Joshua Tree

Welcome to Briefly 1.37, also known as our Joshua Tree Release.

Joshua Tree sees major improvements to the core functionality of Briefly - helping you to write better briefs, faster. We also threw in some non-functional stuff for good measure.

Here's what we shipped...

Your chat means more

Briefly can offer insights as you discuss your brief, and will generate an outline as you go

We got some feedback that went like this:

I love having a conversation before my brief, but when I then get to the brief itself it feels like a completely new thing that I’ve never seen before. And I end up navigating back to my original conversation to grab my answers.

In fact, we’ve had versions of this feedback quite a lot. The chat is great, but then the brief itself feels quite disconnected, even if the content is good. This is especially true when you land on a blank page and have to click tab a lot to generate your full brief.

We spent a lot of time thinking about this - how can we help bring these two experiences closer together without just generating as you chat (which would be distracting and take away from the quality of the conversation).

In other words, if the mountain (the brief generation and editing experience) will not come to Muhammad (the Discovery Question experience), then Muhammad (the Discovery Question experience) is going to have to go to the mountain (the brief generation and editing experience).

This is our first attempt to close the distance between the two.

When you start writing a brief, you’ll now see that your chat sits next to an outline of your brief. This outline will update as you start to answer more questions until it eventually becomes a rich set of notes about your brief. While you can’t edit the outline directly (yet), you can ask Briefly in your chat to make updates (and, as long you ask nicely, it should follow your instructions).

This outline is designed to give you a good sense of the brief (or how Briefly is interpreting your brief) before we draft it. Importantly, it does that without just drafting your brief there and then, which we worried could become fiddly and distracting (”No - I don’t like that use of the Oxford comma”). So you can focus on the ideas behind your brief before getting into the execution.

At least that’s what we think.

As part of this, we’ve also made the chatbot a lot smarter. It can now search over your Brand Intel to pull out relevant insights and offer to add them to your brief. Conversations should feel more natural and flowing - divert to brainstorm an idea or search for insights, or rush straight through to spin up a simple asset request.

Finally, when you do come to generate your brief, we now generate the whole thing in one go (so no more spamming Tab). This is trade-off, we add to your cognitive load (you no longer go section by section), but we reduce your manual load (hopefully, fewer reports of repetitive strain injuries). Given the outline should have already, err, outlined the brief for you, we think this is a good compromise.

Then when you want to make edits to things, we’ve beefed up AskBriefly to make that faster and easier than ever before. Speaking of…

Ask Briefly (nearly) anything

New commands, sourcing, and sorcery all added to Ask Briefly

It’s bulking season. And Ask Briefly has been hitting the data science gym.

You’ll notice 3 new upgrades:

1. Ask Briefly now has a much better understanding of your docs. You can ask it to find sources for a particular claim or ask it just about anything to do with your Brand Intel. All results will be returned with links to the original Canvas Blocks or Key Docs in case you want to read the source material yourself.
2. You can summon Ask Briefly by highlighting any text in your brief, allowing you to focus in on a particular point in your brief, rather than referencing your entire section.
3. There are several new commands that help newer users know what Ask Briefly can be used for and help experienced users do those things faster.

Everything else

Here’s a list of everything else we shipped…

🔦 Rebuilt Brand Canvas index that allows for faster search of Canvas Context

🎹 Added keyboard navigation to Ask Briefly commands

🏡 Gave the dashboard experience a spring clean

⏰ Improved email automations for new sign ups

🪛 Updated onboarding tooltips for Flows and for agency users

💬 Chatbot can now format its text (so don’t make it angry)

🚪 If you go back to Discovery Qs from your brief to make updates, you then get the option to regenerate your draft

🌁 Cache improvements mean Ask Briefly is faster and feels more responsive

🍷 Text formatting bar has had a makeover

👩‍🚀 Fixed some spacing and padding errors to do with Ask Briefly

🌊 Added new tooltips to Flows to better explain what’s what

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We ship major updates every two weeks.

This was part of our Joshua Tree release.

Joshua Tree is a National park in California, USA.

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