Welcome to Briefly 1.34, also known as our Hot Springs Release.
And never has a name been more fitting because, oh boy, is this a hot release.
Here's what we shipped...
Glide through discovery questions with new question types
We mentioned in our Glacier Bay release that we, like most people, don’t love chatbot interfaces.
While they work well for the underlying technology and, thanks to ChatGPT, are now the industry-norm, they’re not great for people.
Sure, Briefly is insulated from some of the worst problems of chatbot interfaces - for instance, the problem of not knowing what to ask for applies less when Briefly is the one asking the questions.
Nevertheless, writing full-length responses to questions can become fiddly and cumbersome. (Even when we’re asking smart, pointed questions.)
So, we’ve been looking for ways to make getting started on a brief feel less like a slow game of ping pong.
Specifically, how can we give you more natural and richer ways to build your brief?
One answer to this challenge is to take elements that people are used to in other software (from mobile apps to Excel) and introduce them to the discovery questions.
A first, obvious, port of call was Select (or multi-select) buttons.
If you want to create a form, there are no shortage of form builders.
Adding pre-built select questions (where users set the question and the corresponding choices manually) felt like a step backwards.
What makes Briefly smart is that its conversations are dynamic and adaptive. We can zoom in when needed and skip duplicate questions when we already know the answers from elsewhere.
If we now asked people to specify their multi-select questions, we’d end up building the rigid, inefficient systems we’re trying to replace.
So, we asked ourselves, is it possible to combine the ease and familiarity of multi-selects with the adaptability of AI-driven conversations?
This prompted a project that we dubbed Generative User Interfaces (or GenUI!).
Can we get Briefly to:
As you might have guessed from the rest of this post, the answer is yes.
When asking you a question, Briefly will look at the your conversation history along with your Brand Canvas and decide on the best type of question to ask. If it’s a multi-select, Briefly will populate the options (and we’ll always include an ‘Other’ option as an escape hatch).
This will make getting into a brief faster and more intuitive.
(And with Flows, it’s now entirely customisable too. So, if you have a standard set of deliverables, or frame rates, or delivery teams, you can specify that in your Discovery Questions panel.)
This is just the start. Now we’ve built the systems to determine and drive different question types, the world (of alternative, dynamic chatbot interfaces) is our oyster - from ‘how brave should this campaign be?’ sliders to competitor positioning 2x2s. That said, WE NEED YOUR HELP. We don’t know which of these UIs will actually be useful, so please let us know what you want to see.
Here’s a list of everything else we shipped…
🔧 Added dynamic suggestions for how to improve your Brand Canvases
🔋 Progress tracker added to new brief discovery questions
▶️ Added ability to ‘Test run’ Flows
🔗 Fixed the ‘add link’ bug (where adding a link actually struck-through your selected text)
🎨 Improved canvas tab behaviour (new/rename/delete are all faster and smoother)
🛞 Added pending buttons to a bunch of forms to prevent duplicate requests
🚨 New notification controls & brief access permissions
We ship major updates every two weeks.
This was part of our Hot Springs release.
Hot Springs is a National Park in Arkansas, USA.
