April Highlights: Flows — Now Better With Shapes!
Product News
Berk Çebi
Apr 2022@berk
Hey! Welcome to our April round-up of product updates. I’m Berk, one of the co-founders at Zeplin and your product highlights guide this month. We have a special announcement to make: Shapes in Flows is here!
Flows, now in all shapes and sizes
Since January’s launch, thousands of users like you jumped right in to build user flows in Zeplin. You told us that Zeplin’s quick snap connectors and locked screens are remarkably easy to work with, and it’s even helping you save time during handoff. But we knew Flows in Zeplin were missing something crucial: the ability to show conditional flows, alternate branches, and actions. So we got to work right away.
Now, with Shapes in Flows, you can map all possible use cases — empty states, edge cases, and more.
Capture decisions, conditional flows, and branches with the diamond.
Indicate the start/end of a path with the pill.
Show actions or placeholder screens with the rectangle.
In fact, as you get closer to handoff, reviewing user flows with your broader team means they can help identify gaps in the user journey. Product Managers and QA can easily add missing use cases to a Flow using Shapes. No more scrambling or shipping delays from overlooked edge cases, because everyone chips in!
You might ask why we built Flows in Zeplin when other tools out there could do the same. It’s an important question, and it ties back to why teams rely on Zeplin in the first place.
As designs evolve, the number of user paths naturally increase. Manually drawing flows in the design tool can take hours, while going back to the wireframing or prototyping tool feels somewhat regressive.
Enter Zeplin Flows. Flows are not only easier to build, with Zeplin’s dynamic connectors and labels, and groups to organize flows, your developers have everything they need to build pixel perfect designs: a view of the entire user journey, complete with product requirements in annotations, component information, and optimized specs, assets, and code snippets.
This has been at the heart of what we do at Zeplin: We want to help you translate design intention smoothly — so you don’t have to keep jumping on calls or Slack huddles to explain yourself. If you haven’t tried Flows yet, I hope you give it a whirl today!
Sample projects for all
Going forward, all new users will have a sample project in their Personal workspace to help them get up and running quickly. With this project, they’ll learn about Zeplin’s essential features — how to navigate projects, use comments and annotations, understand versioning, and get familiar with Zeplin’s different types of downloadable assets. This update rolls out to new users in early May.
Other updates this month
We also brought back a feature favorite and made improvements to cross-platform consistency.
1.Screen tags are back! You can now see all tags, listed by frequency of use, on the right panel when inspecting screens. To add or remove a tag while on a screen, use ⌘+T on the Mac app and ⌥/Alt+T on the Web app.
2.A more unified user experience. Since we’ve grown, our feature updates across Mac, Web, and Windows apps have sometimes varied. We’re working hard to unify your experience across all apps, kicking off with these:
3.The Sketch Cloud file link now appears in the right panel for Web & Windows apps
4.You can now order colors in Styleguides in Web & Windows apps
5.You can copy the link for multiple tags for Web and Windows apps
To learn about other updates in April or revisit releases from previous months, check out our support article.
Fin
