A while back we posted that we were setting up ConceptShare Labs as a way to engage the ConceptShare community in shaping the direction of the product. The community driven ideas filtered up from the needs of our users. When we introduced our first group of users to the workspace we weren’t really sure what to expect. The group consisted of a wide variety of users.

• Graphic Designers
• Architectural
• Engineering
• Software developers
• Product designers
• Web designers
• Print & Pre-Press

The goals for this project space

• Engage our users in the direction of the product
• Continue to improve upon the user experience with great tools
• Prove ConceptShare as tool for innovation

Once the workspace was created we simply posted design mock-ups along the product road map. We found that the flexible nature of ConceptShare made the discussions very relevant. Users from around the world didn’t have to sync to the schedule of EST. It was interesting to see how quick on the trigger some users were; we would post new designs and users would instantly come online after getting the notification email. We would start the discussions generally with a general description of key features, from there questions and suggestions began to grow.

As we made changes new designs would be uploaded replacing the older design. Starting the review process again. This drastically reduces the time between iterations. What would have taken many months of back and forth via email and meetings were completed in weeks.

Features being Discussed

This is a look at the concepts within the workspace. Once features were implemented concepts are moved to the completed folder, resulting in a clear experience. (Drag-and-Drop Folders are a graduate of the Labs)

A typical discussion in ConceptShare Labs

The users really took to using ConceptShare to discuss the new features. The ability of CS to structure discussions around specific elements of a design ensured that users were able to discuss fine elements of the design. Layering of comments keep users focused on the discussion at hand and away from comments and markups of other discussion items.

Users discuss the crop tool idea. You can notice that this was one comment of three on this particular mock-up

Continuous Innovation

We have more then one workspace underway in ConceptShare Lab. We are ready to roll out the GUI Upgrades 2 workspace to more users with the next evolution of GUI improvements. We also have other projects that we are working on quietly with the internal team. The flexibility of ConceptShare allows us to work internally first and then open up the workspaces to more people when we are ready.

We have some interesting stuff that is going to come out of the Labs in the coming month or so. These should prove to be very interesting to our users and greatly extend the use of conceptshare by ……oh wait that is another post.

The Result:

We have completed 11 features thru this process and it has proved to be incredible. We are very committed to this process as it has allowed us to be incredibley agile as we develop. We are a small team so the ability to have a feedback loop that is so accessible and instant makes the process faster. By integrating the feedback loop tighter to the design process we were able to take fast steps getting feedback needed along the way. This is a stark contrast to older styles of design where the design might get a lot further along in production before getting feedback.

We accomplished the goals that we had set out for this workspace.

• We had the conversations with our users giving them a real stake in the next generation of features.
• We created some incredible new features that have greatly added to the effectiveness of ConceptShare as a tool for business.
• We demonstrated that ConceptShare works as a tool for innovating.

We look forward to the release of the next round of GUI upgrades to the community. There’s lots of things that have been asked for that and we are really excited to let them loose on the ideas.

I hope this article is helpful, I wanted to give you some food for thought about how a different approach to the design process worked for us. Opening up for feedback early, coupled with the proper tools create a very fast development cycle. Think how this can apply to your product, your users, your designers.

Cheers

Scott

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Categories: ConceptShare, GUI, Ideas, Innovation, Product Design ~ ~ Trackback