Best Practices for Creating Workspaces

When optimized properly, workspaces are extremely flexible and useful for achieving a high degree of efficiency for staff members.

When developing custom workspaces for your site, keep the following best practices in mind.

• Design for appropriate screen resolution—Be sure to tailor workspace layouts to your agents’ screen resolution. If your display is set to a higher resolution than that of the people who will use your workspace, they may find that the layout is difficult to use. Test appropriately when making design changes such as adding a column or adjusting the size of a field or add-in control.
• Optimize your layouts—Give careful thought to the number and sequence of controls and fields in the layout of workspaces and tabs, providing only the information, fields, and controls staff members need to do their job. Also, try to avoid nesting tab sets, panels, and tables more than two or three levels deep. Streamlined layouts can optimize workspace performance and improve staff efficiency. They are also much easier to update as new processes are rolled out to your team.
• Add keyboard shortcuts and tab indexes—Agents can be more efficient when they can keep their fingers on the keyboard. After you have optimized your workspace layout, select a Tab Order to specify the order in which field focus is advanced when the Tab key is pressed, such as top-to-bottom or left-to-right (see the Tab Order button description at Behavior Properties). Add keyboard shortcuts to the most commonly accessed fields to provide even faster navigation, and train your team to use them (see the Text label description of Label Properties).
• Hide or require fields—Reduce visual clutter and improve performance by making fields visible only when they need to be, and only to agents who need access to them. For example, some fields might be required only when a new record is being created, and then hidden or displayed in a read-only format the rest of the time. When a workspace is shared by multiple profiles, you can choose to hide some of your fields from profiles of agents that don’t use them. For profiles of agents that must complete a specific field, you can make that field required for that specific profile. See How You Set Hidden, Required, and Read-Only Properties.
• Use different tabs for different tasks—Tabs can be used to organize alternate field layouts tailored to common tasks. For example, in addition to a base tab containing an incident discussion thread, you could create another tab containing a guided assistance control and fields commonly used to solve technical issues. Additional tabs could contain alternate layouts for resolving billing issues, tracking and returning orders, soliciting feedback, or creating sales opportunities. Whatever content you add, be sure each tab and field has an accurate, descriptive label. Also, be sure to order the tab set appropriately based on priority, with the most frequently used tabs first. Then set tab indexes and define keyboard shortcuts so your agents can navigate quickly using their keyboard. See Add Tabs to the Design Space.
• Delay loading data-heavy controls—Some controls, such as reports and browsers, may take awhile to load based on the amount of data they return. To reduce the initial load time of your workspace, you can delay the loading of these controls when they are found on tabs that are not visible when the workspace is initially opened. See Report Properties and Workspace and Script Browser Controls.
• Use scripts and workflows to simplify your workspaces—Scripts and desktop workflows can be effective alternatives for complex workspaces. A workspace laden with a large number of fields, controls, and rules can be challenging to create, use, and maintain. By splitting up some of those processes across multiple elements, you can reduce the risk of functional or procedural conflicts while also simplifying and improving the performance of the interface for your agents. See Overview of Agent Scripts and Overview of Desktop Workflows.