The new craftsmen portal – a modern look, high-speed performance and practical functions

Please allow us to introduce the new craftsmen portal

If you access the home page of the revised easysquare craftsmen portal to take a look at its new design, you will barely recognise it. The login dialogue has a smart design that is reduced to only the key aspects. As an option, the customer logo can be embedded at this point, allowing initial familiarisation and identification. After you enter the portal, the modern design continues. Instead of outdated and confusing SAP^® tables, coloured icons in a flat design await the user. These icons guide the way to the available topics and functional areas (Figure 1). For example, from the home page, users can access the outline purchase agreement, service entry, orders or company profile areas. Metaphorically speaking, the red carpet is rolled out for each user’s individual work. Small badges on the icons show how many items are waiting for the user in the various areas. Options for maintaining personal profile data and a chat function are located in the upper right corner, similar to on familiar social media platforms, and shown by means of an icon.

When you enter the individual areas, the relevant sub-items are displayed with a clear structure. Behind the “orders” door, for instance, there is a subdivision into the various statuses that an order can have; for example, current, cancelled or other. Just like when moving into a new apartment, customers can, of course, design the individual sub-items themselves. Experienced users of the craftsmen portal will be familiar with the structure and options already, but the simplified operation and clearer visualisation are new. So, now that we have gained an initial visual impression, let us take a closer look at the functional area of the craftsmen portal.

Have we met before or are you new here?

When you move into a new apartment, you do not automatically throw away all your furniture from your old apartment that has been perfectly fine up to now. You take it with you. However, a fridge with a poor energy efficiency class might be replaced and an older sofa jazzed up with a few colourful cushions. It was similar with the craftsmen portal: functions that proved useful were kept, others were improved and some were replaced.

Seek and you shall find – now very conveniently!

One of the most important changes in the scope of the relaunch of our craftsmen portal is the implementation of a free-text search. Let us assume a user is looking for a specific order and no longer knows the name of the tenant but remembers that the drain was blocked. Now, the user can simply enter the words “Doro+drain” and subsequently receives a released order at Dorotheenstrasse 4 for Mrs Waltraut Heinemann. Complicated filtering, for example by order date and street name, can therefore be avoided.

Scrolling instead of clicking through pages

For larger trade companies, the list of orders, offered and recorded services or framework contracts can get rather long. Previously, twenty list entries were displayed per page in this case. The user then had to click through these pages. With the new craftsmen portal, you can specify the number of list entries to be displayed yourself and then scroll instead of clicking (Figure 2). The advantage of this is that you can tailor the results list individually to the size of your screen.

Hello, where have you come from?

If users jumps to an order, they will not only be presented with a clearer display in which icons refer to the individual functional areas; for example, header data, chat and service entry sheets. In addition, a map function has been created here (Figure 3). This allows users to display the place of performance for the order easily and conveniently.

The breadcrumb to guide the way

To make navigating within the craftsmen portal as easy as possible, we have integrated a breadcrumb into the footer. As is usual practice on many websites, this shows users which area of the craftsmen portal they are currently in (Figure 4). All status actions (e.g., released or print) are now also located in this area.

Craftsmen portal in excellent working order

The heart of the craftsmen portal is the technology it is based on. With our relaunch of the craftsmen portal, we have converted it to the new SAP^® UI5 standard. The key benefit compared with SAP^® GUI is the high degree of compatibility. The craftsmen portal now works entirely independently of browsers. Another focus of our conversion was improved performance. Data can now be selected much faster and called up with almost no delay at all. This way, when creating service entry sheets, for example, it is possible to show all the services with their sub-categories at the same time and select from them.

The harmonious interplay of the three aspects design, functionality and performance is the recipe for success for the craftsmen portal’s relaunch. We have made using the portal not only easier, but also faster so that you, the user, save valuable time.