OnBoard Accelerate: How We’re Evolving Board Management Software Into the First True Board Intelligence Platform

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Board management software has come a long way.

Many of my fellow Pathfinders were part of the earliest days of the industry, and they tell us the focus back then was digitizing all the paper-based work boards spent so much time on. Since that time, we’ve pushed the industry forward by innovating dozens of new features around collaboration, productivity, and governance. All along, we’ve strongly adhered to our fundamental principle that great design and usability are essential for helping boards and organizations realize the full value of OnBoard. And now for the first time in our history, we’ve gone even further by improving design and user experience across the entire platform in one single effort.

†We call this effort OnBoard Accelerate.

OnBoard Accelerate began as a technical initiative led by our development team to upgrade the underlying OnBoard technology. We soon saw the opportunity to standardize and create an entirely new design system. While this effort has been described as a “facelift” of the platform, we prefer to describe the changes as subtle but impactful, focusing on simplification and consistency. In making these updates, we continually asked ourselves this central question: How can we make this better yet familiar?

Here are a few highlights of the improvements we’ve made:

Improved Look and Feel

We’ve updated several design aspects of the platform and applied a new design system. This improves the overall look and feel in OnBoard while creating uniformity and consistency across product experiences.

In one example, the improved look and feel can be seen when applied to OnBoard’s Dashboard feature. Improvements include:

• Rounding of corners, which makes the platform feel more modern and comfortable for users.
• Better usage of color and icons, providing consistent visual cues throughout the platform. 
• Distinct sectioning of items, improving the readability of content. 

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Easier Workflows & Navigation

Utilizing OnBoard Resources as another example, a few core improvements in how we’ve simplified workflows and navigations throughout the platform. Improvements include:

• A more explicit document and folder moving experience.
• Improved navigation for jumping between nested folders
• Table column sorting by file name and type and enhanced search functionality. 

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Clearer Text Labels and Consistent Experiences

Meetings are an essential part of the OnBoard experience, and we’ve taken great care to make thoughtful updates that enhance the meeting user experience. In addition to making text labels more clear, we have created more standard views, regardless if someone is an Admin or User. Improvements include:

• The improved overall organization of content into distinct sections designed to be edited individually. 
• Better usage of color and icons, providing consistent visual cues throughout the platform. 
• Visual section badging so attendees can quickly see documents, more information, or linked actions. 
• Better organization of disabled features in menus and more explicit feature upgrade messages are applied.

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Evolving OnBoard Into the First True Board Intelligence Platform

The examples illustrated here are just a small sample of the hundreds of user experience and design improvements we’ve made in OnBoard. These visual and workflow updates were only a single part of the OnBoard Accelerate initiative. We’ve also improved the underlying technology with pro-active security upgrades, completed foundational work to eventually provide OnBoard in additional languages, and enhanced the accessibility of the platform to every user regardless of disability. Additionally, this exciting initiative will culminate with the launch of two compelling new features coming soon: D&O Questionnaires and Minutes Builder.

We’ve come a long way since the early days of digitizing board work. OnBoard Accelerate is a major leap forward and represents a significant investment in our platform. Ultimately, the initiative will enable us to evolve OnBoard from board management software into the first true board intelligence platform.