In September, we started rolling out a brand new video platform to clients, featuring a slew of new features (hello, background blur!) Client admins got enhancements to the Cohorts and Analytics tools. Here are the details: 

✨ For session participants

The new video platform this month introduces several great benefits for session participants. Over the course of this month, we plan to gradually increase the percentage of sessions that run on the new platform, with the goal of 100% of sessions running on the new platform before the end of October. On this new platform, participants see:

• an option to toggle on/off background blur for their video camera
• an option to toggle on/off noise cancellation for their microphone
• a highlighted border indicating which participant is currently speaking
• better AV performance under suboptimal network conditions (the new platform has lower bandwidth requirements)

Separately, the Sparkwise platform was designed to support a number of different team workplace configurations, in order to support remote teams, in-person teams, and various hybrid arrangements. Last month, we modified the process that participants use to enter "in-person mode" to make it more clear when it should vs shouldn't be used.

Since our initial release, all video clips on the platform are accompanied by a full text transcript that can be displayed next to the video. Now, we're also starting to add closed captioning to all newly-uploaded video clips. Captions are available in English and can be toggled on from the video player's settings menu.

⚙️ For client admins

Back in August, we introduced a new "Cohorts" tab, designed to be used by client admins that manage multiple distinct cohorts for their organizations. This month, we enhanced this a bit. Client Admins with Cohort tab access will now see cohort names included in the participant table (at the top of the session details page). Note that the "Cohort" tab is not enabled by default, so please reach out to us if you would like it enabled for your account.

For client admins with access to the "Analytics" tab, the Summary tab now includes a stacked barchart showing quantitative participant scores. This provides more insight than the average value, and we think admins will find this useful.

Finally, bulk actions now show any resulting error messages in an easier-to-read format.

Coming soon

We have a number of new features slated for introduction on top of the new video platform, so we're excited to continue to enhance the AV experience.

We're also working on ways that client admins that manage multiple cohorts will be able to customize their communications for specific cohorts.

Finally, we're working on an exciting new way to help clients prototype and explore future Sparkwise programs.

That's the update for this month! 

Interested to see what we've released in past months? Highlights from our changelog can be found in our Product Release Notes.

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