Feedback and feature suggestions for the Brainstorming platform
By Darko Savic on Jul 22, 2020
This is an extremely early version of the Brainstorming platform. At the time of writing, there are 70+ features on the to-do list. These are currently being worked on:
- Automatic citation/reference system to help people with proper format
- Collaborative editing of any text. Edit suggestions are possible/visible to all users except beginners. Whether suggestions make it into the working version of the document depends on votes by established users.
- Irrelevant tab; Casting a vote to move any solution or comment into an "irrelevant tab". Content that gets moved there is out of the main document view but can be seen if you visit the irrelevant tab
- Learning material tab; A tab (one click off the main content area) where experts outline a DIY curriculum and link to the most suitable resources. This is meant to help enthusiastic non-experts catch up on the topic so that they can then contribute in a meaningful way from their unique perspective.
- Ability to follow/unfollow specific content pieces, tags, users and set custom notifications
- monetization (crowd-sourced rewards, user-to-user tips, sponsored brainstorming competitions)
Please take it from here and suggest new features we should add. We will sort the list of suggestions by popularity and prioritize working on those that are most upvoted first.
We try to make every feature as intuitive as possible. If you find something that could be made more clear, please point it out and suggest a solution. Also, point out any bugs you find.
Thank you for helping us shape this into a great tool for creative collaboration! Hopefully, something good comes out of it.
Creative contributions
Header image cropping
Optimizing (cropping) thumbnails for horizontal layout is ok - I don’t see any other way to make all thumbnails uniform. However, on the idea/session page, you don’t have to crop upright images for horizontal view. Simply resize the header image to make the maximum width match the content area but height should be kept at the original aspect ratio relative to the resized width. In other words the thumbnail and the full sized header image don’t have to have the same dimensions. While the thumbnail is cropped to uniform width/height, the header image should be in original aspect ratio - just resized by width.
by Dragan Otasevic on Jul 24, 2020
Brainstorming groups (think tanks)
Groups of users that have their own “workspace” environment. The group environment can be public (for anyone to see, but only group members can participate) or private, where only the group members have access and the public cannot see the environment. The groups can be listed or unlisted (invisible). With listed groups, people can apply for membership (to be approved by members of the group with administrative privileges). Group members with administrative privileges can invite other members into the group. The group workspace should include: - Chat channels (like slack) - Group members with administrator privileges should have the ability to optionally create sessions with attributions to the group (group symbol/logo/marking added to the session) and group name listed as the creator - Index of private and public sessions/ideas created by the group - Private group sessions/ideas visible only to group members
by Darko Savic on Jul 26, 2020
this feature is also on the to-do list
Stick to your inspiration - follow your audience's UI preferences
"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." - Reid Hoffman As I landed on your link and started to signup this is exactly what I thought about. As soon as I logged in and scrolled down the page I ran into that exact quote as a comment posted by a user named Darko. You can see the need for this in ways that aren't apparent to the average person (myself included). Yet you move this thing along by exploring ways to connect that huge need with things people can relate to enough to want to explore the journey. The artwork is a big piece of this (IMO). The next steps towards integrating that into a UI that matches the vision are apparent to you I'm sure. I'm glad you didn't wait until those steps were further along before launching. We're all launching every day and every hour - that's how this works. Love your project just as much today as I did the first time I read your post on it. Congrats on your first "official" launch. Looking forward to being a part of each subsequent iteration.
by Lorenzo Carver on Jul 28, 2020
Thank you kindly! Are there any UI changes you would recommend? We received feedback about the platform being too blog/news-like. I can agree. We are now looking into going back to the initial design concept which was less blog-like
Your creative contribution
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. - Reid Hoffman
This is near the top of our 65-pages long to-do list...