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Stylus friendly devices don't solve the whole thing either. Maybe not today, but if everyone had stylus+pad and knew how to use the related software/UI, what e

Stylus friendly devices don't solve the whole thing either. Maybe not today, but if everyone had stylus+pad and knew how to use the related software/UI, what else do you think would be useful?

ska 3y ago
I don't know. I do know I've provided entire teams with stylus + letter-sizes pads (and smaller ones, and/or ipads) and tried all the available software (we could find, anyway) with pretty mixed results.
- Chris_Newton 3y ago
  Would you mind elaborating on the “pretty mixed results”? I’ve been curious about trying this for a while, but it looks like you already have, so I’m very interested in what did or didn’t work well in your experience.
  - ska 3y ago
    Sure! We never found a workflow that fully replaced taking turns drawing on a (shared) whiteboard. Some people found the tools really pretty usable, so for them it was great for drawing a quick sketch and sharing with people, but it was always a bit clunky compared to physical pens. Oddly (perhaps?) some of the team were very self-conscious about drawing while others watched, more so than in person. After a while we realized that some of the team was disengaging from the rest of conversation while sketching, in a way that noodling on paper didn't' seem to. Maybe because they were in a different physical space, so when eyes were focused on the drawing, there wasn't really much connection (other than audio) Scaling is a problem in than nothing on a monitor seems to work as well on multiple scales as a big ass whiteboard. I mean, you can certainly represent more scales digitally, but you are pan-and-zooming all the time. The "single picture" part didn't seem to work as well. Another thing is that we never found a digital place that has the same mental priority as big whiteboard in the common area. There was a lot of "where did we put that, is it attached to meeting or on the folder X or ... On the whole I thought it was more positive than negative, but over time they were definitely being used less and less. A couple of the team absolutely loved them for diagramming and completely replaced other tools for that. To be fair, it was a "forced experiment" during covid lockdowns initially, so could certainly have been executed better.
    - Chris_Newton 3y ago
      That was interesting and not always what I’d have expected. Thanks! :-)
- 8note 3y ago
  A surface book 2 and Microsoft sketchpad do the job really well for a screen share. However, there's skill involved, and you really want that multi touch+pen input. Zoom in to write text, zoom out to draw boxes, move the canvas around, etc. Also, having a colour pallet, since that's designed into whiteboard markers for you, where digital systems give you a billion bad options

Stylus friendly devices don't solve the whole thing either. Maybe not today, but if everyone had stylus+pad and knew how to use the related software/UI, what else do you think would be useful?

ska 3y ago

I don't know. I do know I've provided entire teams with stylus + letter-sizes pads (and smaller ones, and/or ipads) and tried all the available software (we could find, anyway) with pretty mixed results.

Chris_Newton 3y ago
Would you mind elaborating on the “pretty mixed results”? I’ve been curious about trying this for a while, but it looks like you already have, so I’m very interested in what did or didn’t work well in your experience.
- ska 3y ago
  Sure! We never found a workflow that fully replaced taking turns drawing on a (shared) whiteboard. Some people found the tools really pretty usable, so for them it was great for drawing a quick sketch and sharing with people, but it was always a bit clunky compared to physical pens. Oddly (perhaps?) some of the team were very self-conscious about drawing while others watched, more so than in person. After a while we realized that some of the team was disengaging from the rest of conversation while sketching, in a way that noodling on paper didn't' seem to. Maybe because they were in a different physical space, so when eyes were focused on the drawing, there wasn't really much connection (other than audio) Scaling is a problem in than nothing on a monitor seems to work as well on multiple scales as a big ass whiteboard. I mean, you can certainly represent more scales digitally, but you are pan-and-zooming all the time. The "single picture" part didn't seem to work as well. Another thing is that we never found a digital place that has the same mental priority as big whiteboard in the common area. There was a lot of "where did we put that, is it attached to meeting or on the folder X or ... On the whole I thought it was more positive than negative, but over time they were definitely being used less and less. A couple of the team absolutely loved them for diagramming and completely replaced other tools for that. To be fair, it was a "forced experiment" during covid lockdowns initially, so could certainly have been executed better.
  - Chris_Newton 3y ago
    That was interesting and not always what I’d have expected. Thanks! :-)
8note 3y ago
A surface book 2 and Microsoft sketchpad do the job really well for a screen share. However, there's skill involved, and you really want that multi touch+pen input. Zoom in to write text, zoom out to draw boxes, move the canvas around, etc. Also, having a colour pallet, since that's designed into whiteboard markers for you, where digital systems give you a billion bad options