Lately @ Lucid: New capabilities for spring 2024

At Lucid, we’re continuously improving our products so teams like yours can see and build the future. With that in mind, we’re rounding up the latest and greatest Lucid capabilities that you can start using today!

For this edition of Lately @ Lucid, we’ve focused on teams. The team is at the center of work and pivotal to a company’s success—when teams are disconnected, innovation halts. We’re reimagining how teams collaborate within Lucid so they can coordinate, align, and build across entire workflows. 

Take a look at all the new updates available to you and your team! 

Note: The availability of the features mentioned in this post depends on your account type and region. Learn more.

• Team hubs

• Touchscreen whiteboards

• Microsoft 365 Copilot plugin

• Generate a diagram with AI

• Slack AI integration

• Mind maps + AI

• Quick diagramming

• Quick shape banks and quick actions

• Visual Activities innovations

• Developer platform enhancements

Coordinate

We are bringing teams together into a shared space with centralized resources so team members can see updates and progress, initiate and discuss work, and make decisions faster. That brings us to our first feature announcement: a new team experience. The new experience includes team hubs, an updated logged-in homepage, team documents, and team spaces.

Team hubs

Team hubs are where you’ll find your team members, team space, and team documentation. Create documents that are automatically shared with the entire team and centralize shared documents, workflows, and projects to provide a one-stop shop for team coordination.

We launched team spaces last year, and they’re here to stay! Within the team hub, you can pin a team space that serves as your home base for coordination. Existing team spaces will move to Lucidspark so your team can take advantage of all Lucidspark functionality as you work together, such as breakout boards, voting, facilitator tools, and more.

We’ve also updated the logged-in homepage to center around your teams. Create teams within Lucid to share documents and information faster and start collaborating with the right people. Easily navigate between teams by pinning them to the left-hand navigation or accessing all your teams on your “My teams” page.

Touchscreen whiteboards

With new integrations, Lucid users can work on Lucidspark boards on large touchscreen devices through Google Meet, Zoom, and Webex to improve collaboration between in-person and remote team members.

Align

We’re helping teams jump-start their work through intelligence and making it easier to visualize concepts and share context that keeps everyone aligned. Take a look at all our new features focused on improving team alignment! 

Microsoft 365 Copilot plugin

Within Microsoft 365 Copilot, users can retrieve Lucid documents, plus get an AI-generated summary of a document, saving time and streamlining workflows.

And we’re continuing to invest in our integration with Copilot—our future plans will allow users to auto-generate new Lucid diagrams directly in Copilot and then edit them in Lucid.

Generate a diagram with AI

Auto-generate a flowchart, sequence diagram, class diagram, or entity relationship diagram using AI within Lucidchart by typing in a prompt. From there, you can use AI prompts to continue iterating on the diagram until you have the exact visual you need. Visualize complex data faster.

Slack AI integration

Now when you share Lucid documents in Slack (with the Lucidspark and Lucidchart Slack integrations installed), you can use Lucid’s AI capabilities to quickly summarize the document right in the Slack channel.

Mind maps + AI

When you create mind maps in Lucid using the mind map tool, Collaborative AI can help you build out your mind map quickly by suggesting other ideas and questions to add. Once you’ve added all your ideas, you can use Collaborative AI to summarize your mind map.

Quick diagramming

Start diagramming faster than ever before with intuitive tools right on the Lucidchart canvas. From quick shape changes to automatic branching, you can build out powerful diagrams in a few clicks.

Quick shape banks and quick actions

Like quick diagramming, quick shape banks and quick actions make it easy to jump-start work in Lucid. Quick shape banks are groups of sticky notes, stickers, and more embedded directly in the canvas, surfacing the shapes you need for a faster start. 

Quick actions allow you to instantly trigger features such as the timer, laser pointer, highlighter, and more from a button on the canvas to organize and present your work.

Visual Activities innovations

Last year, we launched Visual Activities to help teams turn qualitative feedback into actionable insights and make decisions faster. Now, we’re enhancing Visual Activities to make the experience even more seamless and customizable so facilitators can align teams more quickly and easily. Take a look at what’s new:

• Select shapes and objects that already exist on your canvas and instantly add them to a new activity.

• Send results to the main document with the click of a button.

• Export results as a CSV. 

• Use resolve overlap to spread out a cluster of results to see each individual response. 

• Share activities with a customizable link that allows you to set the user type and permission level.

• Send all collaborators directly into an activity.

Note: Lucid’s AI capabilities are currently available to all users but may be subject to a paid subscription model in the future.

Build

Create powerful, custom solutions for your team to streamline workflows and increase efficiency. 

Developer platform enhancements

Last year, we announced new developer resources such as API offerings and the Lucid developer portal to make it easier for users and partners to build apps and integrations that enhance their team’s workflows. This included API endpoints that enable the embedding of Lucid documents, the embedding of assets into Lucid documents, the visualization of tasks via Lucid Cards, tools for data syncing and visualization, and the creation of custom shape libraries.

Now, there’s an org chart API available, plus you can publish apps privately for your organization.

More to come

All of the features mentioned in this post were developed with you and your team in mind. Lucid can help your team coordinate, align, and build across your entire workflow. And this is just the beginning! Keep a lookout for future Lately @ Lucid announcements and even more new features.