This is the week. It's sure to be less fun than the release party this Thursday night (you're coming, no?), but the blog pays its own form of remixable tribute all this week with a countdown of the top enhancements you'll find when you log in to Salsa. Sure, the party has an open bar. But does it have an RSS feed?

The birth of the condiment:

For Salsa, at one point called Fuse, and at another called Joan Rivers and Six Million Dollar Man (granted, only I called it that) we set forth some very basic, high-level goals.

• make the system easier to use
• make the system more stable
• make the system more flexible

Our approach was not to define every centimeter of the system and then begin to build it. Instead we initially defined four areas to focus on for the initial release:

• navigation
• email blast creation
• online action creation
• look and feel

As this early user research continued it made sense to start adding in some oft-requested features such as a way for users to build their own reports. This one sounded much easier to accomplish than it is: at this late date we are still re-working the user interface. By mid-June a brief document was produced that gave the 30,000-ft. overview of the new system. Accompanying this was the new navigation (roughly 85% complete at the time), and new flows for email blast creation and online action creation (100% complete). The reason to not define every aspect of the system to the micron is so that the developers can have room to add in their own creativity to solving some of the problems and to allow for flexibility while we learned more about how the system is used. While this can lead to great ideas it can also lead to delays. It did both in our case. But, I think you'll find that the wait is worth it. With dozens of new features we are all very proud of Salsa and we hope that it makes you more productive.

Change is difficult:

In order to make Salsa eaiser to use we needed to change the current behavior of many tools you've grown used to, warts and all. Changes were not done on a whim but only after extensive user research. Personally, I've met with or spoken to dozens of clients from a variety of organizations each with their own specific needs. From these conversations we looked anew at the entire system. One area that has had a dramatic overhaul is the Query tool.

Query me? Query you!

The current query interface is very powerful but not intuitive as to what results you may get. Users told us that many of the options were intimidating or confusing. Additionally, the query interface has a bad habit of allowing users to create truly nasty system crushing queries. These gremlin queries would grind the system to a halt and frustrate users and cause our system administrators to listen to scream-core music all day long. So our challenge was to make the interface less intimidating, remove the opportunity to create gremlin queries and add a oft-requested features – such as the ability to create OR type queries. Great artists steal. We strive to be great artists. The query builder essentially filters a supporter list down to a smaller size, so we looked for other applications that allow for the filtering of content. Our first thought was the filters in email programs. These allow for the automatic processing of email based on its content and are very flexible. I've even been accused, accurately, of creating filters that automatically delete email from certain people. Filters are a friend. Internally we agreed that this interface would be a good approach. After many variations, lots of user testing feedback and a complete nervous breakdown of a developer we have a new query interface. More flexible. More powerful. Less harmful. The interface has been greatly simplified. The long, blue list of tiny type has been replaced with a pleasant color scheme and drop-downs. The process of building a query is much more logical and allows you to build the query in your own order as opposed to the current, limited system. Choose a condition from the first drop down and then subsequent drop-downs appearing allowing you to set your options. For example, selecting "groups" allows you to choose whether someone "is a member of" or "is not a member" of a selected group or groups. Then you can click on the icon to keep adding more conditions, such as filtering by postal region. If you want to get "real crazy with the cheese whiz" you can break out your Logic 101 text books and create OR queries. OR queries allow you to ask for supporters that match the first set of items OR that match the next set of items. Salsa allows you to keep going on an OR binge until your head explodes. Enjoy the pretty colors as you add another OR condition. Mistakenly added a condition? Zap it by clicking on the minus sign next to each condition. Want to squash an entire OR condition? Crush it with the harmless looking white X in the upper right corner of each group. This sounds great, but did you remove choices? Damn right we did. Redundant options such as cities, zip codes and zip regions were combined into “within postal region”. Much better than entering in a string of zip codes or trying to spell Tallahassee. Advanced email options (we weren't sure what it did) was given the 86 and a few items were given new life under "supporter fields" (looking for signup by date? Use "date created" under "supporter fields"). Overall the new interface is much slicker. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think. We are always looking for ways to make it even better.