Before the year is slowly coming to its end, we have two great new features to announce, which greatly improve the usability of the innosabi platform for all users and admins. The new tile view switch allows you to change the layout in which ideas are displayed in the frontend. The Unsplash API is a direct integration of one of the largest databases of free stock images. You can use it to find beautiful, high-quality images for the header and teasers of your topics. Read more about these features below.
While the traditional view of ideas inside a project displays suggestions and comments in the form of a wall or feed, the tile view gives each idea a small, clickable tile with various tabs depending on the project type. Before the latest update, the tile view had to be enabled platform-wide or for certain project types such as funding campaigns during the platform setup. Now, you have the option to configure it yourself inside the topic settings. And not just for the entire platform but for individual project phases! Now it’s possible to have the classic view for a collaborative discussion in the first step and then continue with a voting with a short list in a tile view. Just a few clicks in the backend to select the respective phases and to find the switch for the tile view. It’s as easy as that!
The second feature we have just introduced to our platforms is supposed to make life easier when setting up new topics and campaigns. From our experience, one of the most important factors for engaging people and guiding them towards participation is the aesthetic appeal of a project. High-quality, topic-related teaser images will simply create more curiosity and interest on the overview page and provide a cleaner, more refined overall user experience. This can be challenging, and you don’t always have the time to go on a lengthy search for the perfect visuals. We often face the same problem when drafting platform mock-ups, concepts for new features or communication material. That’s why our own frontend developers and designers all rely on free stock image databases. Our favorite by far: Unsplash. It is irreplaceable in our daily work flow. To give you access to the over 300,000 high-quality images of Unsplash, we reached out to them, and they accepted the integration of a direct API to their database inside the backend. What this means: Instead of uploading your own topic teasers and header visuals, you can search the Unsplash catalogue for your keyword and select the image you would like to add with just a few clicks. And without even leaving the topic settings page. This feature is now available in all our platforms, and we hope our customers like it as much as we do. After all, a beautiful platform is a place where people feel welcome to share their ideas.