Punchlist 2.0 is Here!
I'm excited to announce Punchlist 2.0! This version has been completely rebuilt from the ground up and includes new features and improvements focused on making Punchlist faster, more user-friendly, and better able to handle large projects. Read on for more details about what's new in Punchlist 2.0.
One of the primary goals of the rebuild was to make Punchlist faster and more responsive while creating a solid foundation for future features. Nic did a great job outlining the scale of rebuild the team accomplished in just 90 days, and I wanted to outline some of the product thinking that went into it.
Here are a few key areas we thought about with 2.0 from a product standpoint: Project Organization, Workspace Settings, and Project Interface.
Project Organization
We originally designed our dashboard with small- to mid-size agencies in mind. We imagined them adding one project per client, and guessed that most agencies in our target audience produced no more than 20 websites a year. As we’ve grown, one use case that surprised us was users creating dozens of single page projects, such as advertising landing pages, on a weekly basis. For these users, the dashboard quickly became unwieldy.
In 2.0, we’ve given users greater control over how their Punchlist dashboard is organized. Specifically, we’ve added a few key enhancements to folders:
- Direct Link to Folders: Folders now have a unique URL, which means if you copy and paste the link, the recipient can click right into the folder. This makes folders more compelling to account owners, and reduces clicks for visitors. But most importantly, this was a big first step in helping us achieve the next enhancement.
- Folder Permissions: Now, just like you can in projects, you can set the access level of a folder. Folders can be public, limited to your workspace, or invite only. You can also invite guests to folders! Rather than sending a dozen invites to individual projects, you can now send one invite and they can access all projects in a folder.
- Subfolders: You can further divide projects in a folder among sub-folders. This could be great if you have concurrent projects with different departments in a single organization, or if you want to break up projects by stage of work (like UX research, copy, design, development).
- Favorite Folders: You can now favorite folders by clicking the star icon in the top right. Folders you favorite will appear at the beginning of your folder list. Favoriting is unique by account, so different members of your workspace can favorite different folders, based on each person’s priorities.
If you want to customize your view of the dashboard even further, you can collapse the folders section or project section at any time. You can also choose to display projects as a list rather than a grid.
And with our performance improvements, whether you have four projects or 400, your dashboard should now load instantly.
Punchlist is used in a wide variety of ways and our goal is to make sure our organizational features support your optimal workflow. Read more tips for organizing your projects.
Workspace Settings
This was one of our most highly-requested features! Users liked that Punchlist offered a variety of settings to customize their projects, but wished they didn’t have to do it for every new project. So we created Workspace Settings to allow you to set preferences for all projects in your workspace in one location. This will save you time when creating new projects and ensure your guests have a consistent experience across all Punchlist projects with your team.
Workspace settings are consolidated into three categories: default project settings, integrations, and branding.
Default Project Settings
We’ve now made it so the vast majority of interactions in a Punchlist project can be turned on or off. If you want to hide the “like'' button, statuses, or screenshots on all projects in your workspace, you can quickly toggle them off with one click. We also added some new settings, including the ability to prevent guests from adding new pages to a website project when navigating the site — another feature that’s been requested many times. If you need to make an exception to your default project settings, you can still change settings at the project level; these will override what’s set at the workspace level.
Integrations
We've also added the ability to set your integrations at the workspace level and have those credentials flow down to projects. By authenticating at the Workspace level, anyone on your Punchlist team can add integrations like ClickUp, Monday.com, or Jira to a Punchlist project without having to look up an API key or ask for credentials.
Branding
We'll talk about our project interface later, but one of the small details we brought in 2.0 was the ability to set a workspace logo. Your workspace logo will appear on your dashboard beside your workspace name and on your public submissions page. Most importantly, you can choose to have your Workspace logo appear in the top left of your project pages (where the Punchlist logo usually resides). All you have to do is activate the Enable Photo toggle on the main Workspace settings page. This is not a full whitelabeled experience, but we think it’s a good step in the right direction. We understand the importance of putting your brand or agency at the forefront when working with clients, so we’re working to give our users the ability to mold Punchlist into their own platform.
Project Interface
Our project board, the core of Punchlist, has also undergone a complete rebuild. Feedback is at the heart of every Punchlist project — it has to be easy to give feedback, and the interface has to be intuitive for first-time users (like your guests or clients). So keeping the UI clean and straightforward was a top priority.
We kept the parts that people love. There’s one button for giving feedback. You can reply to feedback and easily @mention or assign tasks to collaborators. You can change an item’s status to indicate progress. You can quickly switch between the project view and a consolidated list view. But we also made some much-needed improvements.
In this redesign, we wanted your project to be front and center. So while cleaning up our interface, we tried to create a clearer divide between the creative work that needs feedback and the app that facilitates that feedback. One outcome is our more neutral color palette, which ensures the focus remains on your project.
We also improved and expanded the ways you can view projects in the app. For web projects, we added two additional breakpoints to preview your project on different devices, bringing the total to five. For image projects, we moved the zoom tool to the top of the project. We added a keyboard shortcut to hide the sidebar when you need to focus on the work without distractions (Ctrl/Cmd + [ or ]) and introduced a sidebar drawer that makes it easy to open existing feedback without having to change the breakpoint.
Let us know what you think!
We're excited about what we can accomplish with this new foundation, and we can't want to start rolling out new things. We hope you enjoy this rebuild and all the improvements in Punchlist 2.0! As always, please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or feedback — we'd love to hear from you.
