New Feature: Collections

…actually, it’s been there the whole time! Read more below:

This is shaping up to be a big week for us at INVIEW labs! I am currently in-flight to DC to attend the first inaugural Building Content Summit (BCS) AND RTC. As co-chair of the BCS, it has been AWESOME to see the amount of interest in the event from all segments of our industry! I look forward to participating in this first meeting of the many content-minds out there. At RTC, The team at INVIEW labs will also be showing off our latest work on Unifi – plan on stopping by our booth so we can meet you!

As a product designer for Unifi, I take deep pleasure in seeing Unifi being used in so many ways by our amazing customers. Simple, yet flexible tools are the best tools. We measure each proposed feature against this core principle and we are proud of the positive feedback we receive from our customers that confirms the value of this.

We developed our simple meta-tag feature to fulfil many different needs. In Unifi, tags can be applied automatically upon upload, or manually anywhere an element appears. Consider the following uses of tags:

• Improving search results – Search results are heavily influenced when a search term matches tags.
• Searching – Many of our users enjoy searching by tags. By typing a bracket “[“ in the search form, users are given a drop down list of all tags. This is filtered down as you type.
• Collections – “What? Collections? There’s no collections feature in Unifi..” you say. Let me explain below..

..but first, a bit about the Saved Search feature. Search criteria can be saved for perpetual use later. For example: a normal search for “Double Glass” will probably return many results. But if you add a Category filter of ‘Doors’, then your results will be greatly reduced. If you want to perform this search often, you can save the combined search term “Double Glass” AND the Category filter of ‘Doors’ together as a Saved Search. This is very powerful because any new content added later that fits this criteria will automatically appear when you open that saved search. It’s like an automatically updated folder!

When Saved Searches include certain tags in the criteria, they basically become collections. For example: want to organize a collection of ‘Living Room Furniture’? EASY! Just apply a tag that describes the collection (“LR Furniture” perhaps?), then create a Saved Search that only looks for that tag. From that point on, all living room furniture will be displayed by opening that saved search (provided the elements have the tag applied). Want to make the saved search available to everybody? Simply make it a Company Saved Search. So, YES, Unifi has a collections feature and these CAN be shared with your whole company! Unifi has a collection feature!

Again, these are simple tools that can be used in many different ways. Let us know how YOU use these features. I’d love to know!

Stay tuned throughout this week as we’ll be blogging about RTC!