How we’re approaching v3
The last time we teased you with a rebuild was in 2013. Back then, we were a nimble product with a small but keen set of users. Ten years on, it’s time to start talking about Kumu’s next chapter.
In the years since we lost Ryan, we’ve struggled to iterate on Kumu at the speed that you deserve. The UI still has some rough edges and there are longstanding bugs that we can’t easily fix. We’ve decided that it’s time for a rewrite.
Say hello to Kumu v3 👋
We’re still in the early stages of this work (rebuilding a product this complex is a serious undertaking) so everything you see here is a work-in-progress.
We’d like to tell you a little about what’s changing and why we’re changing it.
Simplified User Interface
Most of you are already working on complex problems and we want to give you the best chance of making sense of them without getting in the way. We’ve always strived to keep Kumu clean and intuitive, but as the product has grown, so has the complexity of our user interface.
The first thing you might notice above is that there’s more space for your map! We’re reclaiming the space around the viewport and we redesigned the sidebar to be the new home for maps, views, fields, search, admin, and much more (everything, in fact).
Whilst we’re here, we’ve also reworked the project menu and given you a way to search the contents of your map right from the second you land in the project. Say goodbye to all that empty space in map overviews without descriptions.
It’s also easier to get back to the map overview and we think people are going to find it more intuitive to close the sidebar too.
Goodbye, Advanced Editor
Gone are the days of needing to learn our advanced editor language to bring your views to life. The only people writing code in Kumu v3 will be the developers.
We’ve redesigned our view editor so that all of the decorations that you know and love will be accessible through an intuitive UI. No more time spent in the docs looking for property names!
Don’t worry, your v2 advanced editor styles will continue to work in v3, you’ll just be editing them with a user interface, rather than a code editor.
Going code-free has some downsides that we’re still figuring out ways to work around, but we think that most people will be able to create visually stunning maps without ever reaching for the documentation!
Simplified Data Model
We’re making some radical changes to Kumu’s underlying data model, so that your data won’t be shared across maps, unless you explicitly want it to be!
That means that you won’t find yourself in surprising situations where editing an element in one map accidentally changes the element in all the other maps in project.
It also means that you’ll finally be able to have multiple elements with the same label!
Building Selectors
Selectors are a fundamental part of Kumu. We use them to write style rules, to target controls, for filtering, for showcasing, for clustering, and y’know, for selecting stuff generally.
We’re giving our selector builder a serious upgrade to make it easy for all users to build complex selectors without learning any syntax.
Prefer writing them by hand? Never fear, it’s a quick hop back to editing the underlying selector if you want to. Plus, we’ll even let you know when there’s a mistake in the syntax!
Loops → Groups
Kumu’s loops work best in causal loop diagrams, where you associate a label with a group of connections (usually a group that forms — you guessed it — a loop).
In v3 we’re lifting the limitation that means loops are just for connections and as such we’ll be renaming them as groups. This means you’ll be able to create a groups of elements, groups of connections, or groups that include both!
This will make annotating your maps much easier and opens the door for all kinds of compelling features. Stay tuned for more surprises here!
Control Builders
Giving users the chance to extend our user interface with controls has always been a powerful feature of Kumu, but it’s one that has largely stayed hidden behind the advanced editor. Many people don’t benefit from this functionality because defining and configuring controls can get pretty complicated!
Just like everything else in the advanced editor, controls will get their own user interface. Forget the code. You’ll be able to build, tweak and configure controls to your heart’s content.
We’ve also improved the architecture for controls behind the scenes, which means that interacting with controls won’t change your view, and you’ll never again see the dreaded “unsaved changes” warning after activating a clustering control.
We’d show you a screenshot, but v3 doesn’t actually have controls yet 😅. As we said, it’s early stages!
Redo
We’re taking the chance to redo our undo functionality, so that you’ll be able to go backwards and forwards through your changes. There’s even a chance that your undo history will persist across sessions.
Some Fond Farewells
We’re not fans of rocking the boat, but we’re making some significant changes where we feel it is best for the long term health of the platform.
Table 👋
Kumu’s table view can be a helpful way to view your data and works well for rapid data entry, but it’s a complicated bit of user interface for us to maintain, and we think we’re better off using our time to deliver those features in other parts of the app.
Geo 👋
Kumu’s geographic template is neat, but you probably know it has serious limitations in performance and legibility, especially when elements are located close to one another. Again, we think our time can be better spent improving other parts of Kumu.
Markdown 👋
We’re moving away from using markdown in profiles to a rich text editor that has simple controls for formatting text and adding widgets (and perhaps even Kumu controls) to your descriptions.
Discussions 👋
Discussions are important, but we haven’t nailed the functionality yet, and they’re not as impactful as we’d like them to be. We’re not prioritising them as part of v3, but they may reappear one day in a re-imagined form.
Presentations 🤨
Before you panic, we’re not entirely saying goodbye to presentations. Effective storytelling is a core part of Kumu as a platform, but we think that we can do a better job of presentations if we rethink them from the ground up. This means making some breaking changes so that we’re not handcuffed by the current implementation. We’ll do our best to help you migrate, but you might have to edit or even rebuild your presentations once you switch over to v3.
New Friends
It’s not all goodbyes either, here are some of the promising things that our new architecture will make possible, some of which we’re already working on!
- 🤖 A public API for Kumu!
- 🌳 Offline mode
- 📋 Copy & paste
- 🏃 Live metrics
- 🌚 Site-wide dark mode
We’ll say more about all of these in the future. Just know that we’re excited and you should be too!
Roadmap
This is only a small peek at where we’re heading, but there’s still a long way to go. We don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver, so here’s the rough sequence of events that will happen between now and the end of life for Kumu v2.
Private Beta
Soon, we’ll start to grant limited access to a sandbox version of v3. This will be a fresh version of Kumu where you can play around with the new UI and the new data model, but you won’t have access to your existing Kumu account or projects.
Public Beta
Once we’re happy, we’ll open the beta up to everyone, so that anyone can create an account in our sandbox to play around with the new features and give feedback.
General Availability
Then v3 will become the default version of Kumu, but we’ll running it alongside v2 and there will be a way to import your existing projects into v3.
We’ll continue to support both versions of Kumu for a period of time, so that no one gets caught out by surprise, but ultimately we’ll sunset the current version of Kumu some time in 2025. Don’t worry, there will be lots of notice!
We’d love to tell you exactly when this will be, but honestly, we don’t know. There’s still a lot of work to do, lots of questions to answer, lots of documentation to rewrite, lots of videos to reshoot. We’d rather take our time and get things right.
We’d love your input
We’d love your unfiltered thoughts and reactions. What are you exicted about? What terrifies you? What do you want to make sure we don’t mess up as we build v3? What’s that dream functionality that you’ve always wished we would implement? Send your feedback to support@kumu.io!
- If you are interested in following along with the engineering and the design behind v3, then go and check out “Making Kumu” our new behind-the-scenes blog!
- If you want to see features as we work on them and have the first chance to give us feedback on the direction we’re taking, then come join us on our Discord server where we’ll share weekly updates and sneak peeks.
Stay tuned for more updates and surprises on our journey to Kumu v3 🚀.
