Updater monday.com App

Sending regular status update emails is a pretty common task nowadays. For our client, it’s one of the steps in many recurring processes. They are using monday.com, a platform with incredible extensibility potential, so they wanted to know if they could save time by automating this routine.

We have a solid, long-lasting partnership and delivered multiple monday.com apps together, so they contacted us to investigate and develop a solution.

Discovery

We started with a meeting where the client described their use cases and preferences for the app. They write updates for multiple scenarios beyond simple emails as part of long processes. Not all items from the board or even specific groups should go in those updates. That’s why we’ve decided that a completely automatic solution would be overkill and even less convenient than semi-automatic, where a user enters some data and gets generated text copied in their clipboard.

The UX of the app was also important. Dozens of people in multiple departments could benefit from the app, so it should be intuitive and easy to use. It should look professional and resemble monday.com interfaces. The update structure editor should support text formatting, pasting rich text, and other advanced text editor features while preserving a minimalistic design.

For convenience, the app should support templates. Those templates allow generating updates with the same structure for different items in the future. They are shared with all users of a board where they were created so that everyone can generate these updates. For example, one person can configure multiple templates for each board, and everyone may use them when sending updates.

Solution

The app adds a new board view where a user is prompted to select a template or create the structure from scratch. The next step shows all items and groups from a board and asks the user to choose which ones should be present in an update. It has convenient controls to select/deselect the whole group or all items on a board.

Now that the items are selected, a user would see the update structure if they started with a templated or are prompted to create one from scratch. Users can use hotkeys like ctrl-b for text formatting or copy-paste preformatted text. They can insert special placeholders for every column in the structure that will be later replaced with the corresponding values from every item when generating the update. Those placeholders also support formatting.

The final step is where the update preview is generated. There’s a convenient button to copy everything to a clipboard. Users can also save the structure as a new template or update the one they used for an update.

For sharing between users, the templates are stored in a database on the backend. They are linked to the board, so every user of a board can use them, and they are only present on the board where they were created. Every user can create or modify any templates.

Results

The app saves a tremendous amount of time on writing board updates manually. With formatting support, in 99% of cases, updates are ready for copy-pasting to the target place as-is. In the remaining 1%, they require minor formatting before publishing.

Thanks to the user-friendly interface, clients’ employees can start using the app immediately, without extensive onboarding or reading through documentation.

The client is happy, and we’re working on multiple other monday.com apps together.