Blog
The control panel is at the heart of At The Yard. It’s the first thing everyone sees no matter whether they’re a user, staff member or an admin. It brings together information from across the system. Showing you everything from your latest charges and invoices through to an overview of what’s happening across the yard.
As At The Yard has grown over the years we have introduced more and more features and in step with this the control panel has grown to incorporate them. Everything from the all new activity log section through to expanding the calendar to show events, messages and public bookings, it’s all shown on that front page.
The information in these additions is as important as anything that came before them (otherwise we wouldn’t have included them 😉) but for every piece of information we add, the harder it is to find exactly what you need.
Because of this we decided it was time for a major refresh of the control panel with a new layout and a change in the philosophy that underpins it. And that new philosophy is a focus on today!
By focusing on Today we can display much more information directly than we could ever do in the calendar. This means information that used to be hidden away under a button click is now visible at a glance. Along side this we’ve introduced the today view for facilities. You can now choose a selection of your facilities (sand school, indoor arena etc) to be displayed on the control panel. This lets liveries see when the arena is available and book their slot directly from there. This makes it quicker and easier than ever for them to get riding whilst still keeping everyone on the yard informed.
We’ve always described At The Yard as your digital yard diary. And in that spirit this is another step in simplifying and streamlining that experience.
For the keen eyed amongst you you’ll notice that the base for the new control panel was taken from the work we did on the kiosk view earlier in the year, which in itself received a highly positive response when we introduced it. From that base we incorporated the feedback and iterated on the design. From there we introduced it as a BETA feature (available via a button at the bottom of the old control panel) - this let us collect even more feedback as we made changes prior to this launch.
We did all of this as we know changing the front page of any service has to be done with care. So, by doing all these steps, we can be confident in this new philosophy and design being an improvement for all of our users.
We’re excited about this new Control Panel and the opportunities the redesign brings for future additions. As always, subscribers of At The Yard and their customers will automatically receive this update as part of the subscription. If you’re not yet a subscriber we’d love to hear from you - we offer free trials for all livery yards all you need to do is get in touch via our contact page. We’ll work with you to get everything up and running so you can start benefiting as soon as possible.