At AhaSlides, our goal is to make presentations more fun, more engaging and more rewarding for you and your audience. Today, we take a huge step towards that with our brand new design!
The new AhaSlides is new in so many ways. We’ve made things more organised, more flexible, and more us than ever before.
The brains and the hands behind it all was our designer, Trang:
I took the AhaSlides’ accumulated vision and added bits of my own. We’ve ended up with something that’s great for new users, but also a fitting and heartfelt ‘thank you’ to those that have been with us since day one.
Trang Tran – Designer
Let’s take a look at what changes we’ve made and exactly how they can help you make presentations that are smarter and better for your audience.
Itching to check it out? Go discover what’s new by clicking on the button below:
What’s New?
Improved Look and Feel 🤩
This time around, we decided to go with something a bit more… us.
Brand identity was a big focus point of the new design. While in the past we may have been a little reserved, we’re now ready to be bold.
The approach to our new identity is split into 3 parts:
#1 – Illustration
When we started in 2019, cute, colourful imagery wasn’t really high up on the ‘to-do list’. We opted for functionality rather than appearance.
Now, with a solid development team working hard on creating and improving features, our head designer Trang could focus on making AhaSlides more attractive. It was a mammoth task to form a new brand identity around illustrations and animations, but one that resulted in a great library of cute designs:
Check out these other examples of new illustrations on the My Presentations dashboard and the sign up page:
Each illustration has its own place and role. We think it’s a warmer welcome to our new and current users, who can see the playful spirit of AhaSlides as soon as they’re logging in.
After talking with Dave [CEO of AhaSlides], we decided that we wanted to make things more vibrant and more playful. As you can see, the imagery now is more rounded, more cute, but we didn’t want to make it too childish. I think what we have now is a good balance of fun and function.
Trang Tran – Designer
#2 – Colour
Vibrancy really was the keyword with the new design. We wanted something that wasn’t shy of its own vivacity, and something that reflected the joy of creating an exciting presentation to share with a live audience.
That’s why we doubled down on strong, bold colours.
We branched out from the signature blue and yellow of our logo and extended our colour palette to shades of red, orange, green and purple:
We were hoping that this colourful interface would inspire our users to start something colourful.
Trang Tran – Designer
⭐ Coming soon! ⭐ Of course, we wanted to extend our new focus on colour to our users as well. That’s why presenters will soon have the option of selecting any colour under the sun for their text:
#3 – Information Architecture
It goes without saying that a new look and feel has to have a function.
That’s why we made a big change to the IA (Information Architecture) of AhaSlides. This basically means that we re-arranged and re-imagined parts of our software to better help users understand what they’re doing.
Here’s one example of what we mean – the old and new present buttons:
Like all buttons in the new design, the ones above have what we can only describe as a more button-y feel. We’ve added a similar shadow and glow to many selection options not just to give them a real feel, but also to improve the IA, so that users better understand what’s selected and where their focus should be.
What else? Well, you can see a few IA changes in this image:
Aside from the button, we’ve made more improvements in the following ways:
- Individual boxes to help segregate each element.
- Bold text differentiates inputted information from the faded text of an empty box.
- Icons and colours allow information boxes to stand out.
The changes in the information architecture may be subtle, but that was my intention. I didn’t want our users to have to move to a new house, I simply wanted to decorate, in small ways, the home that they’re already in.
Trang Tran – Designer
Better Organisation, Smoother Navigation 📁
Like we said – what’s the point in making things prettier if the functionality doesn’t improve alongside it?
That’s where our second big change comes in. We’ve bought a load of digital furniture and sorted out the clutter.
Let’s take a look at 4 areas where we’ve made improvements:
#1 – My Presentations Dashboard
Okay, we admit it – it wasn’t always the easiest thing to find and arrange your presentations on the dashboard’s old design.
Luckily, we’ve changed things big time on the new dashboard…
- Each presentation has its own container.
- Containers now have thumbnail images (the thumbnail will be the first image of your presentation).
- Presentation options (duplicate, erase data, delete, etc.) are now in a tidy kebab menu.
- There are more ways to sort and search for your presentations.
- Your ‘Workspace’ and your ‘Account’ are now separated in the left column.
⭐Coming soon!⭐ There will be a brand new dashboard view option in the near future – Grid View! This view lets you see your presentations in an image-centric grid format. You can swap between Grid View and the default List View at any time.
#2 – Editor Top Bar
We’ve reshuffled a few things with the top bar on the editor screen…
- The number of options in the top bar has scaled down from 4 to 3.
- Dropdown menus for each option offer better organisation.
- The width of the dropdowns has changed to ensure that the menu will fit into the right column.
#3 – Editor Left Column
Simpler, slicker design in your presentation contents column. Grid view also has a whole new look…
- Slide options are now decluttered in a kebab menu.
- A new Grid View button button has been added at the bottom.
- The layout and operation of Grid View is greatly improved.
⭐ Coming soon! ⭐ The right column is not quite finished yet, but here’s what you can expect to see there shortly!
#4 – Editor Right Column
Small changes to icons, big changes to text colour…
- Re-designed icons for each slide type.
- A massive variety of text colour options.
- Re-ordered elements in the ‘Content’ tab.
Edit Anywhere, On Any Device 📱
For those 28% of our users editing their presentations on mobile, we’re sorry for neglecting you for so long 😞
With the new design, we wanted to provide our mobile and tablet users with a platform that’s just as responsive as desktop. That meant rethinking every element to make sure our users could edit on the go.
Of course, it all starts with the dashboard. We’ve made a few changes here…
The most important information about your presentations and folders are on display here. There’s also the kebab menu on the right that keeps all presentation settings organised.
On the editor, you’re greeted with another more friendly interface.
Again, everything is tucked away in kebab menus. Doing this cleans up the distractions and leaves you with so much more space to view your overall presentation.
Is it becoming obvious we love kebabs? We’ve replaced the overcrowded top bar of old with, yep, another kebab menu! It makes for a much less overwhelming interface and lets you focus on the quality of your presentation.
I really wanted to remove some of the limitations that stop our mobile users from creating the presentations they want. We went with something more sleek and simple than before, but we’ve still got big plans for AhaSlides’ mobile capabilities in the future!
Trang Tran – Designer
