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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.
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.