A new look home page for Evaluator users is going to be released on SupplierSelect in the next couple of weeks:

Previously, the default page after logging in was the big list of projects. However, we’re weren’t happy with that for a number of reasons:

1. Most evaluators work on only one or two projects at the same time - they don’t need a huge list of projects every time they login.
2. Projects go through stages. After all responses are in, users don’t want to edit the title or change question text. So we wanted to provide links to go directly to the scoring page, if that had been visited.
3. We don’t have a good way to communicate news about releases, features or service updates to users. We’d like to get that information into a convenient location.
4. New users can be intimidated by an empty list of projects. We wanted to add some big friendly links which would be genuinely useful to first time users.

N.B.

“Portal” pages, of which this new home page is probably a type, are difficult to get right. Very often users will just hurry through the portal page to the page that they are more used to. We hope this doesn’t happen with our new evaluator home page, but if it does, please let us know.

A big RFx will often require multiple people to complete the response. This can be a complex task to schedule and administer.

SupplierSelect provides a workflow system to aid team work in this situation.

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Weightings are used to place a different importance on different questions or sections in a questionnaire. But what happens when there is more than one perspective on what these features are? For example, the Chief Financial Officer might have a different view on the importance of the Pricing section to the Chief Operations Officer, who’s more interested in the Performance section.

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One of SupplierSelect’s servers will be upgraded this weeked. Expect up to one hour’s downtime from 22.00-23.00 on Saturday night.