We care about what you think and are constantly working to improve our products. We’ve put together a suite of tools and frameworks to help us better incorporate user feedback into our everyday product decisions so that we can create a better product experience for you. 

We’re excited to announce the first in a series of updates that refresh the look and feel of our products. We’ve been hard at work improving our internal product development processes and building out a new version of ProgressUI, our internal user experience framework. We're rolling out a refresh that focuses on fonts, colors, and other minor changes that we believe will make our products easier to use. Here's what changed:

A few years ago, we recognized that we could do better when it came to the user experience of our products. We formed a design team, hiring user researchers, product designers, and front-end engineers. We got to work improving processes and building a suite of tools to help us work efficiently and effectively. We established product design principles, design guidelines, and built an all-new design system we call ProgressUI. Working with product leadership, we changed the product development process to incorporate design and user feedback early and often. These changes have helped us push the design and experience of our product forward and we’ve learned a lot.

VAN is the technology backbone of nearly every Democratic campaign and progressive organization in the country. Every day from now until November, thousands of organizers and volunteers will use VAN to manage key aspects of their work - but we know that it hasn’t always been easy for people to jump right into the work they need to do. That’s why we built Dashboard.

More than ever before, campaign volunteers are ditching clipboards and paper lists for canvassing apps like MiniVAN. Mobile canvassing is already completely transforming field programs, helping canvassers get out the vote more easily and efficiently. Now, we’re ready to take field organizing to the next level – by introducing Script Branching on MiniVAN.

Traditionally, innovations in the digital political world have been focused primarily around online fundraising. Innovations like one-click donations, mobile responsive forms, welcome series emails, pre-filling form fields, and A/B testing have long been focused on improving conversion rates for contribution forms. That’s been great for digital fundraisers, but what about organizers? Today we’re excited to announce the launch of an entirely new suite of digital tools just for organizers: introducing Field Automation, Targeted Email, and Online Actions on VAN.

We’re constantly working to improve our products and make them easier for our customers to use. One thing we’ve continued to hear is that you want a better way to move around VAN. Everyone from volunteers to administrators want to complete their work faster and more easily. There’s so much you can do in VAN - from cutting turf, to phone banking, to managing contacts - and our users asked for a streamlined way to complete tasks, one that doesn’t rely on main menu. So, we’ve designed something that allows you to do just that: Sidebar navigation in VAN. 

We take pride in designing experiences that help our users change the world, one action at a time.

I wear a lot of hats at NGP VAN, but my highest priority is being obsessed with conversion rates. That’s why today, I'm excited to share a big development: according to our most recent analysis, NGP VAN customers are enjoying 5.9 percent higher conversion rates on their online forms.  I'm pretty excited about this. Actually, I'm downright giddy.  Here's a look at the new features that make our online forms lean, mean, converting machines.

Last night we heard some exciting things from Stu Trevelyan, Aharon Wasserman, and John Lee about the future of progressive campaigns. We hope that these new products will help you achieve even more success in your work and we can’t wait to share with you all of these exciting new changes.