Stop Wasting Time on Documenting your Design Thinking Sessions
Imagine that you are in an intense brainstorming session with teammates. You soon fill a whiteboard with ideas. You roll in the next whiteboard and continue your charged session. Your timer goes off and you stand back to look at the brilliant ideas you created with your team. You are filled with excitement and are raring to go… until you think of documenting these ideas spanning several whiteboards.
Do you remember that moment when you groaned at the thought of documenting all the content on those whiteboards? Maybe you just wanted to save that session for future reference or you wanted to continue that session later with your remote colleagues. Whatever the reason, no one relishes the task of mindless documentation after a charged session of ideating.
You are faced with a couple of options now:
1) Go the traditional and mind-numbingly slow route of typing out every one of your sticky notes. You will also have to use some sort of graphics editor to document the mind maps and other images on the board.
2) Go the quicker route by snapping photos of your whiteboards and putting them in a folder for ‘later’. As you know from experience, ‘later’ becomes ‘even later’ and all of the brilliant ideas from the session rarely gets used.
3) Take that a step further and stitch together all of the individual notes using a graphics editor to simulate a whiteboard. This is a slightly better option but it still does not efficiently use an innovator’s time.
All of these are, at best, temporary solutions. This is exactly what the diverse teams in our company realized after several such charged sessions. They thought: “Wouldn’t it be awesome to have brainstorming sessions on physical whiteboards digitized effortlessly?”
We spoke with our users to understand their workflows and we soon realized that such a solution would not only help document offline sessions but also help transition onto a call with remote colleagues. This, in turn, prompted the engineers behind neXboard to develop a solution to seamlessly transfer physical whiteboards into a single digital whiteboard.
Thus was born the #Offline2Online feature: out of experience and an understanding of our users’ needs.
We are always open to feedback and input from our users. Do you regularly facilitate or take part in intense brainstorming and Design Thinking sessions? If yes, we would love to hear from you! What do you think of our new feature? How do you use our solution for global teams, design thinkers and innovators?
