When thinking about making changes to our products and services, Interfolio loves to get into the minds of our users. While your semesters were in full swing, we put on our user research hats and pulled out our testing tools in the interest of redesigning our Dossier and Letter Writer services. As the cherry on top, we’ve been working on these changes in concert with a universal account to better serve our users who take advantage of multiple Interfolio products. User-centered design has become the norm at Interfolio, and the changes you will see when you log into your accounts after June 2nd are based on user research, testing, and feedback from you. When learning about your use of our […] Continue reading »
Let’s All Stop Killing Trees: Send Documents Electronically!
May 16, 2013
For the bulk of our 14 years in business, the bread and butter of Interfolio’s service offerings has involved paper, such as: taking responsibility for the paper documents that you and your letter writers send to us for scanning and storage in your Dossier account, and printing and delivering your application materials to destinations all over the world However, we know that on average 8333 sheets (16.67 reams) of paper are produced by one tree. In our 14 years, we estimate our operations have killed approximately 1450 trees, and we feel terrible about that. Those dead trees haunt us every day. Naturalist and preservationist John Muir noted in Our National Parks that “any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run […] Continue reading »
Keeping the Lights on for Another Hour
April 18, 2013
Back in March, our Fulfillment Team announced expanded coverage for the processing of electronic, email, and online application deliveries. Exciting stuff! New deadlines and weekend processing mean quicker turnaround time. Quicker turnaround time means completed applications. Completed applications mean less anxiety. Everyone wins! Of course, that change meant that the Support Team had to keep up with the Joneses. So, we’ve added an additional hour to our support coverage and are now responding to emails and keeping the phones open until 6 PM Eastern (we previously shut down the phones at 5pm Eastern). We hope to be able to stick around later and later as we move forward, but this is a start. We’re constantly exploring ways to continue helping […] Continue reading »
Tell Us What You Think
April 4, 2013
It’s that time of year again. No, not baseball season. Time for our annual Interfolio user survey. We’re primarily looking to collect feedback on how our Dossier and Letter Writer users interacted with the product and our team over the previous year, while also soliciting ideas for improvements and enhancements. Your input is instrumental in helping Interfolio decide where to take the product in the future. We kicked out an email to a percentage of all Dossier and Letter Writer users that logged in to Interfolio at least once over the course of the past 365 days. Didn’t receive that invitation? No problem. We’ve tweeted the link, thrown it on our Facebook page, and you’ll also see it on your […] Continue reading »
Over Seven Million Documents Delivered (congrats to the winners!)
March 28, 2013
In January of 2012 we noted that we delivered our 5 millionth document, and asked which of our loyal users would deliver the 6 millionth document. Well, as we’ve alluded to in recent blog posts, “Busy Season” is really busy…so busy that we managed to miss the fact that no only did we deliver our 6 millionth document, but also our 7 millionth document as well! I’m a big fan of milestones, because it gives us a good excuse to give stuff away—in this case a few hefty Amazon Gift Cards to our winners: Robert C. of Little Rock, AR shipped our 6 millionth document on September 9, 2012 Alper M. of Farmington Hills, MI shipped our 7 millionth document […] Continue reading »
New Document and Delivery Processing Schedule Means Better Delivery Guarantees For You
March 21, 2013
Six weeks ago, our Fulfillment Team implemented a new operating schedule to include after-business-hours and weekend coverage. We didn’t want to tell anyone until we were sure that this new processing schedule would produce great results and better service, and now that our team has settled in and gotten in to a good rhythm, we are happy to share the good news: it has! For you, this means we are extending our deadlines and implementing weekend processing for electronic, email, and online application deliveries! This means that the majority of our users will see same-day turnaround of electronic deliveries. As an aside, we know that some of our users don’t quite understand why electronic deliveries aren’t instantaneous—and we get that. […] Continue reading »
Introducing the New Interfolio Portfolio
March 14, 2013
Have you logged in and worked on your Portfolio recently? If not, it’s time to come back and take another look! For Interfolio Dossier users, our Portfolio product comes along with it for free; while Dossier is your private place to store documents for use in deliveries to search committees, admissions committees, and anyone else who needs to review your academic and professional credentials in a confidential environment, Portfolio allows you to select information you wish to display to the public in a crisp, clean, easily readable online CV format geared toward academics. A few weeks ago we quietly rolled out new Portfolio and have been happily watching you all create new profiles. For users of the old Interfolio Portfolio […] Continue reading »
Interfolio’s Support Team: Allow Us to Reintroduce Ourselves
March 7, 2013
When you give us a call or shoot us an e-mail, our goal is simple: to provide answers to your questions as quickly as possible. Bonus points if we can get that done in one conversation, but we’re on call to lend a hand to your letter writers, to put a call in to a receiving destination, and to stay on hold with FedEx to ensure that the address on your delivery gets updated. However, now that we’ve emerged from our busiest time of year (roughly September through January, which we imaginatively refer to as “Busy Season”), we wanted to take some time to share a little bit about each member of our team, along with some of the projects […] Continue reading »
Meet the Interfolio Fulfillment Team (they take good care of your documents)
February 25, 2013
Ed. note: This introduction to the Fulfillment team is brought to you by our most recent hire onto the team. We thought she would bring a unique perspective to the people and the processes that have been at the heart of Interfolio for so many years. The first thing I noticed about Interfolio is that it is a well-oiled machine—from Sales drumming up business prospects to Customer Support keeping our clients happy and eager to use our services again and again, and everyone in between. But at the heart of it all is the Fulfillment Team: every document that lives in or is delivered through our products, whether in paper or electronic form, is a representation of the care that […] Continue reading »
Our New User Experience Team, and a Call for Usability Testers (that’s you!)
February 14, 2013
A few months ago, Interfolio had the great fortune of hiring two of the best User Experience (UX) folks working in web development in higher education: Erin Mayhood, our new Director of UX, and Joe Gilbert, our UX Designer. Before coming to Interfolio, Erin and Joe worked together at the University of Virginia Library, in similar roles as they have with us, where they produced incredibly usable and useful interfaces used by faculty and students to achieve their scholarly goals. I have every expectation that they will continue to do the same for us, and ultimately for you. But let me step back a bit and explain a little about “user experience”. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, you’re not […] Continue reading »