By Hillary Johnson
I'm just starting to play around with a really cool, freshly launched product called Edistorm, an online app that features draggable stickies and dot voting. It's a bit strangely positioned, as a consumer not a business product--the example in the tutorial is about cake baking--but beneath this surface is what looks like an extremely useful tool for distributed Agile teams who find themselves longing for the chaotic simplicity a sticky wall.
Stickies and dot voting are two of of our main tools here at Agile Learning Labs. Every free wall is a colorful mosaic, and I suspect we are putting at least one Post-It Note heir through college. Every retrospective (and we have a lot of 'em) ends in some form of dot voting, to narrow down our action items.
Why online?
Online stickies would in theory allow distributed teams to collaborating using the same format tools we prefer for co-located teams. The question then becomes, what makes real sticky notes so great, and do these benefits actually transfer to an online environment?
Big and visible
One benefit is that a wall of stickies serves as an information radiator. By virtue of being on a wall, they are always visible to the team--always on the fringes of consciousness, accessible at a glance, without booting up or drilling through a menu. This benefit is lost by putting stickies online.
What's the alternative? Chris, Steve and I hold a remote stand-up every morning, looping Steve in via Skype video. We can just make out Steve's task board in the background, and he can just make out ours. It turns out not to matter too much that we can't read each other's stickies. We watch each other move through the task board, discussing each stickie as we move it from doing to done, or from the backlog to doing. We are happy with this set-up, and wouldn't switch to an online wall, as the benefit of having the information radiator outweighs the issue of legibility by a longshot.
But that is a taskboard. I can see other situations in which Edistorm could be immensely useful for short-term uses, such as a distributed team retrospective, or brainstorming a small project, where you don't really plan to leave the wall up as a radiator anyway. And you could get creative about sharing, by projecting them on a conference room wall or
displaying them on a large monitor in each location.
It's Simple
One of our mantras at Agile Learning Labs is "What's the simplest thing
that could possibly work?" And about 50% of the time, the answer is
"sticky notes."
Write a sticky. Slap it on the wall. Move it around. Crumple it up and throw it away. That's pretty much all a sticky note can do. It is not programmable. And it is blissfully immune to feature creep.
Edistorm is simple now, but I'm not yet convinced that's by design. Right out of the gate there is a big red flag: it has already included a totally unnecessary feature, a "bot" that makes new "suggestions" based on your current set of stickies. The bot in the cake baking example in the tutorial creates stickies with words like "wedding" and "food" on them. You can turn the idiotic bot off, but my tender young mind should never
have been exposed to the existence of such a thing. How this could ever be anything but distracting and annoying mystifies me, and it tells me the company is in danger of loading its product up with bells and whistles that totally defeat the purpose of using stickies--i.e., to keep it simple.
That said, bot aside, the product really does work like a wall of stickies. It's simple, intuitive, and it just works. It is the dot voting equivalent of my favorite online task board, scrumy.com, which has kept itself ruthlessly simple in design.
If you want to see Edistorm in action, you can watch a nice, to-the-point tutorial, and if you sign up for a free trial, you can create a wall of your own, or visit a stickie wall the company has started where users can add to, or vote on, suggestions for improvements or new features. Several bumptious lunatics have suggested things like a chat window, ven diagrams and Facebook integration. The only feature I voted for was to make the wall itself draggable, and to create an API--my thinking being that an API would encourage people who want to cruft the product up to do so on their own.
Speaking as someone who uses stickies and dot voting every single day, my advice to Edistorm would be to resist adding any feature that isn't also a feature of a real sticky wall. No chat windows, email, spreadsheet imports, etc. Let people who want that stuff use traditional project management software like Microsoft Project. Give me a virtual version of the real thing, and let me figure out how to use it, and what to use it for.
