🚀User Experience Improvements

[James]

Hi Creators,

We’re excited to share some updates that make interacting with key features in the Design Tool easier and more intuitive! 🎉 These enhancements focus on improving the management of Backgrounds, Collaboration, Orientation and Layering to streamline not only your creative workflow, but our customers’ too! Let’s explore what’s new:

Just Added!

📐 Key Updates for Layers/ Design Areas 

We’ve noticed that customers had difficulties understanding how to switch to different sides or pages of a product, so we’ve moved them out of the layers panel into a new thumbnail display. This will also help customers visually see if areas are blank and need attention.

• Switching design areas:
• Up to 6 design areas are shown as thumbnails on the left side of the canvas.
• A scrollbar appears if more than 6 areas are available.
• Each thumbnail is labeled with the design area name.
• Clicking a thumbnail selects the corresponding area.
• Layers panel updates:
• When a design area is selected, only that area’s layers are visible in the layers tab.
• Right-clicking on a layer now gives you action options (copy, paste, send to back, etc.)

🔄 Quicker Access to Orientation 

• We've moved the orientation setting to the top of the design tool, so you can adjust it effortlessly while designing!

🌄 Key Updates for Backgrounds

• Right-Click Context Menu:
• Remove background: Clears both the background image and area fill at once.
• Add background: Opens the background tab if no background is present.
• Edit background: Opens the background tab if a background image or fill exists.
• Layers Panel: The background layer is now positioned near the bottom of the layers list, just above the "Design Placement" layer. Please note it cannot be reordered as it’s the background. 
• Text Labels:
• “None”: No background
• Hex code (e.g., "#XXXXXX"): Fill color only.
• Image file name: Image only.
• “Image + #XXXXXX”: Image and fill color combined.
• Visual Thumbnails:
• Clickable background layer thumbnail opens the background tab.
• The thumbnail displays:
• No background: checkerboard pattern
• Background: Fill color, Image, or both (Image over the fill color if image has transparency) 
• Quick Remove:
• Hovering over the background layer reveals a floating trash can icon.
• Click to remove both the background image and fill instantly.

💬 Design Collaboration features

We’ve found that there’s been some confusion around the share button as customers do not expect sharing to mean collaboration. 

• Key changes:
• Share Button: No longer associated with collaboration, but opens the standard sharing function, similar to the product page.
  
  

• Collaboration Button:
• Clicking on the circle + button will open the collaboration invitation so you can invite someone to collaborate.
  
• Group Call Button:
• When in a collaboration, the "Chat" button is now labeled as "Group Call".
  

These updates are designed to help you and customers work faster and collaborate more efficiently, ensuring a smoother design experience. We hope you enjoy these improvements—happy designing!