It’s been awhile since my last ideation!
Okay, this one’s pretty simple. The idea is: add collaborative editing to design applications, in real-time. Like collaborative whiteboards, but with the integrated tools, note-making, and granular functions.
In the image, the web app user is adding an ‘X’, the iPhone user is adding a note, and the iPad user is scribbling away. They all do this at the same time, or one after another.
In a real-life example, a user experience designer, a visual designer, and a front-end developer could all be working on a single interface for a brand-new iPad game that has a complex logical structure. They are currently trying to understand basic interactions from one screen to another but don’t have time to have the UX designer cook up several wireframe iterations, then have the visual and front-end designers take those frames and make a basic prototype. They have 10 hours left before development. Oh, and one lives in New York, the second in Minneapolis, and the third in Houston. In-person is not an option.
So they all use their favorite basic visual tool, i.e. OmniGraffle, Photoshop, Fireworks, and work from one screen to another, visually describing the interactions with boxes, arrows, text, gradients, shadows, and most importantly, immediate verbal communication and response.
Visual might ask, “Hey, how will the user add more players to the game?” and UX would add an Add Player function to the screen (maybe a button with a modal prompt). Then Dev would say, “iOS doesn’t support that sort of modal, but you could do this” and Dev redraws the button with an text box alert instead. Then Visual says, “That works, but it doesn’t conform to the game’s proposed visual style. Maybe this?” and so on and so forth.
Like?
IDEA JET 