Put your Figma frames side by side with cards from your issue tracking software

We’ve just released our Figma integration. With a few clicks you can bring your sprint plannings, prioritisation sessions and feature brakedown workshops to life with up-to-date designs from Figma.

Here’s how it works:

• Connect to Figma
• Copy link to the frame that you want to import into Qualdesk
• Paste the link anywhere on the board
• Position the frame and wait for the latest version to be fetched
• You can ensure it's always up to date by pressing "Refresh" button directly on the frame

It’s perfect when you want to break down a design into tasks saved directly into Linear, Jira, Asana or Trello. Or even if you just want to annotate them with stickies.

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New work UI

We just launched two new UI elements, focused on surfacing more useful data from integrations, directly in Qualdesk and enabling new ways of interacting with objects on the whiteboard.

1 Work sidebar

While displaying information directly on whiteboard cards is helpful for quick access, some things are just too long to fit on a card. To make it possible to still see those long titles or detailed descriptions directly in Qualdesk, we’re introducing new, Work sidebar.

Easily accessible from the sidebar switcher in the upper right corner, it displays all the data we have about your current selection.

If you have nothing selected it controls work modes and facilitation tools - this is where you will find timer, voting modes, estimation and syncing button.

As soon as you select any cards on the canvas, the sidebar transforms into a real workhorse. It displays title and description of the card, together with a link to the original in the system of record. But it also makes all fields easily editable. This is the palce to change assignees, status of tasks, labels or migrate task from one system to another. And as always, all those changes are immediately saved in the system of record.

2 Hover toolbar

For quicker, more immediate actions we’re bringing back hover toolbar.

Directly under your selection, it shows most common actions that you can take on the cards you are working on.

Hopefully this new UI will help you be more productive during your meetings. We would love to hear your thoughts! Tweet us @qualdesk.

Work with Asana tasks on a realtime whiteboard

We’ve launched our Asana integration, which allows you to work with Asana tasks on a realtime whiteboard. Here’s how it works:

• Connect to Asana and choose a project to work with
• Drag and drop Asana tasks on to a realtime, multiplayer virtual whiteboard
• Work together with your team with live typing and live cursors
• Add tags, change assignees and edit projects
• Everything you do is synced in realtime to Asana

It’s ideal for planning, retrospectives, status updates and more.

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Stay always up-to-date with Github Issues

Last week we launched our GitHub integration.

We made it easier to run planning meetings, reviews and bug grooming sessions, by allowing you to drag and drop GitHub issues and pull requests onto a Qualdesk board.

Today we’re improving the integration by enabling realtime, two-way sync. Whenever an issue is updated on GitHub, that change is immediately reflected in cards on a Qualdesk board.

Now you can not only plan your sprint in Qualdesk, you can also run your daily standup on the same board, knowing that it will always be up to date.

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Work with GitHub issues and pull requests on a realtime whiteboard

We’ve launched our GitHub integration, which allows you to work with GitHub issues and pull requests on a realtime whiteboard. Here’s how it works:

• Connect to GitHub and choose a repo or repos to work with
• Drag and drop GitHub issues and pull requests on to a realtime, multiplayer virtual whiteboard
• Work together with your team with live typing and live cursors
• Add labels and change assignees
• Everything you do is synced in realtime to GitHub

It’s ideal for both companies and open source projects (we have a generous free plan) for planning, retrospectives, brainstorming, bug reviews and more.

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Add Dovetail tags to a whiteboard

Following on from the initial release of the Dovetail integration earlier this week, we’ve expanded the range of content you can import from Dovetail on to a whiteboard in Qualdesk.

You can now add:

• highlights arranged by tag group – do this by importing a Highlights file
• tags themselves – do this by importing a Tags file

To do this:

1 Export your Dovetail highlights or tags

From your Dovetail project, click Settings at the bottom left, and then choose Export from the menu.

Under Export all highlights or Export all tags, click Download.

2 Upload your Dovetail highlights file to Qualdesk

In the Content sidebar, click Dovetail and then either drag and drop your Dovetail highlights file, or click to browse and choose it from your downloads folder.

3 Run your affinity mapping session

You can invite your team, create new groups, and use timers, voting and the ready button (free confetti included) to keep your workshop running smoothly.

