M+E Connections

Creative teams typically have big ideas and lots of moving parts, and to give everyone a voice and make the most of their contributions, words aren’t always enough, according to Box.

Meanwhile, research shows that 40% of people respond better to visual information than other kinds of information.

Those factors are why the company decided to develop Box Canvas, according to the company.

Ahead of its Content Cloud Summit last year, Box unveiled and demonstrated Box Canvas, a virtual whiteboarding and visual collaboration experience that it said at the time “securely connects hybrid teams so they can brainstorm, ideate, and create, together from anywhere.”

With Box Canvas, a company’s creative talent can build out ideas in a shared infinite space, in real time or asynchronously — and it’s flexible for hybrid teams, according to the company. Canvas helps users take ideas from brainstorming to buildout and turn their actionable ideas into real deliverables, Box says.

Early adopters will be able to get a taste of Canvas “before the product is generally available,” Laryssa Polika, Box senior project marketing manager, Core Applications, said Jan. 18, during the webinar “Introducing Box Canvas: 3 ways to bring collaboration to life.”

There is “value of being first to use Canvas, and it really helps us gather crucial feedback so we can make modifications as needed,” she told viewers.

The current version of Canvas is “not the final version,” she pointed out, noting “it’s still in development.”

“Features will be rolled out throughout the beta process and the beta release” so early users “get to participate in that development process,” she said.

Box is going to be “making a big community push around Canvas so you’ll have the opportunity to network and join our growing Canvas community,” she told viewers.

Polika conceded that she was initially not a fan of whiteboarding but went on to change her mind after using one and became a “whiteboarding pro,” she said.

“If we look at some of these stats, it becomes easier to see why visual collaboration is so popular,” she went on to say, pointing to data that showed
“90 percent of the information sent to the brain is visual and 93 percent of all human communication is visual.”

Additionally, “50 percent of our brains are active in visual processing [and] 65 percent of us are visual learners,” she said.

“To summarize, visuals are processed faster by the brain and people respond better to visual information,” she added.

During the webinar, the company also provided a visual tour of Canvas and three strategies Box said can make a difference in a creative team’s collaboration. Viewers learned how to: Transform how hybrid teams work together to generate solutions and solve problems quickly; build out graphical process flows, sprint retrospectives, Kanban boards, and more; reduce complexity and risk with a tool that’s native to the Content Cloud; and how to turn on Canvas within their Box accounts to become an early adopter.