An adaptive platform for managing creative work
Flow provides seamless organization for all your content so you can focus on the creative part of your work.
Too often creative professionals spend a large amount of time organizing and managing their content. This is particularly challenging as the content that designers and planners work with is very diverse. Sketches, interviews, secondary research, workflows, user stories, interaction maps, inspiration galleries, prototypes, visual designs - the list is long and varied.
Research
To get to the root of this challenge, I spent a month observing designers, UX developers, graphic artists in action to design ways to streamline the workflow. I used my own work and collaborative planning as a way to learn what the recurring bottlenecks were. Together, we brainstormed issues that were repeated and time-consuming. Slowly, themes started to emerge.
Like snowflakes, no two are alike. You might do a lot of competitive research on one, and nothing but visual design on another. Organization needs to be flexible enough to support variety without sacrificing recall.
Projects are diverse
People look for things when they need it. You need design references and inspiration when you are designing, interview templates when you are interviewing. Sound obvious? Perhaps. But there is no tool that uses your context so that it can magically pull up all your notes on user testing when you are user testing or help you find the one time you did a particular kind of video survey.
Context is key
Drive for documents. Dropbox for assets. Git for code. Folio for images. Pinterest for ideas. Behance for ideas and portfolios. Disparate systems, each with its own organization, and no unified way to work & organize across them.
Many, MANY tools
Simple enough, but not simpler
We need a system that is simple enough to be almost invisible as you work, but smart enough to know what you are working on and provide contextual support and automated organization as you do it.
Adaptive WORKFLOW ENVIRONMENT (AWE)
Flow is designed with a powerful workspace that is designed around your own unique workflow.
By starting with how you work, flow automatically knows part of your context as you work, and can silently organize your work based on the current stage in your process.
Automated GROUPING
Inspiration galleries, templates, asset management are common needs across multiple creative works and flow automatically creates cross-referenced organization for these common needs.
And, flow is designed to integrate with commonly used tools for documents, images, urls, notes etc - giving you flexibility to manipulate and organize any type of content.
It brings the concepts of Integrated Development Environments, like automation tools and editing support that are common in software development to the world of the creative professional.
Flow is currently under development
