Whiteboard Usability

How Online Whiteboards Can Aid Distant Collaboration

With the onset of the pandemic and the global lockdown, we were all forced to work from home. And with this came challenges that none of us were prepared for. We faced hurdles like staying connected, sharing information, brainstorming ideas, and whatnot.

Over time we evolved with the help of video calls and task management systems. But we still strive to achieve the same amount of agility, flow, and smoothness that we had while working together physically. This is where you could use some help from an online whiteboard.

What Is An Online Whiteboard?

Whiteboards in our offices were the most helpful. We poured all our thoughts, ideas, pointers on them and even went back to those boards when we forgot something.
An online whiteboard helps you do precisely that. It is a shared board that multiple people can access and work on simultaneously, and here’s how it can help you function better!

Benefits Of An Online Whiteboard

Brainstorming Sessions
With all of us working remotely, brainstorming sessions might be a bit dull even though everyone’s present on the call. This is because you can only keep listening for a certain period because of your attention span.
Your mind isn’t running and churning out thoughts but passively absorbing them. So you need something to stimulate you, and here’s where an online whiteboard can help.
Multiple people engage together, not just in conversation but also in doing actions. This results in a more lively session as the minds are pretty active. In turn, the ideas that come out will be great thought starters for you to build upon.
You can also use your personal tablets while using online whiteboards in the sessions. This way, while the sessions go on, you can put your ideas on the whiteboard while taking down essential pointers for yourself on your tablet.

Streamlining Workflows
With different people doing different things, it becomes hard to keep up with what everyone’s doing. Sharing updates and keeping track of timelines becomes a tedious job.
Here’s where your whiteboards can come in handy. They help you by having one shared board where each of you can mention your daily to-dos and keep updating as and when you strike them off your list.
This way, if there’s another person’s dependency on completing your tasks, they can check this shared board and be updated.

Creating Collaborative Mind-Maps
If you’re building a new product flow or a process, mind-maps give you all the clarity you need to begin with. They’re your blueprint that is essential for execution. And here’s where your whiteboard can help you.
If multiple people are working on the same process, you don’t have to do it iteratively since that might take a lot of time. Shared whiteboards can make these exercises multiple times faster since you can discuss and modify them while working.

Conclusion

Though the effect of the pandemic is slowly decreasing in several countries, remote working is here to stay since it is much more efficient and cost-saving.
So a whiteboard can solve a few of your problems, thus making you more agile and efficient. By using them, you save a lot of time and do so without any hassle.