Lighthouse member/invites system gets some love

Last Wednesday, we took Lighthouse offline to deploy some bug fixes and give it some serious feature love. Our original intention was to blog about the new features the next morning so that users would wake up to something pretty cool, but we got a little sidetracked tweaking some last minute details. Now we owe our users a blog post, so without further ado...

What's new?

Member management ++

When you log into your Lighthouse account, you'll notice something different at the top. Rather than the old People tab, you now have an Access & Permissions tab:

We're especially excited about this. The member management and invite areas within your Lighthouse account has been revamped from the ground up.

Lighthouse has received a great deal of feedback from our users over the last year. Thanks to your voice, we came up with an entirely new way to handle Access & Permissions for member management and invites. This update will make managing the people who surround your projects a lot easier.

When you click Set Permissions, the available settings for that member will drop down.

As you can see, I'm currently set to the account administrator. This actually disables the project selectors at the bottom half of the selector options. If the administrator check is removed, then those fields are opened up and you can easily select which projects that person is a member of.

We've had a few users ask how deleting or removing members from their accounts works. This is a side of the user interface that isn't quite finished just yet. We decided to release the improvements we'd already built (ship early!).

The access and permissions list organizes your users in order of their permissions. Members who have account access are at the top, while those who have individual project access will be below the account level members.

So what about deleting a user from your account/project? For technical reasons, rather than deleting the user from the account, you remove all their permissions. This will remove the user from your member count, and they will be pushed down to the very bottom of your members list.

Meet the totally revamped invite system

Lighthouse invites have always been pretty straight forward. Actually, they've been so straight forward that they sometimes were fumbled in the process. We took that into account when restructuring the invite system so there wasn't any confusion between the inviter, the invitee, and the Lighthouse account or project(s) in question.

Now when you click the Invite someone by email tab, you'll see a lot more than just the email address field that the old system had.

The new invite system allows for you to not only invite the user, but set their permissions to your account and/or projects right there. But wait...there's more.

So you've just sent the invite email out and you're soon to be project member gets the email a few moments later. When they click that link in their email, they will see a little something like this:

Notice the two options on the left side? Lighthouse invites now allow you to create a new profile right there on the spot or log into a current profile for which you wish to accept the invitation offer. Also, if you're already logged into Lighthouse when you receive an invite, you'll see a third option.

The third option is to use the invitation for the profile in which you are currently logged into. Pretty cool, huh?

Overall, we really think the new member management and invite system is going to improve the users experience of Lighthouse right from the start.