Conceptboard Visual

New video guide to boards: best features and shortcuts

This post was published first on the Conceptboard blog. 

People retain more than 80% of information when it’s presented in a visual form.

Everyone sketches and scribbles to visualize thoughts and ideas because it’s always better to show then tell. Visual communication transfers ideas more efficiently, makes information easier to retain, and helps speed up decision making processes.

This means in today’s digital workplace, it’s more important than ever for collaborative teams to foster and prioritize visual communication in their workflows.

Conceptboard has been a place for teams (distributed or otherwise) to  focus on collaboration, communication, get instant feedback and assign tasks, all with a visual focus.

Collapsible comments make visual task management easier

The new collapsible comments make it easier to visually track your progress in even the most complex projects — it’s easy to see at a glance what has been finalized and what decisions still need to be taken. Below are 3 tips to get you started!

3 Tips for more visible decision making in Conceptboard

Start separate comment threads for each decision, question, or task

Having a separate thread for each item ensures nothing gets lost and you have an easy visual overview of all the work that needs to be done. Your discussions will be saved for later reference, but your high level overview is clean and organized.

Collapse finished discussions

Once a decision has been made or a task is ready to be assigned, just collapse the comment, leaving only the initial task and final decision visible. This allows you to easily see which conversations are finished while reducing the number of elements on top of your content. It doesn’t matter how long your discussions get, it’s always good to be able to revisit a complete conversation and see the thought process behind a decision.

Assign tasks for each comment

The original article appeared on our Conceptboard blog. 

If you are an expert user or a fresh face in Conceptboard, it's always good to learn some tricks that will save you time and effort in Conceptboard. Here are five great productivity shortcuts!

1. Use the board outline and summary

The board outline and board summary can help you quickly get caught up and jump to the right section of the board. The outline is located in the upper right corner of the board and you can edit it by clicking on the pencil icon. The summary is the set of 3 icons in the upper left corner of the board, where you can find all alerts, tasks assigned to you, and comments created in the board. 

The board opens to the first item on the list, so make sure to change it to the relevant area of the board, that way the person you have invited is already in the right spot when they enter the board.

Use the board summary to easily navigate to the right conversation. All comments in the board summary are sorted in chronological order, and you can click to navigate directly to the item in the board.

2. Share specific comments to get feedback faster

When you are working with a distributed team you can't just walk over to your colleague's desk and tap them on the shoulder. So how do you get someone's attention when you're collaborating online? If you're working in a Conceptboard and  need feedback on a time sensitive task try these tips:

Pro users can directly mention @coworker in a comment and create a task which immediately alerts colleagues both by email and in-app alerts.

Basic users can share a specific item by clicking it on the board outline. You'll see that the board URL now includes a long string with #item. Copy the entire URL and share it in a chat or email, and the person you have invited will start in the right spot. Just make sure to copy the entire URL when you share it!

If you need to share a link to a comment, click it in the board summary. Make sure to copy the entire URL when you want to share it.

3. Private and group collaboration workspace in one

When you're working with multiple team members on a board, turn on Live Pointers to see what each person is working on and discussing. During productive discussions,  everyone will want to share their ideas and often crowd around a specific item or document. When this happens, you don't need to leave the board or switch to pen and paper.

Conceptboards expand as much as you need, so each team member can make a copy and move to a different section of the board. This gives everyone the opportunity to visualize and put down their ideas in private before coming back together with the whole group for discussion. When you've reached a decision, simply clean up the board by creating a new section and organizing everyone's notes and ideas for later reference.

4. New Conceptboards in a flash

When you are logged in to your Conceptboard account and in the middle of a productive brainstorming session and need a fresh board, don't break your flow. Simply open up a new tab and type in conceptboard.com/new and you'll instantly have a new board ready to go that you can share with the team. Just make sure to rename it to something useful when you're done!

5. Board navigation is just like riding a bike

You don't have to switch modes every time you want to move the board or zoom. You can stay in whatever tool mode you need and press spacebar while dragging the board to temporarily engage Browse mode.

Whenever you accidentally create a text box or comment, press Escape or click outside the box and use Command+Z on your keyboard to delete it without having to use the eraser.

The original article appeared on our blog: http://blog.conceptboard.com/ui-updates-faster-file-access/

For the past few months, we’ve received a lot of helpful feedback from our users about their experiences using our app, so we’ve  been working hard and focusing on making Conceptboard work more smoothly for our users.  This is just the beginning, but  today we’ve released several UI updates and some added functionality that we hope greatly improve your Conceptboard experience.

More intuitive zoom options

The previous zoom shortcuts were hidden and not easily intuitive for new users. Our newest update moves the zoom tool from the top header, and instead makes it available in any of the tabs.

You can now click on the new zoom tool icon to select a specific area of your board to zoom in and press shift when clicking to  zoom back out. Bonus: you can hit  the Z key on your keyboard as a shortcut for the zoom tool.

Easier file downloads

Many of you asked for a faster way to download your files. When you have hundreds of images on a board, it can be hard to find the exact version in the downloads dialog. You can now right-click directly on any file added to your board and choose to download it, either as an image, or as the original file, such as a Pdf, word document, presentation, etc, so you know you’re getting the right version in no time.

Cleaner selection tool

To give you greater flexibility and control over your images, we introduced the option to crop and slice your images directly within the board. It added functionality, but there was still room for improvement. The large text overlay and the dark blue selection color made it difficult to see if you had selected the areas you wanted. This especially did not work for selecting very small areas. We updated the UI to make it a lot easier to see what you are selecting, and moved the duplicate button outside the selection box for very small selections.

Chinese language support

Our user base is incredibly international, so we’ve added Chinese script support in Conceptboard! To use it, please switch the font to Arial when writing in text boxes, headlines, or sticky notes to render the characters correctly when you export the board. Text in the comment boxes will automatically render correctly.

For those of you that are interested, the font is WenQuanYi (Spring of Letters).