• Yay!!!!! :-) THANK YOU! :-)
• My clients have been asking for this for years. It looks great, you’re a champ! :)
• Lovin it so far!
• LOVE IT! CONGRATULATIONS! I can’t wait to dig deeper but it looks great!

Thus were the communications sent to me from the community of CA users within the first 6 minutes of my announcement that CA Mobile was ready to go.

Indeed this one’s been wanted for a while.  CoachAccountable has worked from day 1 on smartphones so I deliberately let a mobile version slide as a priority.  Having a second, complimentary version entails substantial overhead to maintaining and evolving the system, and so it was net quite useful to not have that while I grew CA in other ways, ways that made more fundamental expansions to what CA was capable of.

(That, and dragging my feet on this front has meant a much improved “least common denominator” of device that I needed to support over what it would have been a year or two ago, making the released product both nicer and easier to build & maintain.)

But I’ll grant that pinching and zooming about is clunky, especially when all you want to do is mark an Action complete or report on a Metric.  And since we coaches traffic heavily in the realm of getting folks to do that which they weren’t about to do of their own accord, ANYTHING that reduces barriers to acting on our coaching is bound to be a win.

Thus CA Mobile’s time has come.  Let’s take a look!

When you log in as coach you’ll first see a listing of your clients along with a summary of what’s new:

(The “Appointments Outlook” button takes you to a succinct listing of all of your upcoming appointments in the system, as well as any pending requests for you to accept or decline.)

Tapping on a client takes you to their respective client page, wherein you see a detailed listing of what’s new and recent, broken into sections:

Tap on any section to be brought to greater detail of that section.  See for example Actions:

Most items in a listing (for example the listing of Actions seen above) can be swiped to reveal controls: swiping right reveals buttons for common commands that can be done (like unmarking an Action done, or deleting it).  Swiping left reveals a button by which to view comments on a given item (for those items that support it, like Actions, Worksheets, etc.).

Here’s what Metrics look like:

Since hovering doesn’t apply on mobile, you tap a given data point to see the details and any comment.  Tap again to hid it.  If the graph is looking to squished on your upright device, rotating it 90 degrees will have it expand to fill the additional horizontal space.

For this initial release, CA Mobile allows your clients to do pretty much everything they’re allowed to do, and for you as coach to do pretty much everything you can do with client, like making action plans, scheduling appointments and assigning worksheets.  (Heck, though I don’t recommend it, you can even create new form-based worksheets from within CA Mobile!)

(Let’s be clear: this is a squashed mess here, so I say edit complex worksheets on your smartphone at your own peril!  Tip: to edit a form input in a worksheet, do a double tap on it, and if that doesn’t work, a touch hold for one second will.)

Here’s the My Account page, which allows you and your clients to update personal info, including your head shot (no excuses now for your clients to not upload their own, given doing so can be as simple as taking a selfie on their smartphone camera):

And finally the logout screen, which in addition to letting you log out gives you the option to switch to any other accounts you may have linked within CA (assuming there are any), and a button to jump you back to the desktop version of CA for whatever reason (nice if you need to do anything that’s not yet supported by CA Mobile).

I’ll grant grouping all of these things together is a fairly loose take on what the phrase “log out” means, but really this is all the stuff of jumping out of one context and into another.

Getting in to CA Mobile

Accessing CA Mobile is as simple as logging in from the regular login screen a smaller device.  When CA detects you logging in from a device that would probably prefer to show CA Mobile, it’ll redirect you accordingly.  (This works the same for your clients.)

It’ll also remember the preference for a given device so that if, say, you or your client click a link into CA from your email you’ll go to the right place, desktop or mobile.  What if CA puts you in the desktop version and you’d rather be in mobile?  You’ll find at the very bottom when logged in a little link to “Go mobile friendly” in all cases, and a bigger one towards the top right when viewing CA on a smaller screen.

And if you’re in CA Mobile and want to jump back to the desktop mode?  Again, that’s always as simple as bringing up the “Log Out” screen and tapping the “Go to the desktop version” button there.

White Labeling and CA Mobile

One of the fun things about CA Mobile is that it can be made to be very “appy”, in that as a White Label branding user you can set an app icon.

App icons are the spiffy little square images that becomes the icon when you do the whole “add to home screen” thing for a given website on your mobile device. Since your clients will probably enjoy to have a home screen shortcut to CA Mobile on their smartphones, it’ll be quite slick indeed to have your branded app be what shows up.

You can set this up by going to your white label branding settings page within CA and finding the new “Custom App Icon” section within.

CA has a nice default icon for a home page app on a smartphone, but it’s kinda fun to have it be your own.  Compare the default versus a custom:

Another perk of White Labeling in this new mobile-friendly era for CA is that the standard login page (which has been remixed to be look and work great on screens of any size) will brand itself according to the white label settings of the account last logged into, meaning that login page can serve nicely as the one your clients regularly visit (you might want to change your Login URL setting to “https://www.coachaccountable.com/login” to take advantage!).

To wit, after being logged into an account with Couch Reclinable, this is what the login screen looks like:

Looking Ahead

So far CA Mobile is a hit with users who’ve tried it.

Groups, Billing, Courses, and Team Dashboard are yet to come, but what’s in place already should be the 90% solution for the regular interactions with CA done by you and your clients.

I’d like to wrap up by sharing the words of one Michael Leahy.  I give his words on this matter a certain special credence, for he has been one of the staunchest demanders of there being a mobile-friendly CA for now nearly two years (so much so that when my wife and I made a bet of whether or not I would have CA Mobile done by 4th quarter 2015, we set his approval as the threshold of sufficient completion).

One hour and 20 minutes into CA Mobile’s release Michael wrote:

John, so far, all I can say is AWESOME!!! I’m really loving’ this!

So I haven’t really spent a lot of time on it yet, and only on my iPhone. Can’t wait to try it out on my iPad. I may never access CA on my laptop again (except for the obvious stuff where I’m doing a lot of document creation or course creation).

…

You’ve far exceeded my expectations! I can’t wait until I see what you come up with re- Groups, Courses, and Team Dashboard.  Again, let me just say in closing that you’ve really blown me out of the water with this new CA Mobile. Exceptional job!!!

With that I’m given hope that CA Mobile was worth the wait.

I’m looking forward to rounding out CA Mobile with the missing parts, and I thank everyone both for their patience with the process as well as their excitement for the result.

Here’s to giving our clients an exceptional experience of being coached by us.