Acter Dragonfly Edition 🐉🦋¹

In June we embarked on a complete makeover of Acter, known as the Dragonfly Makeover. Proposed and lead by our App Lead Kumar we decided to redo the entire design, UX and product architecture of the App. Though we are not yet completely done with all of it yetƒ³ and we are releasing Acter continuously, what we have been releasing over the last few weeks already deserves a special mention, and be called a special name.

I mean, look at at:

If you have used Acter before, you should notice quite a few differences, and that is just scratching the surface. We did so many changes, in fact, that it would be impossible to list them all here and give you a comprehensive understanding. But a few highlights you might have noticed in that screen cast above:

Completely revamped design and UX

Colors, structures, padding. All has been given a fresh look at and update overall. We have simplified where possible and stream-lined to be more coherent and mobile-first everywhere.

The new home 🏠, new listing, new search

We took "the home is where the heart is" to heart – pun intended – and redesigned many screens from the ground up, starting with the "home" screen. More simplified and organized does it focus on what is important to you, now: like you RSVP'ed to that are happening now or tasks you have agreed to take care of. All while giving you access to all the content right away through the feature-listings above. each listing you can easily search and filter (depending on their type) or you go through the search-screen via the bottom menu.

The new space home

We have taken a lot of time to make the experience of the Space Overview and listing pages more pleasant. This was a starting part of the redesign, which means you might already be familiar with it if you have used Acter recently. But it has come miles from what we had before: the top navigation now acts as an indicator for the section in a single vertical scroll area.

Each section gives you a glimpse into the content and with just a click you can get the same listing as before but specific to that space. Making it easier than ever to find the specific content in its hierarchical structure.

🗃️ Organize Subspaces and Chats

Among other things Space Leaders can now organize the chats and spaces connected to a space into categories, each given a name and an icon, define their order and pick some chats and spaces that should be recommended to the user to join when they look at the space for the first time. These are also the spaces and chats shown on the overview for convenience.

Custom icons

Talking about icons, many items (like Pins and Task Lists) allow you to define your own icons and custom colors now with just a click. Allowing the space leaders to put more color into their app as well as making it easier to distinguish and find the particular item„⁴ in question.

Organizing via Bookmarks 🔖

With all these amazing features it can become very crowded quickly, even if you are just part of a few spaces. And while certain content might be important to a space, not all content (and spaces) are equally important to you, the individual in front. That's where Bookmarks come it, allowing you to bookmark any Pin and Space to put them at the beginning of each list and in the case of Spaces, show only those in the overview of the home screen.

Reducing any extra bloat and giving you a handy and easy tool to keep the most important information dead center for yourself.

So much 🗓️ calendar-ing

We have poured a lot of work in the calendar events. Not only are we showing you the ones you RSVP'ed yes to on the home page and highlight any that is going on right on the top (never struggling to find that meeting call link again: just go to your home page and click the on-going event!), events are also synced to your mobile device calendar for your convenience. And the ones you have agreed to take part in also have an appropriate reminder set.

Quick-Actions revealing bottom menu

From the very beginning we always strode for a good "on the go" experience: you are walking your dog or in a conversation at an event, when you remember to add a pin or task or whatever. Many Apps make it hard to jolt this down quickly, which is annoying, takes too much focus and effort and either takes you away from the thing are actually doing (like that conversation with the new joiner) and eventually leads to people not wanting to do it...

We always wanted to make this a quick an easy experience: wherever you are in the app, it should just be a few taps away to create any of these new items easily. In our very initial idea we had an expanding bottom menu, but found this to be "undiscoverable", something so uncommon that people don't ever figure it out (themselves), so we had put those into the global-search-section for a while.

Now we are back to the initial idea (after almost two years trying to figure it out) with a tiny drag-bar on the menu, we indicate that you can "swipe" this up. And if you don't come up with that yourself, the + on the home screen, issues the same event with the same animation, allowing users to learn this behavior:

There is more...

As hinted to at the beginning, there is a lot more that has changed in the last few months and there is no way to write this all up here. Just to name a few:

• Better inline indication of Spaces items belong to
• Complete overhaul of the attachments, allowing you to attach Links as well
• Redesign of the Comments sections
• View count and Comments on Boosts
• Massively improved comments design and UX
• Inline editing by clicking the item, long-press to select and copy for most titles, icons and text content – as is common in mobile apps
• ...

Just one more thing

We have also revamped the Website in that time. We have moved our docs, news and status report there, as well as have a new Help Center with a search to find help if you have any troubles with Acter. Additionally we have added a more in-detailed sub page about the App and its various features and just agreed to expand on each one of them and further aspects with further sub pages going forward. So, go check'em out.

And go give Acter another spin if you haven't seen these latest features. They are quite amazing!

Footnotes
¹ There is no Dragonfly-Emoji – such a shame! – and though emojiwiki recommends just combining the dragon and the fly I picked the dragon and butterfly instead to convey more of the beauty and prettiness of that update.

² Reminder to self to make a post about how we do "labs" to introduce and roll out new features...

³ As anyone involved in any tech product knows, plans "develop" along the way, priorities shift, new urgent requirements come up and need to be dealt with...

⁴ We humans are slow at reading but fast at recognizing faces, shapes, colors and symbols