New Features: Idea Grouping & Pure Images
When we introduced New Stormboard just over a month ago, we promised our users that the best was yet to come.
Our biggest performance update ever isn’t just great for users — it provides our product, engineering, and design teams with a far more powerful engine behind Stormboard, including all-new capabilities not previously possible.
The team is already hard at work behind the scenes, taking advantage of our new performance boosts to continuously improve your Stormboard experience and help you take your day-to-day work to new levels of efficiency.
Thanks to our dedicated team, our product and feature map is already packed with exciting new updates, innovations, and features that we will continue to roll out over the next year and into the future.
With that being said, we didn’t want to keep anyone waiting too long — and we are extremely excited to announce our first batch of brand-new features!
Introducing Idea Grouping and Pure Images! 🎉
Idea Grouping in Stormboard
A fun, visual, and dynamic way to organize, categorize, and identify ideas within a virtual workspace.
By adding animated bubbles to your Storms, idea grouping enables teams to extract the most value from each idea and recognise patterns and trends that might otherwise go missed.
Try out Idea Grouping as a standalone tool on an unlimited blank canvas, or as the ideal complement to our organised smart sections and exports, which will result in the addition of a whole new dimension to your Storms.
A feature that absolutely must be included in a Storm for anybody who does large-scale brainstorming, concept clusters, or affinity mapping, and want greater flexibility and more context.
Collaborations become more fruitful and efficient by grouping related ideas together into clearly defined categories, themes, or concepts.
Best of all, you no longer have to create additional template sections to categorize thoughts during or after brainstorming.
Some visual collaboration tools and digital whiteboards available om the market limit users to moving ideas in clusters, but with Stormboard’s Idea Grouping, you can visually differentiate, separate, and relate idea groups, organizing and adding more context to your projects than ever before.
Thanks to Stormboard’s smart sections, your grouped ideas will also appear as unique groups in created reports, providing more context than ever in your stakeholder-ready exports.
Read more about how to use idea grouping here.
Pure Images
The addition of graphics, emojis, clean, border-free images, or whatever visual you want is now possible with the addition of Pure Images.
Basically, with Pure Images, you can put icons and pictures into a Storm without the confines of keeping your visual in a regular sticky with borders. This gives your Storms a whole new level of freedom, depth, and context, and enables a level of in-Storm flexibility unlike anything else we've ever built!
Add icons, photos, charts, graphs, emojis, or any type of image directly onto the workspace within your Storm — without the borders you see on any other sticky type.
This gives you the ability to move, resize, and place your photos wherever you want in your Storm, giving every workspace more context and giving every Storm, project, idea, chart, graph, or report a cleaner, more contextual look.
But that’s not it — with this new feature, we didn't just remove borders from images and call it a feature. Transparent PNG image types are now supported when Pure Image mode is toggled on. This means that images such as icons or emojis can be added without the distraction of a solid background or sticky border.
Pure images also give you the opportunity to "layer" the photos in your Storm, which means that you may send them back and forth, overlay them, and drop in as many of them as you'd like to give your Storm more depth — an absolute must for anyone trying to collaborate on a wireframe, working in marketing or design, or just looking to have some more fun with your daily Storms.
Read more about Pure Images and how to use this new feature here.
In case you missed it:
While we’re talking features and improvements, you may have missed our April announcement of these improvements that came built into the new Stormboard.
Upgraded Line Connectors
Whether you are process mapping, showing the flow of ideas, or just linking up similar ideas, Line Connectors have long been a staple of Storms for thousands of user. When we added our performance boost in New Stormboard, it opened up the door for new and improved line connectors.
The new and improved line connectors now allow users to:
Click anywhere on a line connector to open the menu.
Select from 17 new end points and easily swap line connector directions!
Drag a line connector end to a fixed point on an idea.
Updated Section Colors
While we were at it, we thought your Storms could use a little more flair as well. With our new engine, we are now able to support even more color options for your sections.
