Fresh coat of paint 🎨 for our dashboard!
Have always been super proud of the UX we have on the diagram editor, but can't say the same for our on-boarding flow. The app had been using the out-of-the-box designs from Laravel Spark, which works great, is can be quite confusing to navigate for a new user.
Here are a few sample of the 'before' and 'after' of those improvements:
While you can change the zoom level before via scrolling on your mouse or touchpad, it can sometimes be a hassle to get the perfect fit due to varying mouse sensitivity.
That's no longer the case with these new zoom buttons, a great UX improvement suggested by the team at https://www.storytel.com/ 🙌.
This round of optimization builds on the UX changes from the previous update.
The slight tweak in the visuals of our hovered & selected state allows us to significantly reduce the number of DOM elements and listeners loaded on screen - so the canvas is even more snappier now.
Some stats:
Before - selected table was not obvious
Now - selected table stands out more
We also made an improvement to highlight hovered table (rather than just the column):
Small, but ...
It's all about the developer's experience - since inception, having a simple and beautiful editor that's a joy to use has been the driving motivation for building DrawSQL.
Hopefully these continuous UI improvements makes it easier for you to create your diagrams. Of course if you think of anything else, let us know!
It's great to see that teams getting value from the app, and creating larger diagrams with more tables.
Some users have reported that the editor started to feel sluggish at some point, and of course we can't have that! Had to play catch-up on this one, but happy to unveil a largely refactored view layer for the diagram.
We'll be gradually rolling out more performance improvements over the next couple of weeks (that'll be our focus 🎯) . In the meantime, go forth and create!
Here’s a quick win for teams: Team owner can now specify an alternate billing contact (e.g.: accounting team) for receipts and other billing-related communication.
In you team settings, select the ‘invoices’ tab on the left pane. You will see the section for entering your billing email here:
The team membership area received an overhaul today with team roles being introduced. This would allow multiple people to manage the account rather than just the owner. Here’s a brief of the new roles:
Owner- Access to everything in the team, including team management, diagrams, billing and subscription management. Only one user can be the owner, however this ownership can be transferred to another user (see below).
Admin- Access to everything in the team (as above) except billing and subscription management. Multiple users can assume this role.
Members - Access to read and write all team diagrams, but does not have access to team management capabilities.
The team owner can also choose to transfer the ownership to another member, useful when the owner leaves the team.
A quick convenience feature - users on any paid plans can now easily switch a diagram between being private (accessible only be members of the team), and **public **(can be viewed by anybody, but changes are restricted to members of the team).
Small one today (on Christmas 🎅) - the focus so far had been mainly on the diagram editor - continuously improving the flow of creating and updating database diagrams and making it easy and intuitive.
Finally got around to putting some attention on the other parts of the app. Made some UX improvements on the dashboard today:
This should help new and old users when navigating between different diagrams.
If you’re interested, here’s a more technical writeup of this process.
Tiny wins 💪!
Wasn’t expecting this request to come up so soon, but quite a few users have been asking for this one.
From today you’ll be able to “copy” a diagram, for example if you’d like to keep a version of the old diagram intact.
