Insytful monthly roundup: October 2024

October has been a busy month for us. We welcomed Autumn, got our heads down and finished off some big pieces of work.

Highcharts
Dashboard charts refactor
Organisation usage and billing
Sidebar menu
Bugs and other fixes
On the blog in October
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We have updated the last of our graphs and charts to use Highcharts. Highcharts is a highly customisable, accessible graph library. By implementing Highcharts we have:

• Made our graphs and other interactive elements keyboard navigable
• Made our graphs screen reader-friendly
• Improved the accessibility of the data displayed in Insytful

As a result, our data is accessible to a wider range of users. Graphs are notoriously inaccessible on the web, so we are really happy to have finished this off.

We have also updated our dashboard charts as part of our chart review. Refactoring improves the operation of the code without altering the functionality.

Previously, we returned data in various API calls written for other use cases, which brought a lot of additional data back. As a result, it was difficult to follow and much slower than it had to be.

In this release, we have optimised it to be only one API call with only the data we need.

The tooltips on the main dashboard chart were an accessibility nightmare. Initially, that chart was designed to be an aesthetic and visual element only, not hoverable and usable.

Over time, we lost focus and added the hoverable tooltips, which worked great if your scores were high. However, if they were in the middle range, the circular score components would block them. This was not an ideal user experience (UX).

We have now returned to the original concept. We have removed the tooltips and left them as a design and aesthetic piece. However, the data is still available on the overview pages, where you have usable tooltips.

We have been working on a big project for billing and organisation settings in the app.

Now, all users will find billing, scan usage and payment information in one area within "Organisation settings". From here, you now can:

• View your scan usage
• Change your scan limits
• Upgrade or downgrade your plan
• Pay for Insytful using Stripe, and more.

It was a fairly complex project that required a review of our CRM and how we manage the relationships between sites and organisations. We will release the first version internally for our account managers to test before we make it public. Watch this space!

The sidebar menu's default behaviour has been updated. It is now open by default, with the option to minimise and close it. This change comes based on app UX testing. The results showed that users avoided using the menu for navigation and weren't getting the most from the app. We will see whether being open by default encourages people to explore Insytful fully.

As always we have been fixing bugs, improving Insytful under the bonnet:

• We hid certain metadata components if the site was not configured to show them
• We fixed a silly bug fix where some of us were getting the "Your scan has completed" email numerous times
• Some UI z-index issues where certain components had text showing over other components
• Intermittent 0 status codes during URI validations in ongoing scans

Website accessibility checklist

Use our top 10 accessibility fixes for your website to identify and fix accessibility failures on your website.

Insytful at Velocity: An SEO case study with Canterbury Christ Church University

Insytful super users, Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU), presented “Winning the search engine optimisation (SEO) battle”.

Readability checklist

Readability impacts user experience and accessibility, which also affects your SEO score. Follow these top 10 checks to improve the readability of your content.

Why your website needs images in next gen formats

Find out the benefits of using next-generation image formats like WebP and AVIF, and why should you be using those instead of JPG and PNG. Hint: Incorrectly sized images kill your page load speed and negatively effects your SEO score and UX.

There will be more Insytful updates in November. Stay tuned to see what we get up to next month.

If you've got a feature suggestion that you'd like to see, let us know by adding it to the Insytful roadmap. We value your input shaping the future direction of our product.

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