New features of new Ditto

If you saw Ditto's recent announcement, the team here at Ditto has spent the past year rebuilding Ditto from the ground up.

You may be wondering: What does that actually mean?

Changing the foundation of how we think about copy

We’ve changed the way we think about individual pieces of text, and how that text is managed within Ditto.

Previously, every text layer in a Figma file = one piece of text in Ditto. But this didn’t actually systemize the text; it just put it into a new view. Teams were left with a long list of words, but struggled to act on them.

In the new Ditto, you can organize and link repeated text within a single project, so even if it shows up 50 times in your Figma file, it’s managed as one text item in Ditto. As a part of the product rebuild, we also rebuilt Ditto’s design system, data management, and real-time sync engine. Work in Ditto should now be smoother, more comprehensive, and lightning fast.

Now, to get into the nuts and bolts of what’s changed in Ditto — new features, new workflows, new ways to systemize.

What to expect out of new Ditto

By changing the foundational model of how we think about text, that changed some very core areas of Ditto: Connecting with Figma, enforcing your content standards, building your reusable library, and managing team reviews.

• Connect as you go: Bring in only the text you need into a Ditto project, and add more over time — duplicates get linked, so there’s less setup and manual sorting, more time to focus on the content.
• AI-powered consistency: Build your style guides into Ditto, and then let AI enforce it as you draft, design, translate, and review. Ensure consistency at scale.
• Build out your library over time: Work in individual projects, then publish what’s approved to your library to reuse. Drag-and-drop text components right from Figma.
• Make product text a team sport: A new notifications hub, reconfigured email alerts, and a rebuilt commenting experience make it easy to stay on top of changes and get copy to final.

#1: Connect as you go

Stay focused and get started faster in your Ditto project. When you start a Ditto project, you can immediately tag a teammate in for a review, or make an (automatically tracked) edit -- without needing to worry about the rest of the design file. Ditto works in your flow whether you're thinking about 1 line of text that needs improving, or a whole flow.

While you’re importing text, you can also link repeated text with Ditto linking suggestions. Ditto will identify any identical or nearly-identical text items in your Figma files, and make suggestions to link the repeats together, so they’re managed as one text item in Ditto. This way, any edit you make to that text item in Ditto will automatically sync across every linked instance in Figma.

With simplified import flows and smart linking suggestions, you can work on the most important copy right now, and then build out the project alongside sprint cycles. This helps writers stay nimble, prioritize their work, and be intentional about the copy they’re working on.

Read a step by step guide to keeping Ditto in sync with Figma.

#2: Tap into AI-powered consistency

New AI-enforced style guides unlock a whole new level of consistency at scale.

Build your content style guides into Ditto, and then let AI enforce it as you draft, design, translate, and review.

AI-Enforced Style Guides: Make your content style guide actionable. Build your custom style guide rules right in Ditto,  and provide examples to train your AI model.

• Define approved and banned terminology
• Capture voice and tone guidelines
• Document text formatting, spelling, and grammar rules

Magic Edit: Enforce style guide rules and surface edits as your team writes, with Ditto’s Magic Edit.

Ditto will automatically suggest edits based on the style guide you build, to give your team copy suggestions right in context. Drive consistency and feel confident in the copy your entire team creates, with your own magic editor working alongside you.

Read a step by step guide to building your own AI content system in Ditto.

#3: Build out your reusable library over time

Build an intentional, organized source of truth over time. Work through copy in individual projects, and link text to repeated instances in a design file, with just one click. Then, if you want to reuse your text more widely across projects, publish text as a component in your library. Just like design system components, create copy components to move faster on future projects.

As you build out your reusable library, your team can move faster too. New drag-and-drop functionality in Ditto’s Figma plugin makes it easy to pull pre-approved copy into future designs, with just a few clicks.

Read a step-by-step guide to building your own reusable library in Ditto.

#4: Rebuilt collaboration experience

Everyone has an opinion on product copy; Ditto is making it easier to rally them. The rebuilt collaboration experience in Ditto 2.0 makes managing a team of stakeholders feel seamless, with the same always-on activity log to keep track of changes.

• New in-product notifications hub: Notifications have been given their own dedicated page in Ditto. Filter and sort your notifications, contextualize new comments in full threads, and work through all open tasks from one view.
• Improved email alerts: Never miss a message, with email alerts for @-mentions, replies, assignments, edits, and more, with links right to the conversation in your Ditto workspace.
• Commenting improvements: We’ve made conversations much easier in Ditto, with improved usability and actionability of comments in Ditto. This includes: read/unread indicators, clearer visibility of unread comments, and improved filtering.

All these improvements, along with the same collaboration features teams have been loving: Suggesting edits, setting statuses, assigning owners, and tagging teammates.

Bring in collaborators from product, marketing, legal, and leadership, and work through feedback, all inside Ditto, to get to final no matter how big your team gets.

Read a step-by-step guide to running team reviews in Ditto.

Looking ahead: What’s next

Ditto 2.0 gives us the foundation we need to build what’s next — and we’re not wasting any time. Here are some of the big areas we’re planning to tackle soon:

1. More AI and automation to handle the busywork of content design, and scale the standards your team sets, so you can be even more confident in the final output.
2. Robust review workflows, from early startup to enterprise, with explicit approval workflows and smarter notifications.
3. Making the mechanics of bringing text into Ditto more accessible, across both the web-app and the plugin.
4. Faster localization, with more automation and smarter libraries to store and reuse translations.

We’re more excited than ever about what’s in store for you, our users, and we want to bring you along for the ride. Book a time with our team for custom training to maximize your Ditto workspace, or get started on your own in Ditto today.