Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Ideas for ideating online

For the past 2 weeks I've been ideating mashup concepts for my UX design for web class. The students have been sharing links and observations through our class Google Group. Some of us use IM and phone to discuss each other’s projects. But the one thing that we haven't shared much of outside of class is our actual sketches. This has proven a challenge, as the kind of feedback you can give and receive from sharing sketches is much different, and better, than sharing ideas strictly with words.

Here's some interesting tools we could explore in our quest for online collaboration:

Cozimo
It's a real time multi user whiteboard! One of my clients recommended this to me and says it works like a charm on Mac and PC.

Flickr Photo Groups and SlideShare Groups
Flickr is the ubiquitous forum for viewing and commenting on images. SlideShare is like the multipage cousin of Flickr. And how great is it that there's a group that's collecting slide shows about Web 2.o tools for effective teaching? I did a quick scan and thought this one about Web 2.0 educational applications had a lot of great resources, some of which we've experimented with in our class, like Zoho and Google Docs. Personally, I found Google Docs to be more stable and robust than Zoho Writer, but there's a whole suite of tools that look worthy of exploring, such as web conferencing and project management software.

VoiceThread
"A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world." Think of the potential this has not only for our critiques, but for client presentations and online portfolios. My first (quick) impression is that it's also a great example of a user friendly GUI.

Who wants to test drive these tools with me?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Who wants to test drive these tools with me?"

I'm always up for testing another collaboration tool.

Michael said...

Cozimo looks good!

Jim said...

You should also try Basecamp, i use it for seveal clients