Design Blog

As promised, here are animated new year/seasons’ greetings from our Design Team. Enjoy…

Seasons’ Greetings, Short and Sweet:

A Lookback at 2011, and a New Year’s Wish:

As we come close to 2012, we have some things to look back on, and some things to looks forward to, like Therap Version 2012!

There is also some celebrations coming up before the year ends that we hope everyone has a merry time at those! We believe we’ve had a good year, we hope we’ll transcend that next year, and we’d like to wish everyone the same!

Have a Happy and Successful New Year and Happy Holidays!

We’ll be back soon with an animated version of this card! *smiley*

Every now and then, the design team gets a chance to take a break from the tasks related to support materials or marketing stuff like catalogs or fliers. These are the holidays! If you browse around the site you will find a splash for Christmas or Hanukkah. This year, we did our first Puja card. Puja is a Hindu occasion for prayer, and a week ago, it was time for Durga Puja which is a week long prayer. Many of Dhaka city’s fields are decorated and special houses are built for the deities and the people who will come for prayer. Our card features the likeness of Durga, and she is the center of this puja as you can tell by the name! Here are our two designs.

Our conferences are generally useful for all our existing customers, plus those who wish to learn about our services. Since the splash goes out to those currently using the system, the design and style of it is to provide a lot more information about the training that will help their staff ease into Therap’s software system.

On the other hand, for reaching those who might be interested in getting to know Therap or trying it out, we try other styles.

Agencies all across USA have celebrated the heroes of the disability industry – the direct support professionals or DSPs. We had also wanted to show our respect and the design team prepared a graphic that we put up on our site to salute the DSPs.

TRC (from New York) who is a long time Therap user has also created a video that they spread around their agency using SComms to mark the week:

Feel free to share how your agency celebrated the week on our Facebook page.

If you would like to download a larger version of the image we created saluting DSPs, click here (actually, right-click, and then select the option to save link or target)

Or, Ctrl-F?

If you are using a Windows PC, knowing this saves a lot of time. Whenever you are using their File Manager or Internet Explorer, pressing down the Ctrl key, and then pressing down the F key at the same time brings out the Search window.

Using Therap requires you using the browser and you might be looking at a long list somewhere or a pretty long form. You can use this combination of Ctrl and F also on your browsers to bring out their search facility. They can be pretty handy when going through long lists and forms! If you know you want to access the Review or Comment portion of a General Event Report (yes, be sure the word is there in the form, and you have to make sure you type it in right), you could Ctrl-F and type in the word “Comment” and hit Enter and the browser will take you down to where that word appears. If the word you are looking for appears more than one time, like 3 “John”s in a user list, you could click F3 and the browser will move to the next appearing match, and so on till you get to the right one. However it can’t help you if the word doesn’t appear on the page itself. When dealing with lists, it best to check if there is a second page to it, page numbers appear either above or below a list.

Firefox users can fortunately take this further, and this is something I personally use a lot. Go to the Tools > Options > Advanced, and look under the General tab. If you check the box beside “Search for Text When I Start Typing”, from then on, you wouldn’t even have use Ctrl-F to search on your Firefox browser! Any time you are on any webpage, simply start typing and the browser will look for tha word on the page and take you there! You can learn about more Firefox fun things from their pages.

Hope this helps!

If you are not already aware of it, Therap National Provider Administrator’s Conference is coming up in February 2012! Register for it and come attend to meet the folks and attend sessions on how make the most out of using Therap in automating your processes.

Related:
Administration Guides
Enhancements in Therap 9.1
FAQs

We thought green this time and here is what we ended up with –

Thinking of usability in the context of web surfing, I thought of 5 Little Things I am really grateful for! Here:

1. Sounds On/Off
Its often that I end up on websites where they’d have a music jump me and startle me and often its even likeable, but what I am raving about here… is not the actual music, but the ability to control it. Talking about a volume bar, or at least an On/Off option. I might be at home already listening to some music and suddenly theres a new layer of sounds to it creating a strange effect! When I find out that there is no button to turn that website music off, it really doesn’t make me feel like sticking around it any longer.

2. YouTube’s Dim the Lights
YouTube had an idea to put this feature that when clicked, just turned everything around the video player window dark! For watching a video, you might find it more comfortable that way to reduce the bright white surrounding so your focus is more on the video. Unfortunately, this feature is now only available for videos longer than 50 minutes! So, as a sample you can see this video. At the top right of the video window, click the image of the lightbulb

3. Autocomplete
When I have to select stuff from long lists, nothing beats having an autocomplete feature! For users of GMail, you might recognize this as the feature that brings out the list of recipients when you are trying to type in who you’re sending the email to. We’ve actually implemented this feature in Therap SComms too hoping our users will also benefit from it.

4. GMail Labs’ Attachment Reminder
As forgetfulness of human nature goes, its a very common thing to forget to actually attach that important feature to an email before sending it out! I have heard of one story where someone sent 3 mails before finally remembering to attach the file. The second mail apologized for not sending the attachment and it was still forgotten! So, anyway, this feature picks up from the written email whether the author intended to send an attachment if it finds words like ‘attachment’ ‘sending a file’ etc in it! Pretty smart, and it has saved a lot of time for me personally many a times. Mind you, that this feature is not there by default in GMail, you’d have to go to Settings, and then Labs to find it. Don’t forget!

5. Search As You Type on Firefox
As far as browsers go, I LOVE Firefox! Theres a world of useful plugins, and the built in search engines for google, imdb, wikipedia and others .. .its all very cool! But there is one feature that really helps me out – That’s the “search as you type” feature. Its not turned on by default (I don’t know why) and for that not many people know it or use it! But if you have often ended up on long pages and you are interested in a certain part only, this feature can help you out immensely. Turn this on from Options > Advanced > General. And this feature also comes into good use when I am testing Therap out for usability issues, or browsing through my really long FirstPage. Often the FirstPage can have many many modules and go south quite a bit. In those circumstances, I just start typing in the module name – ‘Personal Finance’ for example, and as soon as I have typed till only “Perso” the browser has already scrolled to where that box appears on the FirstPage! This way, I don’t have to scroll down and read through the names on the FirstPage boxes to find the module I am looking for. Of course, users of other browsers can very well use Ctr-F to search for it, but with this option on Firefox, its faster doing a lot of things throughout the day.

Cheers!