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The question is why do you need a whiteboard? What problem is the whiteboard solving? Drawing freely with a mouse is something that can be done but also you h
by lampe3 7y ago
The question is why do you need a whiteboard?
What problem is the whiteboard solving?
Drawing freely with a mouse is something that can be done but also you have tools like draw.io if you need to draw something.
- cyphar 7y agoWhiteboards are absolutely indispensable for communicating ideas quickly in a small group of people. It's effectively just a bigger (and easier to erase) version of grabbing a scrap of paper to scribble something down when explaining or describing something to someone else. I'm honestly more surprised that this isn't a universally known concept on HN. Scribbling on scraps of paper is something most people in western countries have done since pre-school.
- lampe3 7y agoYes, I was born and raised in western countries. So yeah. My point was more why does it need to be a physical thing. Like a whiteboard. we, for example, use hackmd.io and draw.io/figma for quickly drawing. It is also easier with this to archive this and change or copy later.
- KptMarchewa 7y agoI don't really do that.
- vsareto 7y agoI'd actually prefer less whiteboarding to people spending a bit more of their own time on their ideas. Think about it and research it for a few days before calling a meeting.
- dickeytk 7y agoYeah I can think of several times when I or someone else came prepared to a remote meeting with a PowerPoint. Of course that took more work, but the product would often be reused and shared long after the meeting. Not only that, a higher quality work conveys the idea much better.
- ebiester 7y agoIf three people have 1/3rd of the knowledge needed to solve the problem (for example, a front end designer, a back-end designer from team 1, and a back-end designer from team 2), the total time expended is shorter if the three people research their part for 2 hours and then get together for an hour than one person writing based on faulty assumptions and having to go back to the drawing board anyway. The larger the organization, the less one person can hold the entirety of the solution in their head.
- dickeytk 7y agoIndispensable for who? Perhaps designers? As an engineer I spent 5 years working remote and this has never been an issue. We just never needed—or even considered—drawing things. Even now that I’m not remote all we use the whiteboard for is bulleted lists which easily can be done with notion or google docs
- cyphar 7y agoI'm a software developer and I always find that grabbing a whiteboard and drawing diagrams or other such information is very useful when trying to agree on a solution (or even agree on the problem). I work remotely and very rarely see the rest of my team in person, so the clear benefit (to me at least) of in-person whiteboarding in those situations is very stark. Yes, you could probably accomplish the same thing by writing up a proposal spec document (which you'll need to do eventually) but the downside of doing that during the drafting stage is that it lengthens the feedback loop and not everyone will read such a document thoroughly and leave a thorough review. In-person whiteboarding is usually much faster and everyone in the room is almost always on the same page.
- traitsnspecs 7y agoI've been on a team with a super productive whiteboard user, who made ideas more clear by the ability to draw diagrams. I have also been on a team with a unproductive coworker whose whiteboard drawings were confusing, took lots of time to draw, and were generally unhelpful. Both people thought their whiteboarding was indispensible. Neither person's actually were, even the guy who was quite effective at drawing his ideas.
- slantyyz 7y agoI don't know. A whiteboard alone isn't a solution. I think it depends on the communication skills of the team. Anyone who plays some form of "Win, Lose or Draw" or "Pictionary" will quickly realize that most people aren't as good at visual communication as they think they are. Myself, I've been in too many whiteboarding sessions where the whiteboarder either spent too much time trying to "live bake" their idea on the whiteboard or simply produced an incoherent mess.
- blktiger 7y agoI think it depends on what you want to accomplish with the whiteboard. If you just want to capture a list of ideas, google docs will let people collaboratively edit a document or you could just have one person share their screen and capture verbal ideas. If you want to diagram things, pen and paper + a camera can be just as effective if not more effective than a whiteboard. Often it's better to have the whole team do a sketching exercise and share their results which isn't really effective on a single whiteboard. More importantly, whiteboards are never going to be effective for remote organizations for the same reason hallway conversations / voice chat aren't effective. It builds knowledge silos as only the people who were there understand the context of the whiteboard even if you photograph it.
- eeZah7Ux 7y agoA collaborative text pad is way more productive for 99% of the use cases.