Teams love working with our Timeline roadmap visualization and their feedback about how they use it has driven the development of a number of major features for Roadmunk, including Linked Items, Milestones, and more. In addition to some fixes and back-end improvements, we're excited to announce some brand new quality-of-life updates that will help improve your roadmapping experience in the Timeline view - all based on feedback from users like you!
Some new changes you may notice include:
- A new right-click context menu for field headers. No more accidentally opening the field card when you’re trying to re-order your headers.
- New Cascade & Condense layout functions. Now users can organize items on a per-row basis, without being limited to 30-items per action.
- A fresh approach to drag-and-drop. Users can now reference their original positions on the timeline as they are moving their items and milestones.
With all these great updates being released, we thought it would be helpful to break down all the details for you. So, without further ado: let's talk Timelines!
Introducing: Right-Click Menus
When we were exploring potential enhancements to the Timeline view, we gathered feedback from our users on some of their common pain points. One of the common themes we saw was that many users wished they knew about certain features earlier, because it would have saved a lot of manual effort. For the first time in our roadmaps, we're introducing a new context menu which is available when a user right clicks on either a header or subheader - providing users with a number of quick actions that help to speed up and improve their roadmap setup. This behaviour will be carried over to Swimlane column & row headers in the near future and a few other places across your roadmaps in the coming months.
Introducing: Cascade & Condense Functions
This past summer, our team took the opportunity to evaluate both our Waterfall and String actions in Timeline roadmaps. In looking at the feedback from our users, it was obvious that the String feature did not action the behaviours that users expected and was a cause for frustration for many teams. We decided to remove that feature from Roadmunk immediately and take a different approach to how we handle the layout of multiple items on Timeline, which led us to explore how we can build an improved approach to the String action and also address some of the limitations of the popular Waterfall action. With this update, we are excited to introduce two new actions for the Timeline view: Cascade Items and Condense Items.
These tools will replace our existing Waterfall action and the previously deprecated String action in the Timeline visualization, providing users with a quick and simple method for handling the presentation of items in their roadmaps en masse. The new Cascade Items feature allows users to apply a waterfall layout to all items within a single header or subheader, while the Condense Items feature provides the best fit for items on the roadmap, placing them strategically to reduce the amount of lines & whitespace within a specific header or subheader. Additionally, these actions are no longer tied to the 30-item limit our Move Item By Date and Delete Item functions, which means that users can apply these actions to item groups of any size in their roadmaps.
Drag & Drop Improvements for Items & Milestones
Call us Jennifer Love Hewitt circa 2005-2010, because we're seeing ghosts! 👻
And now that we've done our obligatory "bad Ghost Whisperer joke" for the year, we're excited to say that users will now see a floating preview of where they're dragging their items or milestones to before it lands - providing them with a reference to their objects' original positions on the Timeline as they are moving their items and milestones. Additionally, we've fixed a few bugs and made some slight performance boosts to the drag and drop action with this change which will help to prevent the actual "ghosts" of items from popping back up elsewhere on the roadmap after your item has been placed.
And that's all for now - but we have so much more to come! Make sure to check out our Roadmap to learn more about what our teams are actively working on and some of the upcoming features you and your team will see in Roadmunk.
Have a wonderful day and happy roadmapping!