Finally… the online collage tool I’ve been waiting for
by AlexaEver since my Participatory Design class with Liz Sanders (http://www.maketools.com/), I’ve been dreaming of an online collaging application. Whenever I found myself scouring Flickr for hundreds of mood board or collage images or designing a diary study for remote users, the thought popped into my mind again: Why isn’t there an online collaging tool?
The one tool that seemed to have potential was in beta forever, but when I checked in the other day, I found that Scrapblog is up and working beautifully! After playing with it briefly, I was impressed. I’d found the tool I’d been looking for!
The Flex-powered interface is intuitive and fluidly responsive…
The vast collection of backgrounds and stickers express a broad diversity of moods and styles and have an Apple-caliber elegance…
You can easily import content from Flickr (and other external sites)…
And the potential for using it with participatory design research methods seems great…
Collage Activities and Mood Boards
Imagine: Instead of printing out dozens of pages of images, which still limits your research participant to whatever you’ve selected, you can open up the entire Flickr universe to the participant to create their collage. Or, if you want the participant to choose from pre-selected images, you can create a Flickr gallery and ask the participant to draw from those.
Remote Participatory Design
The interface is pretty intuitive, so with little explaining, you can now conduct collage exercises with remote research participants. While it’s unfortunately not a collaborative interface (where multiple people can work on the same collage simultaneously and see updates dynamically), it’s easier than constructing and mailing participant a collage kit! (I’d love to see some collaborative functionality built in though.)
Diary Studies
Multiple page “scrapblogs” (which are actually what the site is designed to produce) can easily be created and published both publicly and privately. I can see scrapblogs being used for or supplementing diary studies, allowing participants to tell their experience stories in a fun and creativity-inducing way.
Optimistic about this tool’s possibilities, I did a little mock study with my 15-year-old sister. I sent her a link to Scrapblog and no more instruction than, “Create a collage about MySpace and a collage about Facebook.”
In closing, I’ll share the clever creation she sent back:
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on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 10:04 am and is filed under Creativity, user research.
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November 19th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
We’re flattered, thank you for the kind words!
Mike
(Dir. of UX, Scrapblog)
November 19th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Thank you for the write-up! We’ve come a long way since our launch in April this year. We’re continually improving and adding features based on our users’ feedback and experience with Scrapblog, and we’re regularly loading new themes, backgrounds and stickers. Your ideas on participatory design research methods are instructive and collaborative scrapblogging is definitely on our list of to-dos. It will be interesting to see the use cases when it’s available. If you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch with us!
-Alex
Director, Community
November 26th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
[…] adaptive path » blog » Alexa Andrzejewski » Finally… the online collage tool I’ve bee… […]
November 28th, 2007 at 7:57 pm
There must be something in the air: I’ve been looking for this exact application for a while now. If you tend to source images from the web, there are a few tips I can share:
1. Use FotoFox for Firefox. This allows you to quickly grab images from the web and send them to the Flickr set of your choice. No more downloading and uploading images.
2. If you’re on a PC, try out Snagit. Much of the time, I need to get a clip of a page and this does the trick. It also publishes directly to Flickr too, which is crucial. On a Mac, I think Skitch will do the same.