Mautic Community Forums

Improve UI and tagging ability when contact filtering

Ideas and Feature Requests
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#1

My idea is: To improve the UI of the contact area when filtering, removing the need for complicated expressions to be used and replacing with a more simple interface. In the process allowing the mass tagging of users based on certain searches (in the way that intercom.io does)

I think these groups of people would benefit from this idea: All users especially those without major techncial expertise (expressions can get complicated!)

Why I think they would benefit from this idea: It will save a lot of time in the UI, and help marketeers using Mautic who dont want to mess around with expressions to do basic filtering. It’ll help people (eg like me!) who want to filter contacts and mass apply tags to users without using code.

Any code or resources to support this idea: The best examples of this are found on intercom.io (we recently transitioned over from intercom to mautic and I LOVE the way they handle this). You can see below a couple of example screenshots that include:

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  • Easy logic to allow users to filter their contacts without having to look up complicated expressions or write pseudocode.

  • Easy ability when a search filter is applied to simply tag all the selected users. This is missing and a much needed feature to those using tags heavily (a lot of people I would think)

Are you willing to work on this idea?: From a feature/testing point of view yes (not a developer myself) and also depending on how quickly someone could jump onto this I could be open to funding a project also via my company.

What skills and resources do you need to explore this further?

  • A UI person to do a basic layout (though intercom does it excellently so why re-invent the wheel)
  • A developer to implement the changes
#2

I think we can generally improve the way that we manage search and filtering, as we have a lot of open bugs about this and it generally causes marketers a big challenge.

Existing request on Github:

Just adding some bugs that I know relate to this:

#3

Thank Ruth.

Yes agree. Its particularly difficult for people like myself, “techy” to a degree but not developers. Any non techy market would really struggle with using the search as it stands.

I came over from paying a small fortune for Intercom to paying nothing to Mautic and entering the open source world which I’m very happy about. I have to say after doing a lot of testing with this 90% is as good as intercom, the 10% I think falls flat is this filtering ability. Ive seen this said in reviews for example in this video review (I literally watched before I installed mauitc for the first time) that person says:

“Ive heard that its a little complicated to use, so if you’re not really nerdy but instead you’re looking for a product that able to go as fast as you want, it might not be the best choice for you” (02:14)

This is a stigma that I think could go a long way to being removed if filtering contacts had a more idiot proof UI!

Marketers use this not not only for mass applying tags (which is very cumbersome to do without a proper UI) but also for generally segmenting their data visually. For me as a conference organiser I filter those views all the time to get business intelligence for example

“show me all the investors, at seed stage that have tickets to my event” and within a few clicks in intercom this is possible. I can them retag them, or send them all a manual message (note, I think the latter is also potentially something thats missing doing a manual message of this kind).

You can do some of this in the Segments area of course, but its time consuming and IMO it would make far better UX to have this in the contacts are.

In summary:

  1. Improved conditional point and click filtering and only expressions for the more advanced stuff
  2. Ability to mass tag people based on those filters
  3. Ability to mass message a manual message to filtered people (mostly as a one off message). Again intercom does this well, see below:

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#4

Is there any plans on this? The current set up is crippling. In order to tag contacts on mass you need to export them as CSV files and reimport. Or set up campaigns (which is not what campaigns should be used for).

Likewise the super technical expression based filters waste me hours every time I use mautic. Its very infuriating UI when the way intercom does it is simple incredible.

I would seriously advice “borrowing” the way intercom.io does it here as its just pure joy to use and couldnt be more opposite to the current mautic experience.

#5

Work is in progress on creating a UI to manage tags within Mautic which we are tentatively hoping will ship in 3.2 (November).

I am not sure if this is in-scope but perhaps @ekke and team could give some insights/take inspiration here?

#6

sure - it is basically this Feature Request: Tag Manager that we are preparing for Mautic 3.2, and any additional inspiration is welcome @jason !
Cheers
Ekke

#7

thanks @rcheesley.

@ekke good to hear however I wasnt sure if Feature Request: Tag Manager really covered this request specifically. This seems to be more focused on managing tags, which isnt the same as the suggestion here to:

  1. Change the UX/UI of the contact filtering view to not rely on highly technical and fiddly expressions but provide better usability

  2. Allow to us mass tag people within that same contact filtering needed in 2).

Can you provide thoughts as I dont think we’re talking about the same thing here.

This is a big pain area and I think many will find better contact filtering very helpful.

Ive given some good insights above in my original posts with screenshots on how I think you guys should do it (mostly inspired by Intercom, because I used filtering there for years and it was beautiful, functional, clear and pain free).

#8

I was thinking that if there is a tagging UI then you can use it to bulk-apply tags using simple filters.

eg all users with (or without) this tag (by clicking on the filter in the tag list like you do with segments to see a list of users in that segment), in/not in this segment or whatever, then bulk change the tags.

If there is work going on to improve the functionality maybe it could be expanded - I did not know the scope at present, hence asking the folks working on it :slight_smile: