MindFlow: Asynchronous Design: ConceptShare

Thoughtlava is an Internet sales and marketing company. We are also a virtual business made up of location independent professionals. Our clients and associates are spread across the United States, India, Australia and Europe. The location of our designers sounds like an SAT question: none of them are in this State (Arizona) and none of them are in the same State. So, one challenge used to be producing quality design with efficiency. We used to send designs as attachments in email around internally and with each client.

Managing feedback was difficult. It required effort to find the part of the design referenced in the feedback - things like "I think it is a little too green" or "what is the purpose of the round edge". We also found ourselves sifting through repetitive feedback - nobody knew what others were saying. It was messy!

About a year ago, we were anxiously awaiting the beta launch of ConceptShare. So much so, that we had become aggressive - calling the owners every week or so for an updated launch date. On the day it launched, we had called Scott Brooks (President of ConceptShare). He said, to our amazement, that it was going to launch in an hour or so. My partner, Jim Cook, and I spent the next 60 minutes refreshing our browsers. Then, it appeared - register for your ConceptShare account. A minute and a half later we were using it. Then, it broke. For the next couple of hours, we would hurl feedback at Scott until they got it back online. We've been friends ever since. However, I still wanted to wait before giving it our seal of approval.

A year later, not a day goes by that we are not using the power of ConceptShare to get a better understanding of what a client wants from a design perspective, showing a series of websites that might be good models, critiquing a design for one of our designers, etc. Here is a short introduction on how it works (this is the last version - I need to do a new presentation for the current version - which is even better!). It has changed the way we work and we can't see going back!