When Allo becomes your online sketchbook
"For weeks I’ve been testing out different collaborative online canvases. With project files in up to ten different cloud platforms - this was far too chaotic & confusing. Allo for me really nails the elegance & simplicity of a whiteboard, with potential for far more functionality to be added. I’ve been loving using the versatile note-taking styles & documenting. Can’t wait to use it as my principle info collection and share point!" - Emma Fouche
Emma is a freelance designer in a design agency called Pa_stek. She is also working for a UX agency in user recruitment for their testing. She first saw Allo on LinkedIn and thought it could be helpful for her work.
Emma previously used Google Sheets as a planner and to organize almost everything: important dates, user interviews, usability testing insights, work schedules, research notes, and more. While this method tends to be popular, placing all this qualitative information into Google Sheets can become extremely messy and difficult to manage.
Emma’s work includes both UI and UX. Emma can easily do her UI work on a design tool but struggles to find a tool that can help her arrange all her UX data and notes well. After exploring Allo, she learned she could organize all the information and files in a more digestible way using visuals.
Allo is not only for teams
Even though Allo is designed to be a collaboration tool, some people like Emma actually found using it alone more than valuable. She uses Allo like a personal sketchbook. From planning to research, and to usability testing insight generation, she organizes all of her work from different design projects inside of Allo.
Organize all your notes in the way you want
Emma loves how she can flexibly arrange her work to best suit her preferences. She is able to organize the documentation within the project using a kanban board to use it as a high-level project management tool or simply group them into different categories.
When comparing Allo’s canvases to Google Sheets, Emma says, “The best I could get was to add colors to the cells.” The fixed-format of Google Sheets meant there wasn’t much she could do to arrange the information in a way that’s understandable to her. Now with Allo, she can display everything in free form through visuals.
Layout information in a more digestible way
Emma wasn’t just looking for a tool that allowed her to organize her work freely and in a visual way. “I found some other visual tools’ organization of information clunky while Allo is very simple to use,” she notes. She loves working with the page format of the canvas instead of having to work on one gigantic board because she can selectively look for just relevant information rather than having to constantly look at everything.” The flexible structure within the freeform of Allo helps Emma lay out all the information in a way that’s digestible for her.
Emma also loved the ability to attach different types of files and preview directly inside the canvas. With Allo, she doesn’t need to open a bunch of different files all the time. She can simply see it as her repository and gather all the external files by dragging and dropping them into the canvas.
Before Allo, all the ways Emma tried to organize notes and information seemed to be far too chaotic and confusing. With Allo, everything is more organizable and trackable.
There are no rules about how personal notes should be best arranged or presented so long as they can be displayed in an understandable way for the individual using it, as it helps the material become easier to digest and absorb. Allo provides full flexibility with only essential structures on how the notes can be organized. When Allo becomes your online sketchbook, all your work and documentation can be presented in the way that works best for you.