Dovetail integration for affinity mapping and team collaboration

You can now get your Dovetail highlights and tags on to a digital whiteboard so that you can:

• collaborate live with your team
• do affinity mapping and other similar synthesis exercises on a freeform canvas

This is ideal for any team using Dovetail to manage user research analysis and data.

To get started:

1 Export your Dovetail highlights in CSV format

From your Dovetail project, click Settings at the bottom left, and then choose Export from the menu.

Under Export all highlights, click Download.

Be sure to export the highlights file – we don’t yet support the other formats.

2 Upload your Dovetail highlights file to Qualdesk

In the Content sidebar, click Dovetail and then either drag and drop your Dovetail highlights file, or click to browse and choose it from your downloads folder.

3 Run your affinity mapping session

You can invite your team, create new groups, and use timers, voting and the ready button (free confetti included) to keep your workshop running smoothly.

Drag and drop Trello cards on to a whiteboard

We’ve improved our Trello integration by adding drag and drop. You can now pick individual cards from your Trello boards and add them to a whiteboard in Qualdesk, instead of having to add all of them at once.

This brings it in to line with our Jira and Linear integrations and makes it easier to choose exactly the cards you want to work with.

You can read more about our Trello integration here.

New to content bundles: Jira epics and Linear projects

As promised, we’ve added more content bundles for Jira and Linear.

You can now browse bundles by Jira epic: after choosing a Jira project, you’ll see a bundle for each epic containing all of its child issues, ready to add to your Qualdesk board.

Likewise for Linear, browsing by Linear project shows you options to populate your Qualdesk board with issues from a Linear project.

As before, you can start a new board from these new bundles, or simply drag-and-drop them from the sidebar on an existing board.

Drag ready-made bundles of Linear issues on to a whiteboard

If you’re using Qualdesk with Linear, you can now drag and drop bundles of Linear content on to the board from the sidebar, or start a new board with Linear content already on it.

You can choose from:

• all of the issues in the active cycle
• all issues still to do
• all issues in progress
• all issues that are done
• all bugs still to do
• urgent issues

and we’ll be adding more options over the coming weeks.

Drag ready-made bundles of Jira issues on to a whiteboard

If you’re using Qualdesk with Jira, you can now drag and drop bundles of Jira content on to the board from the sidebar.

You can choose from:

• all of the issues in the active sprint
• all issues still to do
• all issues in progress
• all issues that are done
• all bugs still to do

and we’ll be adding more options over the coming weeks. You can also start a board with one of these bundles already on it.

Start a whiteboard with Jira issues

If you’re using Qualdesk with Jira, you can now create a Qualdesk board with Jira issues already on it, making it even quicker to start your team meeting or working session.

Here is how quickly we start our bug grooming session using this feature:

You can choose from:

• all of the issues in the active sprint
• all issues still to do
• all issues in progress
• all issues that are done
• all bugs still to do

and we’ll be adding more options over the coming weeks.

Click Start a new private board in the workspace screen or Start a new shared board in a team to get started.

Tidy up your whiteboard

One click is all it takes to tidy up 🪄

You can now organize your sticky notes, cards (and anything) on a Qualdesk board with a single click. Use the tidy button in the mini sidebar to keep things neatly aligned.

Group actions for Linear: run realtime, visual, multiplayer workflows

The Linear integration in Qualdesk now supports group actions.

Groups with actions allow you to create your own visual workflows on a whiteboard, and move issues through them with your team.

1. Add Linear issues to a cycle: this makes cycle planning (or sprint planning) and other team management activities more interactive – everyone can see what each other is doing.
2. Assign Linear issues: this allows you to allocate tasks to specific people on your team.
3. Set Linear issue status: this allows you to move issues from the Backlog to To Do, In Progress, and Done. This is ideal for building Kanban boards for Linear, or any other situation where you want to keep track of where things are, like a daily standup.
4. Set Linear issue priority: for backlog grooming or any other prioritization exercise, this allows you to work together with your team to discuss, agree and update priorities in realtime.
5. Convert sticky notes and cards to Linear: ideal for user story mapping or other planning exercises. Add and agree stories in Qualdesk, and then drop them into a group to convert them to issues in Linear.

