We definitely agree that there’s huge potential in becoming the “authoritative repo,” or as we like to call it — the single source of truth — for all assets, accessible by tools used by every role. Hoping to focus on text first, but not ruling this out for the future.
What we’ve also seen from customers is that it can be hard to work on product text in document tooling like Office 365 or GSuite because those external docs feels detached from the context of the designs and the app, and require separate maintenance and manual copying + pasting to move it into the tools where product development is happening (ex: mockups, the codebase). We’re hoping to address this at Ditto with lots more future integrations (like you mentioned!) with other design tools, project management tools, etc.
Really appreciate these suggestions -- thanks! Excited to make some updates to our landing page based on the feedback we've received here.
Agreed that we should explain how Ditto syncs text across the stages of product development better, especially since that's the big vision (end-to-end text management).
We do have persona-specific pages for writers, designers, and developers (you can find those in the Product dropdown in the top nav, in the section near the bottom of the page, or in the footer). On these pages, we try to verbalize the specific problems those segments are facing, and then specifically how Ditto solves them.
Super useful, thanks for the advice. It's definitely been a challenge to figure out the right language/vocabulary to describe what we're working on, especially since what we're solving for isn't talked about.
A clearer graphic that demonstrates the "magic" is also a great suggestion!
Definitely understand where you’re coming from. The main reason we decided to go with a monthly pricing model is that we see Ditto as a tool that spans the product development process and roles of a company. Compared to localization management systems, which might come into play mainly at the end of a project, we’ve seen pretty consistent usage of Ditto across the drafting, design, development, and post-launch phases with our current customers. Oftentimes, designers and writers will use our Figma integration in the early stages of a project (taking advantage of the text component library to reuse existing text) and then other stakeholders like legal or marketing will come in to Ditto approve/review copy. In parallel, devs can fetch the latest copy from their command-line whenever there are updates as they’re building. Post-launch, updates to copy can be made in Ditto, and then easily pulled in by engineers.
Yes, localization has been on the roadmap from the very beginning! As a first step, we'll be launching the ability to create "variants" of text (ie. for each language translation) in Ditto next week. This way, teams will be able to add translations to text and view it in their mockups, without having to manually mock up each language for every screen. These variants will also be available to fetch via our API/CLI.
In the future, we plan to build on top of this and provide more localization-specific features -- things like translation memory and machine translation (for that initial pass).
Thanks for your feedback -- definitely want to make sure our landing page explains Ditto clearly. Any specific suggestions for what to improve on or what's confusing?
While there’s a chance we expand to other types of assets in the future, we want to tackle text first. We think text is often more cross-functional than images or other assets — it’s worked on by people from legal, marketing, customer success, in addition to engineers and designers — but there isn’t a unified suite of tools focused on text right now. There are lots of areas around text we still want to tackle and integrate into an end-to-end solution: localization and internationalization, A/B testing, intelligent suggestions and linting, etc. A lot of these are text-specific use cases, which allows us to do things like help teams build out a component library dedicated to text, and then surface component suggestions based on text in their mockups.
Sorry that's unclear - we have security measures in place for our app as a whole, regardless of the plan. "Advanced security" refers to the fact that we'll work with enterprise teams to implement custom security measures they might request.
For all plans, we have: encryption at rest, encryption in transit, data stored in SOC 1, SOC 2, and ISO 27001-certified data centers, single sign on and mandatory 2FA for employees, secure SDLC (protected branches, PRs), centralized logging and alerting, incident response plan, business continuity plan, and data deletion and retention policies.
Happy to go into more detail and share our official infosec policy over email.
It definitely depends on the company. For example, a startup that’s working in a highly-regulated industry where copy has significant legal implications (healthcare, banking, etc.) might have a super robust copy workflow off the bat. Others may not (this is much more common), especially if it’s primarily one person writing and reviewing the copy.
As a general rule of thumb, what we’ve seen is that (as with most processes) it’s easier to starting think about early on so you don’t end up needing to hastily put a system in place after things become unmanageable.
To be honest, lots of the challenges + workflow hacks we heard from larger teams mirrored things we heard from smaller teams
A few things in particular that might help at your stage:
- Thinking about copy as part of the design process, ie. working on copy at the same time as (or even before) you work on the mockups. This is huge bc it reshapes where copy sits in your product development workflow.
- Extracting strings out into separate files/trying not to hardcode strings. Like you said, this will set you up for success for internationalization + localization down the line. This will also make it easier to get an overhead view of your copy so you can start establishing more consistency (and reuse copy from different parts of the app to save time).
What we’ve also seen from customers is that it can be hard to work on product text in document tooling like Office 365 or GSuite because those external docs feels detached from the context of the designs and the app, and require separate maintenance and manual copying + pasting to move it into the tools where product development is happening (ex: mockups, the codebase). We’re hoping to address this at Ditto with lots more future integrations (like you mentioned!) with other design tools, project management tools, etc.