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Ask Slashdot: Replacing Paper With Tablets For Design Meetings?
New submitter faderrider (3726665) writes I work in the healthcare design industry and our firm is looking to get away from using paper during our design meetings. My first thought was to load our reports and plans on a tablet, bring a half dozen or so tablets for attendees and somehow create a local ad hoc network that would allow them to view my desktop. A little more thinking brought me to consider the value of attendees being able to mark up documents on their own, or take control of what is being viewed to talk through ideas. Is anyone else out there doing something like this and if so what are you implementing? Specifically the challenges i see are creating the local network, establishing share/control relationships between tablets and managing any documentation markups attendees may make during the meeting. I am also looking at the Samsung 10.1 as the hardware but would be interested in any recommendations. I can also provide, most of the time, web access via my phone but would prefer not to rely on a service like WebEx or JoinMe.
You'll waste the whole meeting fiddling with the technology and getting used to the UI. Just use paper until the design is pretty stable, then go to the computer. Better yet, use a whiteboard. That's what they are for.
As a UX / Product Designer, I've spent years and years taking down everything in notebooks, and doing collaborative design work on large-scale quadrile paper. Until about a year ago. I was getting tired of scanning in or completely re-drawing final product designs, and moved to use Evernote + Sketch to collaboratively develop & design software, websites, and products. What's nice about Evernote and Sketch is that they are 1) Integrated, 2) Work on Windows/Mac/iOS/Android, 3) Easy to use, and 4) Make sharing documents and graphics nearly instantaneous as long as everyone has network access. We've moved to doing all of our requirements and specs in Evernote, and using Sketch to get first drafts done digitally. We also scan in drawn pictures & other misc. materials to be stored in Evernote. It's a great combo & repository.
>> healthcare design industry
What do you design? Interiors? Landscaping? Workspaces? Networks? Something else?
Paper doesn't scale very well. I have a repository for a project that's been going on for a few years and has a few hundred photos of whiteboards. Trying to find one is almost impossible because there's no full-text search for photos of whiteboards. If you don't need diagrams, then running OpenEtherPad with a machine connected to the projector as a client and just saving the output is much better, but I've not found a good equivalent that supports drawing (especially not free-form drawing on a tablet or whiteboard and then automatically recognising shapes and handwriting, as the Newton's drawing program did 20 years ago).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Stop, just stop,
I do meetings like this ALL DAY LONG. No offense, but there's always someone like you that wants to introduce some new technology that is supposed to make us so much more efficient. Instead we spend half of every meeting trying to get that new tech working.
The best way to lead a meeting that I've used:
A conference room big enough for everyone.
An overhead projector hooked up to a computer.
Remote into your personal workstation from that computer.
Have project goals in whatever tool you use at your company. Personally, I prefer a shared spreadsheet, either Excel or Google docs.
Avoid large project management software packages because they require everyone that needs to see them to have a license. They rarely do.
Log minutes in a text document that can track changes (word or whatever)
If there are people not in the room you can share your desktop with them have have a conference bridge the can call into for audio.
Discourage using whiteboards for the sake of your remote users. Also, you cant save whiteboards. I had ours taken out years ago.
PAINT actually comes in handy if you get fluent in it. I can do some pretty complicated flowcharts using it, very quickly... then later put them into visio so they look nice and are editable. I'm actually vision certified and can use it fluently. But I can do a flowchart in Paint in about 1/10th the time. Box, Line, Circle, Text, done! It doesn't look great, but this is a meeting not an art studio.
Now the person LEADING the meeting is not the person at the keyboard.
"Charlie, bring up the requirements. Thanks..." etc...
The leader, leads the person at the keyboard. The person at the keyboard is only focused on having the correct things up, and logging of whats decided.
When you're all done, you send everything (or a link to everything) out to everyone that was there with a statement like "This is the result of our meeting, please review" etc... so corrections or clarifications can be made. Changes should be "requested" not simply made without talking to anyone.
I know it's clunky, but it works. I've tried damned near everything. We have a lot of managers that like to fall for online marketing so every few months there's a new initiative. I'll keep letting them bring the stuff up and we can keep trying. I imagine one day there will be some new neat way of doing things. But it's not here yet, and tablets are certainly not going to do it.
Paper doesn't scale very well. I have a repository for a project that's been going on for a few years and has a few hundred photos of whiteboards. Trying to find one is almost impossible because there's no full-text search for photos of whiteboards.
Then you (or they) are doing it wrong.
IMO, any and all meetings should have an agenda, stuff happens (notes/etc), and a follow up summary. That last part is what you appear to be missing.
Stick someone in charge of doing the wrap up.
(optional) Everyone should send their (brief) notes to that person or group at the end of the meeting.
Said person then writes up what was covered, logs the white board pictures and such (obtaining ID's or URL's in the process of doing so), and puts those in their summary doc.
FTS (full text search) will find the summary, and you can find the relevant white board pics from there.
One could also add a lot more document management stuff (just an example, but knowledgetree can work well), and add comments and tags to each individual whiteboard image.
Any text on the whiteboard could be transcribed as well and included in the summary doc and/or the image metadata.
More work? yes.
Much more work? no (most of that should already being done, else the meeting was either insubstantial or a huge waste of time... in either of those cases, the summary should be trivial to write: link to previous summary + note of "not much has changed").
Much more useful? yes.
1. Create an intranet for collaboration. There are numerous open source projects and proprietary products that can make collaborating between tablets very easy. Some allow easy customization to generation tracking or forms systems to allow you to process and share data instead of using spreadsheet or word processing applications.
2. Make sure you have a nice stylus with palm recognition and pressure sensitivity. Adonit's products for iPad, Samsung or Microsoft's own products are great as well.
3. Use Screenleap to share a desktop with several tablets. It has HTML5 support, is pretty cheap (pay as you go) and very well made API if you want to integrate it with your intranet.
4. Stick to open standards. Use established Internet standards like HTML5, PNG or SIP, and not browser-specific features or plugins, WebM or WebRTC.
5. Do not use a program like Evernote or OneNote, when you can just as easily use iOS or Android's built in handwriting systems to just insert text into documents or web-forms.
6. Buy plenty of power chargers.
7. Invest in wireless access points that allow for two gigabit up-links so you can take full advantage of 802.11ac. Max theoretical speed is around 7 Gbits.
8. Do not buy the cell modem version of a tablet unless you are off-site constantly or have a lot of transmissions when off-site. Otherwise, rely on smartphone data sharing, shared mobile hotspot devices or local wireless.
9. Make sure any design/paint/doodling app you decide to standardize on has versioning built-in so you can easily undo mistakes, because you will be making a lot of mistakes.
10. Recognize that the first six months will most likely be frustrating, but by month five you will be working as fast as paper and after month six you will be saving time.
You do realise that is only a thing in countries without socialised medicine, right? If you're going to complain, at least get it right, and try to not make yourself look foolish in the process. Better luck next time.