Many of you will remember our UI Refresh from earlier this year, which received RAVE reviews from the World Anvil community. But that was only the beginning. We’ve continued working to improve World Anvil these last months, resulting in an even more modern, sleek and easy-to-use design!

So what’s been updated?

This is an update on the new interface, based on your initial feedback. It includes a lot of UX updates and refinements of features that existed already, like the menus pages for your maps and timelines etc., to do list, notifications and more. This update is the preparation for “Prodromos v.1.2” which will bring even more significant improvements to your World Anvil experience.

📄 List pages vs List Menus

Probably the most significant change is that the List Pages (e.g. the list of all the maps in your world) has been replaced with a sleek Side Menu. This means:

  • QUICKER worldbuilding: with fewer reloads in your workflow
  • BETTER OVERVIEW of your worldbuilding: it’s quicker to see and reference your content directly from another page. That’s very important when you’re a god of worldbuilding.
With this update, I don’t need a new tab to grab my statblocks to add them to things: I can just copy straight from the sidebar, which is going to save a lot of time and clicks when I’m worldbuilding!  Thanks for all these updates!💕
-vazdimet | Alchemist (Beta Tester)

The new Side Menus have filtering for easy search, in addition to everything the old list pages did, AND they take up less time from your worldbuilding workflow and space on your interface!

There are still a few list pages (Discussion Boards and Variables, for example) but we’ll be doing away with those soon!

Ooooh liking both this and new updates! I really like removing list pages as a concept.
-oaster2000 | Alchemist (Beta Tester)

🐟 A brand New TODO List

When you’re a worldbuilder, there’s always a lot to do! Our new Worldbuilding To Do list is faster, easier to use, and lets you archive completed tasks so you can feel proud of them. You can find it with the fish icon in the side bar. If you want it always accessible, pin it to your interface like you can with the notebook: click the Green hammer button, then the pushpin icon next to the TODO list, so you can find it more easily. You can see that, and how it looks as a blue fish button, on the image to the right.

Loving the todo list pop out without having to leave the page!
-tjtrewin | Alchemist (Beta Tester)

🔔 New notifications panel

Our old notifications page has been replaced with a new Notifications Panel, that WON’T take you to another page when you click on it. It has filtering and pagination to make it easier to manage your notifications. The delete all button will be back shortly (and may already be there when you read this).

Things I really like: newest first notifications, being able to check notifications without leaving the page, standardizing the filters, side panels rather than unique pages, the new link to the statistics, the new help page!
-nnie | Alchemist (Beta Tester)

🔀 New Project Switcher

The Project Switcher – where you switch between worlds, characters and campaigns, has also gotten an upgrade! It’s faster, and now has a search for those of you will dozens of worlds and HUNDREDS of characters! And that’s not even it’s final form – we have more upgrades planned for this one, too!

I really like this so far! Will help with efficiency!
-shyredfox | Alchemist (Beta Tester)

📝Note creation upgrades

Note creation now has ONE BUTTON creation. Iit automatically remembers the last folder used, so you can get right to creating the note you wanted to! This works when your notebook is pinned. To pin your notebook, click the green hammer, then the pin icon next to Notes. This will give you an orange button at the bottom right to quick-create notes in the notebook.

Loving where this is going, thank you everone who is investing their time on all these new upgrades
I plan on using the TODO list again as this is looking awesome
-graylion | Alchemist (Beta Tester)

😎Get Help and Discover Things!

Help and Discover are now easy access modals, making it quicker to get where you need to go!

👓Search & Continue working

Continue working has a new home – on the search bar! Press Ctrl +K to bring it up, and scroll down to see Articles, Maps, Timelines, and more. Of course, we couldn’t resist improving the Search function to, which is now faster and more advanced. We’ve also made advanced search available to everyone!

🎨 General design tune ups!

Thanks to your feedback (and some rigorous hunting on our side) we’ve done a general design tune up to align colors across the site. We’ve also fixed some issues with the Light Theme where a few tiny pieces of text weren’t very legible. Let us know if you spot any more!

💬 Feedback!

Of course, we’re always excited to receive your feedback. Please let us know what you think in the comments below, and submit bug reports if you find things that aren’t quite right! And by the way, the quotes in this article are what our Alchemists Guild – that’s our Beta Testers squad – have said so far! If you’re interested in getting the good worldbuilding toys first, here’s how to join!

Finally, I couldn’t have said it better than this final piece of feedback from our amazing Alchemists:

I am so stinkin’ excited for this😄
-daniadventures