As with all group actions in Qualdesk, you can work with one Linear issue at a time, or as many as you like – just drag and drop.

New group actions for Jira: change status and assign issues

We’ve added two new group actions to the Jira integration in Qualdesk:

1. Change issue status: this allows you to move issues from to do to in progress, done or any of your custom issue status types in Jira. This is ideal for building workflow boards, including Kanban boards, in Qualdesk
2. Assign issues: this allows you to allocate tasks to specific people on your team. It’s ideal for sprint planning and other team planning activities.

As with all group actions in Qualdesk, you can work with one card at a time, or as many as you like – just drag and drop.

Ready confetti

Expanding on the ‘Ready’ button we launched back in May, we’ve added a celebratory touch when everyone on a Qualdesk board is ready.

We’ve built an “Everyone‘s ready” pop-up that comes with a sprinkling of confetti, so you know when to move onto the next exercise in your workshop.

Drag and drop Jira and Linear issues from the sidebar

You can now drag and drop Jira and Linear issues from the sidebar onto a Qualdesk board. Simple, but a big improvement over having to add them with the Import button.

Browse, search and filter Linear issues

You can now filter through all of your team’s issues and hand pick the ones you want to import. And if you find that you missed some important ones – you can get back to the list of them and import a few more.

As always, you can edit them, assign them and change their status and create new ones, directly from your Qualdesk board to keep everything up to date.

Export for Microsoft Excel, Airtable and Apple Numbers in CSV format

You can now right click anywhere on a Qualdesk board to export data in CSV format, making it easy to add to Microsoft Excel, Airtable and Apple Numbers documents.

CSV exports include:

• the text content of groups, stickies and cards
• creation and update usernames and timestamps
• vote counts

If your content is organized into groups, it’ll be grouped in the export. This is perfect for:

• a retrospective where you want to separate out different types of content, such as good/bad/ugly or start/stop/continue
• a workshop where you want to assign follow-up actions to specific people
• an affinity mapping or other user research analysis session where the groups represent specific clusters of data

CSV export complements our direct connection to Google Sheets (which is even easier – check it out) and gives you a ton of flexibility in the way that you take data from Qualdesk to other places.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback, and thanks to those of you who’ve already provided input into this feature.

Groups with Actions

Whiteboards are brilliant for team activities due to their flexibility. However, the whiteboard itself is rarely the ‘result’ of the meeting. That usually is an agreement, a list of tasks or actions, that need to be stored in your team’s system of record. At Qualdesk we aim to make acting on those systems of record possible directly from your whiteboard.

That’s why today we introduce Groups with Actions. As the name suggests – they’re just like normal groups. You can draw them on the whiteboard and drag items into them or you can select a bunch of items and group them.

What happens next, is special. You select what action should that group represent – set a sprint, change epic or convert all stickies into bugs in Jira. From this moment on, all items in the group will have the action applied to them, no matter if they were in the group from the start or they are added by you or your team later.

This is an extremely powerful tool for creating ‘human-powered automation’, enabling your team to start actions by dragging items on the board. We use it for our sprint planning, with designated groups for bugs, next sprint and some pre-defined epics. This way everyone in the team can take part in planning, and it’s all as easy as moving cards around.

We’re launching just with Jira actions, as it’s the most popular system among our users, but Linear, Trello, and even some custom integrations are already in progress. We can’t wait to see what you will use them for!

Templates

Templates make it easy to get started with a variety of different meeting and workshop formats, and we’ve just launched our first set of templates in Qualdesk.

We’re starting with retrospective templates, and over the coming weeks we’ll add templates for other parts of the agile process as well as ideation, brainstorming, user research and more.

Our retrospective templates include:

• The Four ‘L’s retrospective
• Good, Bad, Questions retrospective
• KALM retrospective
• Mad, Sad, Glad retrospective
• Sailboat retrospective
• Timeline retrospective
• Values retrospective

When you create a new board in Qualdesk, you now have the choice to:

• create an empty board
• create a board using a template

You can customize templates as much as you like to fit your own processes and ways of working.

Some parts of a templates might be locked when you first create your board. To edit or remove these, click the Unlock button in the mini-sidebar.

If you’d like to lock them again in preparation for your meeting, select the items you’d like to lock, right click on them and choose Lock from the menu.

