In the Studio: Aaren Read
If you venture over to our about page you’ll see that I used to work inside a photography studio. I had pretty unglamorous responsibilities, such as mounting negatives on a crop card (remember those?) and answering phone calls. During this job I was amazed at the amount of problems our poorly designed studio management software caused. I’ll be periodically sharing some of my experiences in little features called “In the Studio.”
I received a phone call from a father whose son had just graduated and he wanted pictures of his son. He knew exactly what he wanted (a package comprised of his yearbook picture) and asked if he could just give his order over the phone. No problem I say, let me just pull up his file…
I enter “Aaron Reed” and begins searching for the client and get… no results found. No problem I think, perhaps its a different spelling of Reed. I ask the father and he tells me that Reed is actually spelled “Read.” I search for “Aaron Read” … and get no results. The process goes on for a few more minutes until we clarify that I should be looking for “Aaren Read.”
The father didn’t mind that I needed to take 5 minutes to find his son in our database, but I sure did. It was in the middle of senior season, the lobby was filled with people waiting to be photographed or place their order. I didn’t have time to spend 5 minutes on this problem… it shouldn’t have taken me more than 30 seconds to find Aaren. (It also shouldn’t have taken me more than 5 minutes to create the order… but thats for another post)
In Backdrop we’ve made a simple and easy to use feature that solves problems like these. When you search for a client in backdrop the system automatically finds anyone whose name sounds like what you are searching for. Here you can pick the client you were actually looking for, or click a link to easily create the person you typed in. The whole process takes less than 10 seconds. Click on the screen shot below for a closer look.
