Feature Friday - December 1: Design updates, publishing permissions rollout, and some bug fixes

This Feature Friday, we wanted to kick off the gift-giving season with a bunch of enhancements designed to elevate your LaunchNotes experience with improvements in navigation, usability, and accessibility. From streamlined UI experiences to a refined category presentation to improved roadmap functionality, these updates will make the LaunchNotes experience more intuitive, efficient, and powerful. We also took the hit out on some bugs to remove a couple pesky experiences!

Styling and usability enhancements we’ve rolled out

User menu & support CTA: The support CTA and user menu have moved from the top right of the nav bar to the bottom left of the side nav, conveniently present and tucked out of the way.

Roadmap overview: To focus on the most important information, we have removed subscriber and feedback icons from both the Kanban and list overviews. This declutters the interface of a roadmap item, directing attention to essential details such as categories and roadmap owners. Subscribers and feedback details are still accessible via the roadmap card in the navigation list.

Roadmap category presentation: In the Kanban view, category names have been removed to improve readability. Hovering over a category dot will now reveal the category name. In the list view, both the category dots and their names are displayed.

Roadmap item scrolling: The 'add item' button has been made sticky. This means it remains accessible while scrolling through a list of roadmap items, making it easier than ever to add new roadmap items.

Roadmap items creation: When duplicating a roadmap item, the new duplicate will include copies of the original item's links. Any changes to the links in the original item will not affect the duplicate (and visa versa), ensuring easier link management.

PostMark email notifications: For improved tracking of clicks in emails, the PostMark links for announcement notifications have been updated from the previous URL, https://click.pstmrk.it to https://c.launchnotes.com

User permission hierarchy: Within the Settings under 'Users,' the presentation of roles has been reorganized to reflect a descending order of access and permissions, from highest level permissions (Admin) to least (Agent).

Category management: Categories are displayed in full caps in the management portal and on published pages. For consistency, we have implemented all-cap text on the inputs for “Create” and “Edit” in Settings > Categories > + Create category.

Excerpt only: We have updated the description in the management portal on project-level settings, Email settings page for greater clarity on the use and functionality of this feature. The project level settings for excerpt only sets the default behavior for the setting in new announcements. The announcement-level setting ultimately determines whether the notifications include the excerpt or full content.

Publishing permissions for customers using SAML

Publishing permissions rollout: We have completed publishing permissions rollout for all customers. Now “contributors” in all orgs have restricted publishing permissions. If a ‘contributor’ needs publishing access, the role for that team member should be changed to the new ‘publisher’ role in Settings > Users. For help, take a look at the help article here, or reach out to us directly.

Additional bug fixes & improvements

Roadmap column scrolling fix:  We identified an issue when scrolling on the roadmap in the management portal that both the page and individual columns would scroll. This issue has been resolved, and scrolling now only applies to stage columns.

Streamlined project access: There was a temporary glitch in the 'request access' button when toggling between projects: the request was not being executed. This has since been resolved and the functionality restored.

Roadmap date selector: It was observed that the date selector was defaulting to an incorrect year. This bug has been squashed and the selector is defaulting to the current year.

Let us know what you think!! 

We hope these enhancements help to improve your LaunchNotes experience. Have any thoughts or suggestions? We'd love to hear from you! Just leave feedback here with this announcement.

Thanks for sticking with us and reading through to the end of this update. Have an amazing first weekend of this December!