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Sticky Studio Plus — A collaborative canvas for untangling complexity
Sticky Studio helps you get unstuck, together. Collaborate to understand and untangle complexity.
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Replies
Sam Rye
Hunter
📌
Love Sticky Studio, and excited for this new release! StickyStudio is much more than just a whiteboard, it is a really helpful tool for systems thinkers and complexity practitioners to do the fuzzy front end thinking that is vital to letting go of the cerebral clutter, and externalising the elements of the system in a collaborative space so we can see the patterns and make sense of the signals.
Great tool from the Kumu folk who have been working on tools for systems and complexity practice for over 10 years! Give it a whirl.
@jeff_mohr, would love for you to jump in and share the story behind Sticky Studio!
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Thanks @samrye_enspiral! We had been focused primarily on building Kumu (https://kumu.io) the past decade and when the pandemic hit, we felt there was a gap in real-time tools that support people in making sense of complex issues. Sticky Studio was our take on a simple and streamlined whiteboard tool, with an emphasis on the relationships among stickies. We also tried to focus on replicating what's possible in a real-life room, staying true to the organic feel of actually placing stickers on stickies for voting. You can read more about some of the principles guiding the development of Sticky Studio here: https://blog.kumu.io/introducing...
Hey PH! And thanks @samrye_enspiral!
Excited to share Sticky Studio Plus with you. Plus is our paid offering and incorporates a bunch of feedback from our original launch. We’ve built Sticky Studio to emphasize simplicity and ease of use so you can grapple with complex challenges without your tools getting in the way. Add stickies, images, shapes and text and draw connections between any content on your board. Connections are just as (or more) important than individual stickies yet so many tools get this backward.
Give it a try by visiting https://sticky.studio/try and then come back and share your feedback!
Here’s some of the core features in Sticky Studio Plus:
☑️ Invite-only boards
☑️ Integrated audio huddles
☑️ Comments everywhere
☑️ Sticker / emoji style voting
☑️ Templates for easy re-use
☑️ Shapes for organizing content
☑️ Multiple font options
☑️ Support for exporting to Kumu
You can use this link to get a 20% discount on Sticky Studio Plus (normally $5/month): https://sticky.studio/signup?cou...
Best,
Jeff
Having been a long-time user and enthusiast of Kumu, a revolutionary app that brought correlation mapping to the forefront of collaborative and visual planning tools, I recently decided to give Sticky Studio Plus a try, eager to see what the developers had been working on. Sticky Studio Plus is promoted as a collaborative canvas designed to help teams untangle complexity and find clarity in their projects. However, my experience left me with mixed feelings.
On the positive side, Sticky Studio Plus maintains the user-friendly interface that made Kumu a favorite. The layout is intuitive, and users can quickly start adding sticky notes and creating connections.
However, the tool seems to fall short when it comes to innovation and functionality, especially when compared to its predecessor, Kumu. Sticky Studio Plus essentially offers a single feature from Miro, allowing users to create sticky notes and link them together. While this can be useful for basic brainstorming and planning sessions, it lacks the depth and versatility that Kumu provides with its advanced mapping and data visualization capabilities.
One of my biggest disappointments was the inability to connect multiple notes using keyboard input alone, a standout feature in Kumu that significantly enhances efficiency and workflow. This lack of keyboard shortcuts and advanced linking options in Sticky Studio Plus feels like a step backwards, making the tool less appealing to power users who are accustomed to the rich feature set of Kumu.
Moreover, the focus on developing Sticky Studio Plus seems to have come at the expense of further improving Kumu. While Kumu is already a groundbreaking tool, there are areas, particularly in UI/UX, that could benefit from refinement and updates. It's perplexing why the developers would divert resources to create a new, less powerful tool, rather than building upon and enhancing the existing successful product.
In conclusion, Sticky Studio Plus may be suitable for teams seeking a basic collaborative canvas for simple planning and brainstorming activities. However, for those looking for a tool to truly untangle complexity and facilitate deep analysis, it falls short of expectations, especially when compared to the capabilities of Kumu. The developers at Sticky Studio have demonstrated their ability to innovate and create powerful tools in the past, and I hope to see them refocus their efforts on enhancing Kumu, a tool with proven potential and a strong user base.
Thanks so much for the feedback @mickeyns! Would love for you to share more detail about how you are hoping the keyboard inputs would work. Certainly plans for us to continue to improve Sticky Studio in ways that improve speed and efficiency, even if we are deliberately keeping other features from Kumu out for simplicity and ease of use. Rest assured that we haven't taken our eyes off improving Kumu either, there are a few pieces of context that have slowed development but we're now heads down on an ambitious project to essentially rewrite Kumu from the ground up and will have more to share in the coming months!
Thanks @jobenjada! We've been involved in and around the social change and philanthropic spaces for awhile and originally came to this work as people were struggling to find tools to support the application of systems thinking and network mapping to solve complex problems.
This app reminds me a bit of Miro. It's quite handy for brainstorming and visualizing ideas but I'm just wondering, was this app inspired by Miro in any way?
@angelo_galang certainly! Lots of usage of Miro, Mural, and other collaborative whiteboards by our team and the Kumu user base. A lot of Kumu users were struggling to import their work into Kumu from those platforms and would end up creating a map from scratch. As we explored further, we decided to launch our own tool to address some of the ease of use issues and also make sure that relationships were prioritized more than they were in those other tools (they have made some progress in making relationships easier to draw but they still feel like second class citizens in those apps in our opinion).
Congrats on the launch! 🚀 Excited to explore Sticky Studio Plus and its new features. Way to go, team! 👏👍
Very cool application for stickies, it's very easy to use which is most important for an application of this kind.
One thing I'd love if you added is the ability to change fonts, I don't like the default font when it's small, when I zoom out.
Glad to hear @leon_novacki! Hear you on the small font, you can change the font family by using the menu in the upper left corner and then going to "board settings". Let me know if those options give you something that works better for you!
@jeff_mohr I can't seem to find it, the options are help, feedback, tour, what's new. Is it because I'm in the trial?
@leon_novacki ahh yep, we have the functionality limited in the /try board but if you create a free account you'll be able to change the board font settings.
@theological we promise no real animals were harmed in the making of this video and all animated animals had a full recovery (and a cocktail to boot).
@jeff_mohr ahahaha okay that's fair and also a good answer :D (I just can't stand to see animals being hurt, real or animated notwithstanding :D)
Sticky Studio Plus is a fun and creative platform. How can users make the most out of its sticky note features? Congrats on the launch!
Thanks @jonathan_monroe! One way we recommend is to really focus on the ability to add relationships between any of the content you add to the board (labels, shapes, images, stickies). When you start bringing in sketches and images to make sense of a complex context, the result is really engaging and beautiful. That and inviting the community to add comments with their questions and feedback on the various parts of your board.