Usually we send release announcements out directly to customers and upload them to our Zendesk knowledge base, but we’re working hard behind the scenes to make our tools continually better and everyone should know about it. For validation reasons.

Several of the latest releases from our Kaizen (continuous improvement) milestone process have delivered longed-for improvements and even a couple of shiny new answer components, but that means we were about due for a more lowkey, humdrum, ironing-out-the-creases release and that’s what Citizen Space v5.6 is all about. This one is mostly behind-the-scenes tucks and tweaks, including fixes for bugs that customers hopefully haven’t encountered, with a modest sprinkling of visible changes which you can read more about below.

What’s new?

Manage Theme will now automatically resize images

Sometimes consultation owners accidentally upload a large banner image or logo to a consultation which results in a slow load time for the page (potentially eating up mobile users’ data) only for the browser to have to resize it anyway. In this release we’ve changed it so that all banner images and logos uploaded to Citizen Space via Manage Theme will now be resized to appropriate dimensions automatically, which should hopefully remove the headache for any users who are not so savvy when it comes to file sizes.

We uploaded the above banner image as an example. It was over 5MB and Citizen Space has automatically resized it. Photo credit to Balazs Busznyak via Unsplash.

“Add a response manually” view will list all errors at the top of the page

We’ve made another improvement to the “Add a response manually” view where site users can input offline responses. Previously, if you tried to add a response and missed any validation (such as a required question or not entering the correct content in a specific component) Citizen Space would alert you that there was at least one error but you had to scroll through the survey to spot the error text and fix the problem. We’ve hopefully made life a bit easier for users by changing it so that any missed validation will now be listed in error messages which stack up at the top of the page, including links allowing them to whizz directly to each component that needs looking at. Hurrah!

The file upload component debuts a new look for Autumn/Winter 2019

We’ve made some changes to the user experience of the public-facing file upload answer component. The button to choose a file is now bigger with a cleaner design and, once the respondent has selected a file, another button will now appear giving them the option to clear the file if they wish (previously, there was no way to remove a file once chosen).

There is also a new message which appears in light yellow, once a file has been selected, to let the respondent know that changes will only be saved once they continue to another page in the survey.

If a respondent returns to a page with a file upload component where they’ve already uploaded a file, they’ll see a message in light blue letting them know they can keep the existing file, remove it or replace it by uploading a different file if they choose.

And much more…

As mentioned above this release has also tidied up a whole bunch of little niggles including the usual bug fixes, behind-the-scenes security and performance improvements.

If you’d like to learn more about Citizen Space or our other continually improving democracy tools, book a free demo and we’ll walk you through them.