If there are templates you’d like to see in Qualdesk, or customizations you’d like to save, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.

Add images to Qualdesk boards

You can now upload images to Qualdesk boards, including:

• photos (perfect for design and user research)
• screenshots (comment and annotate, and create follow-up actions in Google Sheets, Jira, Linear or Trello)
• diagrams for meetings, discussions and workshops
• animated GIFs for, well, whenever

To upload an image, you can:

• drag and drop an image file from your computer
• paste an image by pressing ⌘V or ^V
• click the Upload image button in the toolbar

Stack sidebar for retrospectives and brainstorming

During a retrospective, brainstorming workshop or ideation exercise, it’s often helpful to split the task into two sections:

• individual work, where you have time and privacy to get your thoughts on paper (or virtual paper in this case)
• team work, where you discuss as a group and agree follow-up actions

We’ve launched a new feature in Qualdesk called the stack to make this easy.

Open the stack by clicking the stack icon in the mini-sidebar, and then type away. Press return to create a new sticky or card, and pick your preferred color from the palette at the bottom.

When you’re ready to work with your team, you can drag and drop sticky notes and cards from the sidebar to the board:

and then work with your team as usual:

Your team members will only see items from your stack once you’ve placed them on the board.

Don’t forget that you can record your follow-up actions directly in Google Sheets, Jira, Linear and Trello.

Beacon

It’s often helpful to be able to show other people what you’re looking at when you’re working as a team on a Qualdesk board.

You can now long press anywhere on a board to set a beacon. Everyone else will get a notification and can click to come to where you are.

Particularly handy now that Qualdesk boards are 4× bigger.

Ready button

Now you can let everyone on your Qualdesk board know when you’re ready, need more time or have an idea.

Perfect for retrospectives, brainstorming and all sorts of creative workshops (and less creative meetings).

Increased board size

We increased the default size of our boards. No matter if you are working on something by yourself or running a retrospective with a team of 20, you should find enough space for all your content on our new bigger boards. All new boards are created in the new size.

Log in with Google

You can now log in to Qualdesk with a Google account. This should make it much easier to access your boards, without having to switch to your email client.

If you already have a Qualdesk account, you can use Log in with Google to access it, as long as it’s using the same email address – we will do all the magic on our side to make it work.

New action toolbar

Cards on Qualdesk boards can represent many different types of data. There are stickies and cards, which are useful for information that doesn’t belong in any other tool, but there are also Jira, Linear, Trello and Google Sheets cards, that are directly linked to data from those tools.

Apart from that representation, and being able to move them freely around the board, you can also take action on each and every single one of them. Change sprint in Jira, change assignee in Trello or edit labels in Linear. All those actions were hidden in the context menu, but we know they're as important as other things you can do with Qualdesk.

We introduced a new toolbar, that is always visible with actions that you can take on currently selected items. No need to visit Linear to move that forgotten issue into the next cycle.

Undo

When working in a free-form environment, we don’t want anyone to be worried about making mistakes. That’s why we introduced the very simple and powerful command that we all know from all other software - undo. Now you can easily roll back your last action (and then the previous one, and the one before that, and so on…).

As long as your actions haven’t been overwritten by someone else on your team, you can undo them.

Connect to Linear

We enabled our Linear connection for everyone, to make Qualdesk work for more product teams. It works just like any of our other integrations – you can hand pick which tickets you want to put on a board, and you can edit or take actions in Linear, directly from Qualdesk.

If you love Linear and want to help us make this integration even better, send us a message @Qualdesk or product@qualdesk.io.

New connections experience

At the core of Qualdesk is the concept of letting you work in a flexible environment, with data from software you and your team are using. To make the task of synchronizing your data easier, we redesigned our connections experience from scratch.

Starting with Jira, you can now filter through all of your team’s tickets and hand pick which ones you want to import. And if you find that you missed some important ones – you can get back to the list of them and import a few more. As always, you can edit them, assign them and change their status and create new ones, directly from your Qualdesk board to keep everything up to date.

Team workspaces

To make it easier to find and organise your Qualdesk boards we introduced Teams and team permissions. You can keep boards visible to you or share them with your team when you feel ready. And as the list of your boards grows bigger, you can sort and search to get to the one you're looking for.