We’ve made working on group design projects super easy with ‘collaborate’. It’s designed to be super intuitive and helps you save time and iterations by allowing you to gather pointed feedback with context. Collaborate enables you to send your designs to friends, peers, or management and compiles all their feedback in one place.
What’s the problem we’re solving?
We know first hand how frustrating it is when large teams have to pull off a creative vision together. Often, stakeholders such as CEOs and Middle management don’t have the time or inclination to learn or track projects on project management tools such as Basecamp or Trello. In such cases, feedback is mostly delivered via Email or even worse on Slack or Whatsapp (Shocking I know!).
It can be a nightmare to sort through the niceties, irrelevant conversations, and duplicate comments to come up with the final draft of feedback from different sources. Also, the feedback that’s gathered through this process lacks context and can often be counterproductive.
We’ve all had clients or middle management that give teeth-grind inducing feedback such as “Make the colour pop”, “Bring out the concept”, “Can we make it sharper” and the likes. This kind of vagueness and ambiguity is aggravated by the lack of ‘context’ in the way they share their feedback.
The result is elaborate and inconvenient Skype calls and Screen share sessions to help get all stakeholders to get on the same page. Scheduling such calls at everyone’s convenience can end up delaying design projects, putting entire product teams off their schedule.
Our frustrations with the existing feedback process are what got us thinking on the need for a simpler way to compile and give feedback. That’s when inspiration struck, even though there’s a number of project management tools out there on the market, most of brunt force work at companies or agencies get done on either Google docs or Excel, that’s mainly because of the simplicity, easy learning curve and ‘real time’ nature of these tools.
Our aim with ‘Collaborate’ was to introduce a feature that helps all stakeholders be on the same page on a design project while minimizing the complexity and barrier to access.
How does it work?
Imagine a google doc for images, with all the functionalities such as live collaboration, track changes, and sharing. Collaborate has introduced ‘Hotspots with comments’ that allow collaborators to pinpoint a part of the image and have contextual conversations around it.
This is especially helpful for large design or product teams with collaborators who work offshore. Hotspots help you add collaborators on a project and circulate it at once through your network. The collaborators can track the comments being made on the project in real time and this helps them avoid duplicate feedback loops.
Collaborators on the go can also provide their feedback as audio clips or video. This helps the creator of the project have all the necessary feedback at the tip of his fingers. It’s also a way to keep everything transparent and above board to avoid future disagreements on the project.
