Collaboration features for UI/UX design in Lunacy

Want to see what your teammates are doing, leave voice memos, or edit the same frame your colleague is working on? You can have all that and more!

Thanks to the post-pandemic shift towards remote work, collaboration tools via cloud document sharing have become a must for many apps. As a fully remote team, we knew exactly what the users needed when developing collaboration features for Lunacy. Here is a breakdown of Lunacy’s features for cloud document sharing and co-editing.

What’s inside

• Create teams
  • Invite other users to your team and assign roles
  • Create team documents and sort them into projects
• Share a cloud document using a link
• See what the others are up to with the Observer mode
• See the documents shared with you in your “Recents” section
• Show your designs using the Presentation mode
• Leave comments, stickers, and voice memos
• View version history and restore deleted documents

Create teams

Teams are Lunacy’s biggest collaboration feature. Once you create a team in Lunacy, you get access to even more collaboration tools. Let’s dive deeper to see what you can do once your team is all set and ready to collaborate.

Invite other users to your team and assign roles

To create a team in Lunacy, you need to be a registered user. You can log in using your Icons8 account or Google account to access Lunacy’s team feature in a snap. The user who creates a team space and invites other users to join it is automatically selected as the owner. Whenever you decide to add a new user to the team, you can assign roles that determine what each team member can do with shared files. For those who use Lunacy’s basic team plan, the number of team members is limited to 3, including the owner.

Here is the breakdown of the roles, starting with those who have the most rights.

• Owner. Hey, look, that’s you! Or whoever else created a team space. The owner is the only user who can’t leave a team since they manage the rest of the users as well as the team’s plan. Owners can do it all, from creating new files to editing team projects to adding and removing team members. Because of this, it would be smarter for a team lead to take on the role of the owner and create a team in Lunacy. Once you become a team owner, you can’t change your role unless you delete the team space entirely.
• Admin. Just like the owner, the team admin can do pretty much anything you can think of. There are only three things unavailable to admins: deleting the team, changing the owner’s role or removing them from the team, and changing the team plan. Other than that, think of admins as team space co-owners.
• Can edit. Editors can perform every task that has nothing to do with team management. Creating, editing, deleting the files, and inviting new team members to edit the document? Editors are welcome to do all that. Changing the users’ roles, editing team info, managing the team’s subscription plan? Sorry, that’s what only admins and owners can do.
• Can export. Unlike editors, users who have permission to export documents can’t make any changes to the files. However, they can view the documents, inspect layer properties, inspect the code of the elements in the document, and export document layers. This is a perfect role for developers who don’t need to tweak color settings, change fonts, and play around with button shapes.
• Can view. Viewers can only view the contents of team documents and copy elements to their own documents. Once a user joins a team via an invite link, they are assigned this role by default. The team owner or one of the team admins can change this.

Create team documents and sort them into projects

Teams allow you to create documents that are available for every member of the team space. You don’t need to edit permissions for every new file: they are all assigned by default, depending on the role you choose for each user.

To start creating team documents, you’ll need at least one project to organize them. In essence, projects are cloud folders for your documents. These clouds can store newly created, moved from other projects, or imported files. Read this short guide to learn how to import files from Figma to Lunacy. If you have the Lunacy basic plan for teams, the number of documents across all projects is limited to 10, including deleted documents.

Share a cloud document using a link

Want to quickly show your document to a client or colleague? Sharing via a public or private link is the best way to invite other users to view, edit, or comment on your project. If you choose to make the document public, anyone with the link will be able to access it. If you want to make sure the file is only opened once, you can turn it into a private document, and the access link will only work once. In both cases, you can select whether the other user can edit, export, or only view the document.

See what the others are up to with the Observer mode

For those of you who tend to be control freaks, Lunacy’s Observer mode is a must. Whenever someone else is in the document, you can click their avatar to see what exactly they are doing. You can follow your teammates to view their activity on the canvas and leave feedback as you watch them edit the file. This way, you and your teammates can literally be on the same page at all times and track important changes on the go.

See the documents shared with you in your “Recents” section

To make it easier to find cloud documents shared with you, we placed them right into your recents. Just click the Home tab, and you’ll see all the documents you opened recently. These include your local documents, your cloud files, and other users’ documents shared with you. In case you don’t need the shared document anymore, you can delete it from your recent files or leave it.

Show your designs using the Presentation mode

If you need to show your project to a client or a teammate without wasting time exporting the file and adding comments to each element, Presentation mode is the way to go. All you need to do is share the link to the document with another user and click Ctrl+ once they’re in it. This way, their screen will follow your cursor and show them everything you are currently doing on the canvas.

Leave comments, stickers, and voice memos

Receiving and providing feedback quickly and easily is a crucial part of collaborative work. With Lunacy’s Comment feature, there is no need for extra calls and messages. You can link your comments to specific elements or simply drop them at random points on the canvas. Plus, once the comment bar appears, you can click the microphone icon to record a voice message.

Aside from the regular comments, you can also find reaction stickers here. You can use a like or dislike sticker, a heart sticker, a +1 sticker for whenever your team needs votes to decide on a design, a question mark sticker for anything that looks weird and confusing, and an avatar sticker to call dibs on the easiest part of the project. You can reply to stickers and mark them as resolved as if they were regular comments.

Sometimes, minor misunderstandings happen, and designs get off the track. This is why being able to view and restore an earlier version of a document is crucial for teamwork. With Lunacy’s professional team plan, users can view the entire document history from day one. Those who use the free plan can view version history from the last 30 days.

View version history and restore deleted documents

Need access to your deleted files? With the professional plan, you can revive even the long-forgotten projects from forever ago in a couple of clicks. Teams who use the basic plan can restore any document deleted within the past 30 days. If you accumulate too many documents in your Deleted tab, you can always delete files permanently.

More about collaboration tools in Lunacy

Want to learn more about cloud documents and teams in Lunacy? Check out our documentation for more info about collaboration features in Lunacy. Have a new useful collaboration tool for Lunacy in mind? Share your idea on the Lunacy community forum. Don’t have the Lunacy app yet? Here you go — download your ultimate free desktop app for UI/UX design with a built-in asset library, AI tools, and collaboration features. Windows-, Mac-, and Linux-compatible.