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Release notes: Dialogue V2
Welcome to the brand new, Version 2 of Dialogue.
We've been working on this for a number of months and are excited to show you all the new features and a whole new look.
The theme is vastly different; sleek and responsive. It's designed to be much clearer for your respondents how to get involved and have their say — more on that later.
We've also listened to your feedback and have updated other admin features too, enabling invite-only challenges and draft mode, amongst many other things. There's much to cover, so let's crack on:
What's new:
It looks totally different
Yes it does, and that’s because Dialogue is now responsive, meaning it looks clean and is easy to navigate on smartphones as well as other devices.
We’ve spent significant time redesigning the public-facing layout, streamlining and smartening up the application.
In-keeping with a responsive design, the information on the page is now in clear sections. This makes it easier for you to set out your challenge and easier for your audience to respond to it.
It sounds totally different
Some of the terminology we use has changed. Why is this a big deal? Well, words are powerful and can serve to confuse or encourage - we’re only interested in the latter.
Dialogue App has become Dialogue
Why? Because people were confused by the app part. And there’s no need to tell you in the name that Dialogue is an application.
Discussions have become Challenges
Why? People don’t solve discussions, they solve challenges. This ties into the whole drive behind Dialogue, which is asking a group of people to submit ideas and discuss them in order to reach a common goal. The word challenge asks someone to step up, it encourages them to get involved and it stops this being a passive exercise.
Public/Private has become listed/unlisted
With the new email invite feature, which will allow you to specify the email addresses of users who can access those invite-only discussions, we now have a number of levels of visibility on Dialogue. For that reason, just having private and public challenges no longer makes sense. Challenges will now be:
| Listed, open invite | Publicly visible and accessible to all users |
| Unlisted, open invite | Open to anyone who has been sent the link, but hidden from the site content |
| Listed, invite only | Publicly visible, but only open to users you have added to the email invite list |
| Unlisted, invite only | Super private, visible only to those users with email addresses on the list for that challenge. Your name’s not down, you’re not coming in |
Tags are now topics
As it's now 2015, we've removed the tag cloud entirely. You, as admins, can still assign topics to ideas to help with your analysis of the data. Your visitors can search by those topics, but they can no longer tag ideas themselves. This should reduce confusion for you and them, and allows you to keep control of the whole business.
Draft and published challenges
You told us that it wasn't ideal to have to put together your challenges in public, and we agreed. Now, when you add a challenge, this will begin in draft mode so you can make sure it looks excellent and delivers your message clearly before pressing the 'Publish' button. No hassle, no leaking of challenge info before you're ready.
Email invitations
As mentioned above, the new email invite feature allows you to run super private, invite-only challenges - perfect for asking for input from a select few, or only from people within your organisation. You set your challenge as invite-only, list the email addresses of users whom you wish to contribute, and only they will be able to see the challenge and join in. The users you invite will have to verify their email address before they can see your invite-only challenge too - giving you total peace of mind that only those you've listed can access it.
What else?
Along with all that wonderful stuff, we've done work behind the scenes to introduce more security and better process flow:
All SSL, all the time
New Dialogue has SSL applied across the whole site, not just the registration pages, for enhanced security for you and your users.
Improved hosting
During the process of upgrading a Dialogue, we'll also be moving you to a different hosting provider. This enables us to have more flexibility and control when it comes to supporting your use and better security for your data.
Admin made easier
We've nipped and tucked the administration side of Dialogue too, you should find you're using fewer clicks and finding information in more relevant places. There's a lot more work done here than we can fit into a paragraph, so we'd be happy to give you a tour of the improvements - just ask your customer success manager.