New Wider, Easier-to-Use Control Panel

As you may have noticed, we recently widened the AWeber.com public site to:

Today we’re implementing some of these same adjustments, along with a couple other style tweaks, to your AWeber control panel.

Here’s what you’ll find different:

The Control Panel Is Wider and Centered

While there were still a small minority of people accessing their accounts using monitor resolutions of 800 x 600 pixels or smaller, the overwhelming majority of you (and we’re talking 99%+ here) are looking at your accounts on screens that are at least 1024 x 768 pixels.

So, we’ve widened the control panel to allow us to provide more useful information to you in a more readable layout (not only now, but as we add content and make adjustments in the future). We’ve also centered it to better match the style of the public site.

New Look For Your Account’s Home Page


(Click to see full-size)

Drop-Down Navigation – No More Rows!

The old “hover over this tab, then move your mouse along the row of links beneath it” style navigation needed fixing. So we replaced it with with the same drop-down style menu from the main site. This should make it faster to navigate your account.

New Tabs in Navigation

You’ll notice a few changes to the navigation bar (see above screenshot):


(Click to see full-size)

Cleaner Page Styles

We’ve been on a mission to get rid of visual clutter and make it easier and faster to get into your account, get things done, and get on with managing the rest of your business.

We began this with our redesign of the message edit pages a while back, and are continuing it throughout the rest of your account.

Here’s an example from the “Add Subscriber” page:


(Click to see full-size)

Hope You Find The New Changes Helpful!

Many of these changes are a direct result of your feedback (moving the “Getting Started box” to the sidebar, for example).

More enhancements are on the way throughout 2009 – stay tuned!

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Director of Education Marketing at AWeber. Justin Premick on Google

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23 Comments

  1. Will

    Hi Team,

    The new drop down menu in the Control panel is coooool. It is certainly a lot easierr to use and the nice blue colours make for a calming effect.

    Nice work

    1/14/2009 12:25 pm
  2. Susan

    SOOOO much better! Thank you!

    1/14/2009 2:02 pm
  3. Robert Hazenberg

    Thanks for listening !
    Streamlining the Home page and putting the Data we need to "Quickly" see results without scrolling down is time, efficient and most of What we need!

    Thanks again !

    1/14/2009 2:37 pm
  4. Shawn

    aWeber,

    Thank you for the drop-downs! Much more user-friendly. All of the changes are very welcomed. Thanks!

    1/14/2009 3:15 pm
  5. sylvia

    thank you for the nice ergonomic design. very relaxing, better to focus on tasks at hand.

    1/14/2009 4:32 pm
  6. Frank Haywood

    Thank you!

    And thank goodness for that. I’m glad you realised it’s possible to overdesign functionality out of an interface, and got rid of that cluttered mess which didn’t even display properly in some browsers.

    This is much better, much more usable and much cleaner. Superb.

    And we don’t have to put up with the latest news in our face either! (Not interested usually.)

    Nice one guys!

    1/14/2009 5:22 pm
  7. Tarik

    Love the new design and outlook. Navigation is much easier, plus I access my stats with 1 click of the mouse!

    1/14/2009 5:31 pm
  8. Tom

    I love the redesign! It makes navigating and using the Control Panel so much more intuitive!

    1/14/2009 5:43 pm
  9. David Turnbull

    Loving the new interface.

    I still reckon the colors and some of the graphics are a bit distracting, but overall it’s definitely an improvement.

    1/14/2009 7:54 pm
  10. Amin Motin

    Well, that’s a bit easier on the eye.

    Although it still seems to be common advice to design for the lowest common denominator, it seems to ignore the modern reality that doing it that way means possibly 99% of your users won’t have an optimal experience.

    Your own figures show that very clearly.

    So, you can cater for the 1% who might have old machine setups, or the 99% who definitely don’t.

    I’m glad you decided to go with the 99%.

    1/15/2009 10:22 am
  11. Cassie

    I love everything about it, but my favorite part is the drop down menu. Overall I find it much quicker and easier to use and since the changes have been implemented, I’ve been spending a lot more time in my Aweber account. Thank you!

    1/15/2009 10:52 am
  12. Justin Premick

    Hey all,

    Thanks for your great feedback! We’re really excited to see that you’re liking the new look to the control panel.

    It’s especially gratifying to see you saying things like "quicker" and "easier" and "more intuitive" – that’s what this was all about!

    1/15/2009 11:20 am | Follow me on Twitter
  13. Garrett

    Agreed, Wider is better :)

    1/15/2009 5:20 pm
  14. Jenna

    Nice work, guys!

    1/15/2009 6:51 pm
  15. Robert Scanlon

    Yes the navigation is better now (much easier to be fast).

    I wish you would survey us about the other recent "improvements" … for example:

    1. The "personalize box" closes after each use. I USE THIS ALL THE TIME so why can’t you let me leave it open. Stupid ajax programming – think "USABILITY" people.

    2. Now I have to scroll all the way down to expand boxes for sending to multiple lists.

    3. I have to turn OFF settings I never want (eg tracking click-throughs; syndication).

    Too many clicks just to send a broadcast … I recommend you do some usability testing to see if you can reduce the number of clicks … or let us set some "defaults" that stay set unless we change them for the next broadcast (ie "remember last setting").

    (The wider CP is an improvement through!)

    1/15/2009 7:07 pm
  16. Sergiu

    I’m very glad that the Unsubscribe column has returned. Hopefully, it will never go away again.

    1/15/2009 8:11 pm
  17. Justin Hitt

    Thank you for improving menus and putting list stats in a more predominate position on the screen. I can already feel myself being more productive (meaning I’m not clicking the wrong link in navigation.)

    I do wish width conformed to the size of my browser, just because I have a 1280×1200 screen doesn’t mean I want it filled up with a single window. This trend for 100px plus widths is tiresome.

    However, the drop down menus make up for any thing else. Thanks again.

    1/17/2009 5:18 pm
  18. Emmanuel Segui

    Yeah… the new things are really coooooooool. The drop down, the new tabs, the home page is clean and simple

    I really love your impovements.

    1/18/2009 5:48 am
  19. Chris

    Always nice to have to relearn where everything is. The backup used to be on the home page. Where is it now?

    1/20/2009 2:47 pm
  20. David Hoffmaster

    Is there a trick to the HTML templates so that I can reuse one template instead of starting from scratch EVERY time?

    I have been using plain text only since I don’t have time to set it all up each week.

    1/22/2009 8:55 am
  21. Joe Lavery

    You guys rule!!!

    I’ve bee shouting it for years and you prove it over and over again!

    Thanks for all your hard work!

    1/27/2009 2:35 pm
  22. Will

    Hi

    I am still enjoying the smoooooth clean interface.

    I simply race acros the page to use the drop downs.

    The percentage counter (my definition ;-) is cool. Just keeps reminding me of what I need to do.

    Really cool stuff.

    1/28/2009 3:47 pm

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