A new look & new ways to collaborate

Today we’re releasing our biggest update since entering beta last year. It’s actually one that we’ve been quietly working on since September and it’s taken months of explorations, testing, and iterations to bring to life.

When we started on this project, we had three main goals in mind:

• Radically simplify the editing experience
• Make feedback and collaboration top of mind
• Improve the accessibility of templates and presentation styles

We’re confident this update will make designing, creating, and collaborating in Pitch simpler, without limiting what you and your team can build.

A more personalized workspace

Like many of today’s leading collaboration tools, we use workspaces as a way to centralize your team’s work and facilitate sharing and discovery. What we’ve been missing is a mini-command center that offers you a personal view into what’s happening at work.

With this release, we’re introducing a dashboard as your default view of Pitch. Today, when you open up your workspace you’ll see the presentations you’ve most recently viewed or worked on. In the future, we hope to take this even further, showing you the templates you work with and the notifications that matter most.

A reimagined editor that prioritizes speed and collaboration

When we ask users about the benefits of Pitch, many mention speed, efficiency, and consistency compared to the presentation software they used before. But based on user testing sessions — and our own experience using Pitch — we knew there were opportunities for improvement.

Our new editor is designed to help you focus like never before. Every element on your slide has an inline editor that shows you the most relevant options. Just point, click, and edit.

If you’re editing text, you can quickly switch between text styles, change the font size, adjust alignment, and more.

You can also search from a library of nearly two million inspiring, beautiful Unsplash images to find the perfect visuals for every slide. Once you’ve added an image, you can use the inline editor to quickly replace it — Pitch will remember your most recent search.

With this update, we’ve completely removed our right-hand panel and replaced it with a bubble bar. This brings the key workflows that go into collaborating on presentations to the foreground while giving you more space to work on your slides. In the bubble bar, you’ll find:

Design: If you want to make more extensive edits to your slides, the design panel includes the advanced functionality not included in the inline editor.

Workflow: Before, slide assignments and status updates were hidden in the Collaboration tab. With this change, you can immediately see what’s happening with a slide and quickly update its owner and status.

Comments: Viewing open comments or adding your own is faster than ever.

Reactions: Tools like Slack have helped standardize the idea of emoji reactions. Why leave a comment saying you agree when you can save time and space with 👍? Like comments, we’ve brought this into our mobile web app experience so that collaborating in Pitch across any device is seamless.

Notes: We’re thrilled to finally bring speaker notes to Pitch. Add important messages and ideas as speaker notes so that you or others can reference them while editing or presenting.

We’ve also added a slide editor, which sits just below the slide canvas. Browse and add slides from templates, switch between presentation styles, and work with background colors and images faster than before.

How did we get here?

Today’s release was a massive effort that involved every product team and department at Pitch. The journey to this release was one that forced us to challenge our initial assumptions and identify new ways of working cross-functionally. In our next post, we’ll take a deeper look at what it’s like to redesign and rethink an app that’s still being built.