There are two ways to build a product roadmap. The first way is top-down. This way is all about picking a couple of important jobs your product does and making a strategic bet on how you can do those jobs better.
The second is bottom-up: you talk to the people who use your product every day, listen to their feedback, and use what you learn to improve the little things about your product.
Our new review experience is that second kind of work. Over the past several months, we paired hundreds of hours of interviews and office visits with something new: usage data from inside the product itself. In our latest webinar, our Head of Product Matt Abbitt walked through the result: A completely-rebuilt plan review experience that we're beginning to roll out for testing this month.
Here’s what we learned, what we changed, and how to get your hands on it.
And if you’d rather watch than read, we’ve included three clips from our recent "Improving the Plan Review Experience" webinar below — plus a link to the full recording that you can watch on-demand.
When we looked at how reviewers actually use the product, three features towered over everything else: adding comments, changing statuses, and stamping plans. In one short measurement window, those three features alone accounted for 1.1 million clicks. And after doing that analysis, we knew that if we wanted to save reviewers real time, that’s where we had to focus — not by adding more features, but by optimizing the ones you live in all day.
Fourth on that list was a button called Save Markup. Reviewers would make a change, travel up the screen, and click it. Over and over, thousands of times. In the new review experience, that button doesn’t exist — markups now save automatically. Sometimes the best way to streamline a step is to delete it.
The interviews told the same story from the other direction. No single friction point was ruining anyone’s day. But add up slow renders, extra clicks, and clunky navigation across dozens of plan sets, and it quietly takes hours out of your week. Fixing that problem became our focus: streamline how you move through a plan set, make it easier to mark up, and make it easier to comment.
The first thing you’ll notice in the new experience is speed. The entire plan set now renders natively. We're talking fast, just like opening a PDF on your desktop. Scrolling, zooming, and jumping through a large document is easy and intuitive. No more page-by-page rendering, and no more blurry pages while you wait.
Around that core, we built in the flexibility and little features reviewers kept asking for: dark mode for long review days. Keyboard shortcuts that follow Adobe conventions and are fully customizable to fit your preferences. Rotate a group of pages (or all your pages) without touching the rest of the document. Scroll continuously or page-by-page, single page or two-up, depending on your screen real estate. And one of our most requested features ever: full text search. Type “concrete” and jump straight to every place it appears in the plan set.
The word we kept coming back to as we worked on this part of the product was flexible.
Your workspace should be set up the way you want it. And this latest update makes sure it happens.
Highlights, underlines, and freehand tools are all one click away, and they’re smarter than they used to be. Draw a slightly crooked freehand highlight across a row and it snaps straight. Draw a shape, then restyle it — border color, stroke weight, fill, and opacity — attach a comment or a hyperlink to a code section, and copy-paste it anywhere in the document.
Measurements got the biggest overhaul. You can now set your scale by typing the units directly (the single most requested change) and save multiple scales for different portions of the same document. And measurements now snap to lines. If you’ve ever found yourself zoomed in to 280% trying to get a ruler to land exactly on a wall line, you know exactly why we built this. It hits the line the first time.
Comments are the most-used feature in our product, so they got the most attention. The new comment editor gives you full formatting, color-codes every comment by discipline, and handles the thing reviewers asked about most: rich content. Drag an image in. Paste a screenshot. Paste an entire table (or create your own). No more saving a screenshot to your desktop just to attach it as a file. You can just drop it in, resize it inline, and keep moving.
Standard comments also got a little fix that some of you were (using your words) "screaming for": the standard comment list now persists while you place comments. Scroll to a comment, place it, and pick up right where you left off. There's no more starting from the top of the list after every single placement. Another little thing that makes a big difference.
Everything in this release exists because reviewers told us what was slowing them down.
So thanks for the feedback. And don't worry: we're not done listening.
Watch the full webinar recording here, and if you missed the first installment of our summer series (where we showed how we’re applying AI to intake and plan review) you can catch that recording here.
Want a deeper walkthrough for your team? Reach out to your customer success representative or email info@eplansoft.com.