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For this reason I love drawing diagrams on whiteboards and absolutely hate taking the step of putting them into a wiki/README/etc. One thing I miss about in-of
by dkarl 3y ago
For this reason I love drawing diagrams on whiteboards and absolutely hate taking the step of putting them into a wiki/README/etc.
One thing I miss about in-office work is that people would spontaneously draw diagrams in meetings. The same diagrams would get drawn over and over again, evolving. And everybody did it, so everybody was rehearsing the architecture in their heads and had a basic grasp of it. It was like a tribe singing the same songs over and over again, trying out variations and evolving the “official” version over time.
This doesn’t happen (IME) with remote work. Drawing diagrams takes for-fricken-ever so people tend not to do it in meetings. Best case, someone shows up with a diagram, and it stays up while people talk about different ways of doing it, and after the meeting someone makes the changes that were suggested.
It really lacks the collaborative value of someone walking up to the whiteboard and saying “what if we did this,” not hesitating to make changes because they can do it in ten seconds and then wipe out their changes and redraw the original in few seconds if they want.
When somebody starts making changes to a diagram in a remote meeting, it’s a sign you’re going to be there for a long, long time.
- zoomablemind 3y ago> ...absolutely hate taking the step of putting them into a wiki/README/etc. Take a picture of a hand drawn diagram and just paste the image. Sure it's not vectored but wiki is, well, quick wiki-wiki.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> wiki-wiki That's a reference I haven't seen in over a decade. Nice!
- eastbound 3y agoNew macbooks can film the sheet of paper you’re writing onto, on the desk, turn it around, fix the perspective, and display it to others. That’s very clever, if true it’s a great replacement for a tablet.
- ewi_ 3y agoExcalidraw has been great for me and my team to create diagrams on the fly during meetings.
- b0tch7 3y agoCame here to say the same. It's the only tool I'm comfortable creating visuals live / on-the-fly with
- Chris_Newton 3y agoOne thing I miss about in-office work is that people would spontaneously draw diagrams in meetings. [...] This doesn’t happen (IME) with remote work. Drawing diagrams takes for-fricken-ever so people tend not to do it in meetings. I agree. I’m a big fan of remote working in general but with current tools we’ve definitely lost something in this area. The practical utility of just having a huge whiteboard on the wall that everyone can see with a bunch of different coloured pens that anyone can pick up is enormous. I hope the next generation of conferencing apps will provide shared “whiteboard” spaces as standard. Extra points if they can effectively use tablets (thinking Wacom not iPad here) so everyone can just sketch out ideas quickly and collaboratively again, and if it also provides useful and rapidly accessible tools for things like saving interesting work, editing and moving things around, and retrieving something you were looking at earlier in the discussion. I suspect there’s a significant opportunity here, a chance to fix one of the legitimate criticisms of WFH. Certainly among the smaller businesses I tend to work with, I could imagine any remote conferencing tool that got that right first would rapidly expand its market share.
- ska 3y agoThe current generation mostly have shared whiteboards already I think (zoom, teams, etc). Digital whiteboards aren't great, but they are useful. Interestingly though they dont' seem toe be used quite int he same way. I still insist that for my teams all rooms that get used for meetings, formal or informal, have at least 1 big whiteboard. It's always paid off, and as you and GP note - nothing in WFH tooling quite works. Hell, I've had team members WFH put a whiteboard in their house and an extra camera to show it; with mixed success. It's not collaborative, which reduces value. Tablets too. The workflows are all so-so.
- Chris_Newton 3y agoThe current generation mostly have shared witheboards already I think (zoom, teams, etc). To the extent that this is true, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them used routinely in any team or organisation I’ve worked with. I believe a large part of this is because no-one has yet found a way to use a keyboard and mouse as quickly/casually/effectively as good old pen and paper (or, in this case, marker and whiteboard). Given that so much of our work now happens remotely, I’m a little surprised that stylus-friendly devices haven’t caught on more.
- rjbwork 3y ago>One thing I miss about in-office work is that people would spontaneously draw diagrams in meetings. The same diagrams would get drawn over and over again, evolving. And everybody did it, so everybody was rehearsing the architecture in their heads and had a basic grasp of it. It was like a tribe singing the same songs over and over again, trying out variations and evolving the “official” version over time. I got a laptop with a touch screen and baked in stylus. Screen share + paint is my white board. I can screenshot them and dump them into our chat logs. Works pretty well and people do seemingly find it charming.
- rightonbrother 3y agoI agree with your comment so much I created a login. 'One thing I miss about in-office work is that people would spontaneously draw diagrams in meetings. The same diagrams would get drawn over and over again, evolving. And everybody did it' I miss in online meetings the start with and highlevel outline diagram, and fill in different detailed sets depending on the conversation. I like plantuml, but it's hard to do that as fast as a white board. Also I found that repitionion of explaining your system to multiple sets outsiders really helper refine the content.