After teasing this update for almost a year, we're finally ready to launch our much anticipated overhaul the tooling in Strategic Roadmaps and lay the groundwork for a better roadmapping experience than ever before. These refreshed menus, panels, and toolbars help to improve your experience in-app by providing a more intuitive, thoughtfully-prepared layout that promotes feature exploration and simplifies navigation.
Want to know what we did and how we did it? Let's talk.
Video Walkthrough of Refreshed Toolbars & Menus
Better Tooling for a Wider Range of Devices
One of the key considerations we made when designing this update was that the selection of devices our users work from has changed quite drastically since our last major redesign. Additionally, many users expressed their frustration with having to "jump through hoops" to find a specific feature or tool, often expressing how certain options being buried in other menus or secondary modals can prevent them from using certain helpful features in the app as often as they'd like to.
We solved this issue by taking the existing layout that users were already familiar with and finding ways to retain the pieces they loved while remedying the ones they thought were "far more complex than necessary". We also focused on button placement and size to ensure that users had tools which were logically grouped in the UI, easily recognizable, and didn't require an unnecessarily long mouse drag to get to. Additionally, we built with a consideration for all screen sizes - allowing users to move from an ultrabook to an ultrawide monitor without disrupting their workflows or usage of the tool.
One of the key changes that helps us achieve this goal is the introduction of the Format Panel for Tables. By introducing density controls and providing a home for our Column Customization menu in the UI, we've created a simple way for users to control exactly what they're seeing on the screen and how much of it they're seeing. Combined with our beautiful refreshed Table View, this update brings a much needed lever of customization into this visualization while helping to improve both readability and quality-of-life in the application.
Simple, Intuitive Exploration and Navigation
Since our last major redesign in 2018, we have launched a number of features in Strategic Roadmaps that have helped our users take this tool to the next level; however, this also created some unnecessary and noticeable clutter in the UI. And while a button-heavy UI can work in some cases, there are definitely a number of drawbacks from a UX perspective when you're working to provide a solution that lets users go from 0 to 60 in the shortest possible time.
This is why we've worked to reduce some of the scattered elements on the screen and introduced a number of key components that help to aggregate common functionality and simplify the navigation experience in Strategic Roadmaps.
The most obvious example of this comes in the form of our updated Viewfinder - a thoughtfully-built combination of our legacy Viewfinder dropdown, Sub-View selector, and View Settings tool. Not only does this menu create a quick and easy way to navigate roadmap views, it also eliminates some of the barriers to managing those views by allowing users to rename, duplicate, or delete any view from anywhere in their roadmap.
Making Feature Discovery Easier Than Ever
Strategic Roadmaps can do so much for you and your team, but as we mentioned above some features were harder to find or more cumbersome to access than others. This is why we've updated the experience in roadmapping to bring some of these great features to the forefront. For example: helpful features that can protect your roadmap, like our Lock View Formatting and Lock Color Palettes toggles, now live under new menus that will ensure that users can organically discover those features sooner into their roadmapping journey.
Additionally, we've made a big shift to the way integrations are showcased in roadmaps through the updated Integrations Panel. The new Integrations Panel provides an at-a-glance view of all possible integration options - not just the ones you've already have setup. When the roadmap is integrated with another tool, a quick reference card at the top of the panel allows users to view, re-sync, and manage their integration. On top of all of those changes, we've relocated the popular Calendar Sync feature into this panel based on the feedback we received from users who actively sync their calendars from Roadmunk.
The Big Question: When?
Hopefully you’re as excited as we are to begin exploring this new update! These changes will be rolled out to users over the coming weeks, with a majority of users seeing it in one of two main cohorts on May 30th or June 20th, so make sure to keep an eye on the in-app announcements tab to see when this release will be popping up for you.
For more information on this update, along with breakdowns of every new feature we're launching with it, please make sure to check out our article on Navigating the Roadmap in our Knowledge Base. And as always: thank you for reading along, hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and happy roadmapping.