(1) New interaction in town: Checkbox questions 🎉
Creators, we heard you. Being one of the most requested features, Plio now supports Checkbox Questions, a.k.a. questions with multiple correct options. We did support MCQ questions already, but it was restricted to having only one correct option. Creators have already started using it and we are excited to see the number of new use cases that it unlocks! 💪🏼
(2) Customize your plios: A new realm 🔮
This one is big. Earlier, while designing plios, creators were restricted by the choices that we had made as developers, thereby restricting their creativity and flow.
Now, creators can finally configure their plios according to their needs. The first setting that we've added is for them to be able to disable the "Skip" button on their plios. They can choose to either change the settings for an individual plio, as well as set the default configuration for all their plios from the "Settings" button on the home page.
This really opens up a lot of possibilities for us to make Plio truly configurable. We are soon going to add more settings to give even more control back to our creators. If you have more ideas for customizations that you'd like to make on Plio, we’re listening with our ears wide open 👐🏽
(3) Copying plios across workspaces 🚕
This one is for our enterprise users. A lot of creators who work in teams begin by actually creating plios in their personal workspaces. However, once they are reasonably sure that they want to take up the enterprise plan, they end up having to repeat the entire creation process on their team workspace. This leads to a lot of wasted time and effort for them. But not anymore!
Now, creators will have the option to copy plios from their personal workspace to their team workspace with just a click of a button. Cheers to more meaningful ways of spending your time 😇
Plio is now 5-10 times faster after removing support for plio-analytics. You can read all about it here. P.S. - All of it came from reading a book 📒
Show Question button on the player to change according to player size ✅(1) A single place for all resources 🔥
Now, creators will see a new slick side menu on the home page of Plio. We often struggled with identifying the best way for making it easy for new users to refer to our Product Guides and Documentation along with keeping our regular users updated with all the new features, bug fixes, and enhancements that we keep releasing almost every day.
With this change, our users can now find all the resources along with important platform-level settings (like selecting the workspace that they are currently in) in a single place. It also gives us a lot of real estate to add any new sections in the future. Plus, it just looks way neater than before :)
(2) Easily share the draft link with your collaborators 🌟
We received a lot of feedback from the educators using our organisational plan (read about Plio for Teams here) that it was not super obvious how they could share the plios that they are working on with other team members while collaborating. To make their lives a little easier, we have now added a button on the editor that will enable them to easily share the links of their draft plios with their team members (Read about the draft and publish modes of a plio here)
(1) Be precise with our new time markers 🕖
Although we support setting questions at a precision level of milliseconds, our educators were not able to see the time at which their questions will be placed until they had placed the question. This was an unnecessary extra step we thought we could do away with :)
Now, educators can see the exact timestamp that their question will be placed in the video while they are dragging the time markers themselves.
(2) Better performance
In every sprint, we make sure to dedicatedly park some time to work on performance enhancements for the platform. Beyond ensuring a smoother user experience, it also helps us ensure that we are being inclusive by being mindful of following the best practices with regard to accessibility. Plus, as developers, it’s a good learning experience for us as well to understand the best practices that we might not be aware of.
(3) Cypress Integration 🧪
As we’re getting new feature requests continuously, developer productivity becomes a very important factor, specifically with a small team like ours. Often, after we’ve added support for a new feature, we have to spend a lot of time manually testing various user flows. Although we have unit tests in place, they only give us an assurance that different components of our code work well in isolation. But we need to also ensure that all the components work cohesively together as well. This month, we took the first step towards automating this step by adding support for Cypress - an open-source tool that enables integration testing. Here’s a glimpse of how it looks like to see a Cypress test in action.
(4) A new product guide 📜
The last time we released a product guide was 6 months ago. The platform has gone through a number of significant changes since then, and an updated product guide was long due. Our new product guide is now live!
(1) Now, preview your plio 💪🏼
A plio can be in one of two modes - Draft or Published. Once published, an educator cannot make changes to the plio like adding new questions, options and changing the timing of questions (Read more about Draft and Published modes here).
We received a lot of feedback from our educators that they wanted to experience the plio in the same way a student would, before actually publishing it. It would help them identify any tweaks that might be needed in the plio to ensure the desired student experience and streamline the review process.
So now, with the release of our new preview feature, educators can experience a plio the same way a student would, in the draft mode itself 😁
(2) Shareable scorecards 🌟
We are super excited to tell you that learners can now share an image of their scorecard on WhatsApp with their friends with one click of a button!
3 times faster loading ⚡
We are aware that some of the pages end up taking a bit more time to load than you might expect. Time is one of the most valuable and limited assets that each of us has and we want to protect your time as much as possible. Towards that goal, we have improved the loading time for a plio by more than 3 times as you can see from the image below (left: after the change, right: before the change).
(1) The Plio Scorecard is here 🔥
A scorecard will now be shown to viewers on completing a Plio. We realized that it is important to acknowledge the viewer’s effort and close the feedback loop given the context in which Plio is used - revision, homework and assessments. We spent a lot of time trying to get this one right!
(2) Plios are now embeddable 😎
A feature that has been requested from a lot of organizations using Plio is the support for embedding Plios. We are very happy to share that creators can now embed their plios on their own website. Once a plio is published, creators will see a button to generate a code for embedding the plio that can be easily copied and added to a website. You can read our docs to learn more about this.
(3) A Netflix-style Player 🍿
Our older player had two major issues:
Now, we have taken inspiration from the intuitiveness of the Netflix player to improve our own player. The viewer does not need to open the player in fullscreen mode anymore and there is no more space being wasted. Here is a comparison!
Clearer user guide for downloaded reports 📄
We received a lot of feedback from our users about not being able to understand how to use the reports generated for each plio. We realized that we had used a lot of jargon in the explainer document accompanying each report and the document itself is written in Markdown - which is not what most people are comfortable with.
We have now replaced the Markdown file with a PDF and have clearly defined how the data is internally structured in Plio along with the various terminologies that we use.
Deleting Plios 🗑️
We know we have been delaying this for a long time now. But, no more. We heard you. You can FINALLY delete existing Plios. We added this option on our home page dropdown. Go on, clean your shelf 🧽
(1) Cleaner Home Page 🛁
Earlier, a lot of the real estate on our home page was dedicated to the action buttons related to the Plio. This created two problems:
So, after a bit of user research, we changed the design. Let us know in the comments if you like it! 😊
(2) Updated Login Page🤘
After talking to some of our users and looking at user interaction data, we noticed that there was a significant drop-off on the Login page itself as it didn’t clearly convey what the tool is supposed to do. So, we have highlighted the main benefits of using Plio on the login page too (apart from the landing page) You see, we are all slaves to the conversion funnel 🤡
(3) A clear first step 🤝
Talking about conversion funnels, we saw that most new creators were simply not getting past the first step - entering the link to the video that they want to convert into an interactive lesson. Again, after a ton of user interaction, we realised that it wasn’t very obvious where they needed to paste the YouTube link or that pasting the YouTube link is the first step towards creating a Plio. So, we have tried to make first action super clear 😇
We spent the last two weeks improving the user experience based on your feedback and making our systems more robust. We also have great team news at the end!