The Timeline and Kanban Views are two of our more beloved -- and popular -- Views, and are the central focus of this release. We put a lot of thought and effort into improving their usability so that they deliver a more productive experience. Specifically, we’ve been working on improving their UI/UX, so that you can see more of the data that you need for your work, no matter what screen size you’re using.

The Timeline View displays the start and end dates of items within a specific timeline, and delineates dependencies between the various items. Use it to present a timeline-based roadmap, show an in-depth plan for a certain product or epic, and display the dependencies between various products, epics, or teams. In light of this view’s importance, we’ve decided to upgrade the timeline’s UX/UI, and address issues that were raised by some of you.

We started by upgrading the UI of the item cards - we’ve reduced their height, and now more lanes and items fit inside the screen, so you’ll be able to see more relevant data at a time. Card width has been optimized to the actual date range, and full item details are now available on hover.

Then, we added statuses to the cards themselves, so that you’ll be able to take in the statuses of every item on the timeline at a glance.

Next, we upgraded the zoom mechanism, so you can zoom in and out to weekly, monthly and the new, quarterly view. The new quarterly view also enables a year-long timeline, which is great for a long-term view of your roadmap.

Last but not least, we improved the drag & drop functionality for cards in the timeline, for a smoother, more precise experience.

We expect that the major improvements we made to the Timeline View will only increase its popularity and your desire to use it. That’s why we’ve gone ahead and added it as the fourth roadmap view in the main navigation. It’s now readily available by clicking on the Roadmap item in the left navigation, and then on the dropdown to the left of the title.

With the Kanban View, you can easily visualize items in columns, where each one represents a group that is derived from the “group by” mechanism. While we developed the UI for easy viewing of cards and columns, we do know that sometimes you want to see more cards together on a screen. For example, when you want to take a screenshot to use in a presentation.

To support this use case, and others, we’ve added the Compact Mode. When selecting the compact mode (by clicking on the new Layout Button), card heights are reduced and their width is increased. This enables us to display more cards on a screen at the same time. Note that when in Compact Mode, less data is presented on each card, and fewer groups are visible on the screen. In addition, when sorting by single selection fields in Compact Mode (e.g., release, sprints, product, epic, assignee, etc.), each column is divided into sub-groups to make the reading experience easier and friendlier. Subgroup dividers are also very useful for displaying the second dimension of grouping. For example, you can now group by Release and sort by Product, and generate a Roadmap View, grouped by products.

Tip: To maximize the visibility across numerous cards, use the Compact View together with the Expand Mode!

Yet another important enhancement we’ve completed for the Kanban View, is to enable Kanban cards to display an item’s importance and dependencies:

This release also delivers several improvements to our top-level hierarchy - the Product.

You can now define owners, objectives, and goals for each Product. We’ve also enhanced the Spec Editor so when clicking on a Product, it shows a list of its epics.

We hope you enjoy Craft.io’s latest features! Jump into Craft.io and try them out for yourself.

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