The Art of Visual Problem Solving Using Webex Team Stickies
I loved drawing and painting when I was younger, but like many people, I haven’t picked up a pencil or paintbrush in years. Nonetheless, I’ve always been a visual thinker and rediscovered the value of drawing when I joined Cisco’s Co-creation Team, which designs and builds the whiteboarding experience in Webex Teams. Admittedly, my drawing skills are rudimentary, but I can confidently communicate complex ideas on whiteboards using simple shapes. There are a few shapes that I use all the time, for example, circles to create Venn diagrams, triangles to explain graduation and crisscrossing lines to illustrate product priorities.
It’s important to realize that creating a simple visual illustration of a strategy, thought or idea does not require any artistic skill and is a really effective communication tool. The Co-creation Team designed the whiteboarding experience to be instantly familiar, it’s recognizable as a digital version of a physical whiteboard.
But with a digital whiteboard, the physical limitations are eliminated – you have freedom to create multiple whiteboards, make them as large as you want, zoom in to add detail and automatically save them for editing again later.
Webex Teams Stickies—Better Than Paper
Who hasn’t used Post-it Notes to gather, group and organize ideas. It’s incredible how revolutionary this simple paper and glue idea is and how it has changed many work processes. They can be found in meeting rooms and on peoples’ monitors everywhere – but paper is analog and can’t be saved or shared and once the glue hardens, the notes eventually end up on the floor. Paper was ready for disruption so we’ve added Stickies to whiteboarding in Webex Teams. Like the paper equivalent, the uses are infinite – we’ve started using them at Cisco to track project status, for brainstorming and retrospectives.
All the Stickies are automatically saved so we can reopen and edit the whiteboards again, individually or collectively on our own personal devices or together on the Webex Board.
We’ve been trialing Stickies in our teams and it has transformed the way we work. For example, when we do a team retrospective – the team, even those remote, post ideas on Stickies from their personal devices while the scrum master groups the Stickies on the Webex Board. Remote participants can now truly belong by having their own Stickies wall experience. The retrospective boards are automatically saved for the team, edited again later or shared with other teams. Our best Stickies innovation is a new everlasting glue so the Stickies are guaranteed not to fall down!
Watch this demo video (Facebook) on how you can co-create in the huddles space with stickie note ideation:
https://www.facebook.com/webex/videos/290992571525548/
Whether you’re on the go, at a desk, or together in a meeting room, Webex Teams Stickies can help speed up the ideation process.
One More Note
We love hearing all the different ways that customers use whiteboarding and are always listening to how we can improve the experience. Among the things we are working on are sharing whiteboards between spaces and making it easier to move whiteboards between the Webex Board and your laptop. And to ensure that everyone discovers the whiteboards in a space, new whiteboards will be posted automatically for all to see. Whiteboarding in Webex Teams is not just the digital equivalent of markers and Post-It notes, it’s a new paradigm for the digitized workspace. Time to make the upgrade from paper notes to the digital equivalent, we promise Stickies are here to stay!
See how you can Create a Whiteboard in a Cisco Webex Teams Space
Learn more about how Cisco Webex is revolutionizing the way people interact, collaborate and get work done:
Transforming team communication for IBM Norway
Inspire Your Team to Create in any Space: Introducing the Cisco Webex Board 85
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