Has someone told you that you're awesome today? If not, then we just did! 🙌

Our team took a few weeks off in August to meet up in Portugal—which was awesome by the way! 

But now we’re back with tons of brand new Buttery updates to make your sessions even more engaging.

📊 Polls: Built to boost your engagement!

Polls are one of the first tools we built into Butter, and they're still one of the most-loved features. 

And with good reason! They take only seconds to make, yet they're a versatile way to quickly gather inputs from your participants.

And now we've made them even better!

⚡️ Smooth new design: The first thing you'll notice is the fully updated design of the polls. Everything has been tightened up and now fits beautifully with the rest of the platform! 

🎆 Use images in polls: Add some flair to your polls by using images! Adding a picture to your question or multiple-choice answers makes them extra fancy.

 🌥 Beautiful word clouds: You can now choose to see answers to your open-ended polls as word clouds! It's a great way to read the room or synthesize ideas.

👀 WYSIWIG editor: The new poll setup editor lets you see exactly what the poll will look like to your participants while setting it up. Super handy.

And then a number of other quality-of-life improvements to just make it all feel great!

📺 Watch YouTube, Vimeo, and .mp4 videos

Watching videos together is a great way to put a smile on your participants’ faces.

In our internal Butter Townhall meetings, we always play a silly YouTube video as everyone joins.

We've now made it even easier to show the videos you want! 

With the new Video tool in the toolbox (replacing the old YouTube tool), you can show videos from YouTube and Vimeo, or upload your own mp4 directly.

Everyone’s videos are synced up, so you can all follow along together.

We hope you have fun with it 🎉

Big mobile app update 📱

We've rebuilt the mobile app to make it a smoother, faster experience.

⚡️ Performance improvements: Significant improvements to audio and video, better battery consumption, and more snappy in general.

🙋‍♀️ Video grid and settings: Updated the video grid and added “Hide self view.” You can now select avatars and change your display name in-app as well!

📊 Polls & flashcards: Both polls and flashcards are now available for all participants joining via the mobile app!

Be sure to update to the latest version of the app to get all the goodness!

⚡️ Other new updates

We've also made a number of other improvements to make everything work better!

🖥 Enable screensharing for all: You can now enable anyone in the session to share their screen without having to ask for permission from the facilitator first.

⚡️ Mega chat performance improvements: We found a way to make the chat way faster. This should especially be noticeable in larger sessions with lots of chat activity!

🤝 Change room ownership: Need to transfer room ownership to another team member? Now you can! Just make sure that the person you want to transfer ownership to is already added to the room.

✨ Duplicate rooms: Have you ever spent time setting up a near copy of one of your existing rooms? Now you won't have to. Duplicate any of your rooms and copy over the waiting room settings, the agenda, and the toolbox in an instant!

💁‍♀️ New colorful profile pictures: For anyone joining without an image, we've updated the default avatar to be more vibrant, colorful, and Buttery. Because life needs more color!

That's a wrap 🌯

As always, we would love to hear what you think! What do you think of the new polls? Any questions about videos? What else would you like to see in these updates?

If you want to stay on top of all things Butter, you can join the Butter Community to get notified about our upcoming events. 😉

High fives and buttery wishes, 💛

Chris from Butter 👋