Next month we’ll be rolling out a brand new Slickplan. This update includes all of the tools and functionality you’ve come to rely on, coupled with new easy to use interfaces and plenty of new features to take website planning projects even further. It’s been a long journey to get here and we’re beyond excited to share with you how we got here and what you can expect!
The continued support from the Slickplan community has always been a driving force behind our innovation. Slickplan 2.0 is a reflection of their feedback and our team’s drive to push website planning further.
Your feedback mattered
From the very beginning, Slickplan’s users have been a crucial part of meeting our original goal to make information architecture easier and more collaborative. Along the way, you’ve opened our eyes to new ideas that have led to major upgrades, like adding a collaborative way to gather content for web pages and creating a diagram maker tool for user flows and process diagrams.
Providing and gathering feedback with more ease was something our customers often asked for. To improve their experience we introduced commenting on the shared sitemaps, making it possible to get feedback outside of the project team. Within our content planner, we added special fields where you can add guidelines or instructions to every block of content.
We believe in a customer-centric approach and maintaining a strong focus on keeping our users satisfied, Slickplan 2.0 is the perfect example of that. For some time now we’ve gathered feedback, listened to feature requests and examined reported problems closely to uncover patterns that would ultimately lead to the best user experience possible on the brand new Slickplan.
Data-driven design solutions
Once we collectively gathered feedback the real work began. Breaking down the functionality that provided the most value as well as finding out what caused the most frustration gave us a good place to start. From there we had a solid list of requirements and a good baseline to begin designing.
First, our design team used a collaborative approach to create low fidelity interactive mockups of the app and each module. A major focus was put on tighter integrations between tools like the Sitemap Builder, Diagram Maker, Content Planner and Design Mockup. These tools needed to act as one and provide a seamless user experience. Next, we deployed an iterative approach to the UX design so we could rapidly test our ideas internally to find the best solutions for common pain points.
Once the working prototypes were prepared we reached out to some of our most active users for help. This phase was the most insightful and provided a real look into how people would react to what we’d worked so hard on. Overall feedback was fantastic, it validated concepts and pointed out several shortcomings too.
I really wanted to have the recent activity information on the content planner to see exactly when something was done and you’ve added it! Now I have a clear dashboard showing me every website that we are currently working on in one place. Until now we had to click into every box to see if there was any work done. It’s very nice!
Improvements that will transform how you work
It’s been a remarkable journey and we’ve learned a lot about our users and their needs. In Slickplan 2.0, apart from the many improvements on our Sitemap Builder, we’ve focused heavily on content creation and diagrams to support the website planning process. Some of the main areas that we’ve targeted are:
An intuitive interface with refreshed UI and improved UX
A better connection between different modules for a seamless user experience
Templates for planning content to make life easier
Better collaboration & communication features
Redesigning Slickplan was a huge challenge. The platform is way more powerful now and allows for easy collaboration with team members on big projects.
Stay tuned…
Slickplan 2.0 is a big step forward and we can’t wait to share it with all of you! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing more information and dates as we prepare for a seamless transition, until then if you have any questions or comments feel free to reach out and contact us here.
Gill Wood
March 24, 2021