How MarkUp Reshaped Digital Collaboration for Remote Workers...and Grew 302% in One Month

When we started MarkUp, a visual collaboration tool for digital content, we expected to see user growth from much of the design and developer communities, because of the problem we are solving in those fields.

MarkUp is a platform that allows users to place comments directly on any piece of digital content, closing the notoriously cumbersome feedback loops between designers, developers, project managers, and every stakeholder in between.

What we couldn't predict, like many others, was how a major pandemic would affect the world in 2020 and displace most of the workforce, with those in the fortunate position of still working, many doing so remotely.

In moments of turmoil, there is ample opportunity to support people through technology and innovation. We’re in the fortunate position to be able to do so in these unprecedented and uncertain times. Last month alone, MarkUp added more than 3,500 users who are looking to collaborate remotely on digital content–an increase of 302%, compared to signups from the month prior.

This growth speaks to the fact that, now more than ever, people are seeking out solutions to more efficiently connect, communicate, and create with their teams and communities.

While there are many platforms for design prototyping, including InVision and Zeplin, none provide a platform for collaboration on staging or live sites. A common workflow might see a designer creating a web design in InVision and having their development team create a build based on it. Once the build is finished, designers and developers typically revert to taking screenshots of the design and comparing it to InVision for feedback. Add in email threads, comment-filled Google Docs, and phone calls, and the QA process gets messy.

Whether you are working on a website, landing page, sales collateral, or anything with a URL, users simply add their site URL and MarkUp renders it into a canvas ready for feedback. Users can seamlessly invite colleagues and clients to collaborate and comment in real-time, all in one place.

While this process is typically done between designers, developers, and PMs, we're now seeing different facets of an organization leveraging MarkUp due to an uptick in remote working.

Whether it's marketing and communications teams that previously collaborated on landing pages in the office, or sales reps syncing with the creative team on collateral before going into a demo, for many people, that’s now happening from our homes.

As a result, we're seeing a shift in MarkUp's user base that encapsulates essentially any role within a company. There is an organizational-wide effort to produce and review content, faster, cleaner, and more transparently than ever before.

One of the most encouraging things we've seen was how two companies directly responding to COVID-19, Clorox and the UN, both needed to produce communications at an electric pace in order to inform their stakeholders of the pending crisis and what it would mean in the months ahead.

MarkUp helped their teams review, edit, and push content to their stakeholders with remarkable speed and efficiency. We're proud to have provided a product, for free, that could support them in their crisis communication efforts.

Remote working has fundamentally shifted how an organization communicates and collaborates. MarkUp is here to support anyone at an organization, from designers and developers, to marketing and communications teams, to the CEO, create, edit, and publish content faster than ever.

Check out MarkUp at www.markup.io. It is completely free to use, and we hope it can serve your team as well as it has served over 7,000 people so far.

(Disclaimer: The author is the Business Brains at Markup.io)