I have not experienced this as a big problem for teams. There are many ways to collaborate, iterate, capture, and communicate ideas other than whiteboards, and people naturally find and adapt such methods based on their remote culture.

In fact, whiteboards, imo, are not particular good for this as they require everyone to be present in one place at one time to participate, you can add links, you can't capture side comments, there is no edit history, etc...

We use Google Docs heavily to capture rough ideas, blast them out, get comments and input, and iterate. If we decided that we would benefit from the input of someone that we did not anticipate, it's trivial to send them a link and ask them to comment when they have a chance. Those docs often get thrown away after they served their purpose, in the same way that a whiteboard gets erased.

I actually found remote whiteboards to work quite well when used with a proper pen tablet (like a Wacom Intous). Downside of that is of course increased cost, as equipping everyone with one of those isn't that cheap. It also takes some time to get used to using those, but for permanent remote situations this is about as close as you will get to in-person whiteboards.

A less sophisticated variant that works well for a lot of cases is draw.io (personal preference; other diagramming tools might work just as well). It doesn't give you real-time collaboration of the same board and also no freeform drawing, but a lot of the things you want to articulate in meetings are diagrams anyway. Whenever you want to articulate an idea, you just open the page, and screenshare that.

It sometimes feels like we're very hung up on our traditional tools. Pick a remote whiteboard tool, give everyone relevant a big tablet (personally, I find something like an iPad is more intuitive than the Wacoms other than the Cintiq), norm using it (along with other collaborative docs), and you're probably in pretty good shape. Not really expensive compared to all the other costs you have.

> It sometimes feels like we're very hung up on our traditional tools.

We absolutely are. I think I spent over a decade hoping for an extremely-low-latency pen-based note taking solution to show up to replace my use of pen and hardcover notebooks. If anything, I was romanticizing the notion of replacing a simple, inexpensive tool with expensive technology.

We're pretty close to that now with the iPad Pros, but since I've been remote for several years now, I've given up on that idea of a stylus based tablet solution altogether. These days, my preference is to use a live-conversion Markdown editor. If I was still in the Apple ecosystem, I guess I'd pay for a Bear subscription, but I'm on Windows, so I've made do with Dropbox Paper (I didn't expect to like it, but it's been surprisingly good for my use case).

I sometimes use my iPad Pro with Pencil for note taking and it works well. One advantage is that I can record and just write down key points; I can go to that point in the recording if I want what was literally said.

That said, I usually take typed notes (and maybe shoot a few photos with my phone). I can type faster and more legibly than I write and it's easier to turn these notes into a report/article/etc. (Of course, I can always record the whole thing too if I want.)

Bear looks interesting. I haven't looked at my options for a while.

I got a used Wacom Bamboo (very decent) for $20. Though my handwriting makes it a lot like GP's picture :)

For line drawing, tablets seemed weird for my brain. I'd rotate the tablet to draw comfortably, but a straight line is different because my monitor didn't rotate. But if you look online, people clearly get used to things like this with enough practice.

Cintiqs, iPads, and other tablets don't require this adaptation, though. I've also been kind of amazed how well people can write using mice when forced to (from watching MOOC classes).

>Downside of that is of course increased cost, as equipping everyone with one of those isn't that cheap

I bought a Huion drawing tablet (H610) which was relatively cheap and works well enough for most cases. No screen on the tablet itself, but you quickly get used to drawing while looking at the screen (there is a sort of halo surrounding where the pointer should be, so you're not using it blind). I can see it working quite nicely for whiteboarding.

Excalidraw (https://excalidraw.com) just implemented collaboration, making it a free, secure and OSS solution for remote whiteboard :)

This is incredible, I love the simple and straight forward solution to this.

Thanks for the tip!

give it json graph output and kiss uml goodbye

This is going to be downvoted.... but I have never whiteboarded in my 7 years of professional development. It’s just not how all of us brainstorm.

Rather go try the code that I have ideas for, instead of talking back and forth. Most things I can be verbally told what they want and then I just go attempt it.

Yup you're not alone. After many years of developing and never using a whiteboard, my first attempt at a "whiteboard architecture talk" where I was forced to use a whiteboard was a 45min talk and I came out thinking it had gone quite well, looked back at the whiteboard and saw I had drawn a single box on it. Just one box with no label. I couldn't even remember what the box was supposed to signify.

Not everyone thinks visually. I'm also baffled when people ask for network layout diagrams or want to show me them. I just don't care about seeing that stuff in a diagram - it very seldom gives me information I feel I'm not getting somewhere else.

I've trained myself to do the whiteboard talk now because it seems to help some people. So if I'm communicating a design idea or whatever I'll often draw a diagram while I'm explaining it.

I've seen a pretty big uptick in new Twiddla [1] accounts in the last few weeks, and a bunch of mails from teachers and schools who want to start using it.

I market it to teachers for use as a remote classroom, so it's nice to be able to help out a bit. Though I'm a bit conflicted about marketing it too much right at the moment. The last thing I want to do is profit from the current situation.

[1] https://www.twiddla.com/

Marketing your product that helps people be more productive in an unfortunate situation is not unethical or taking advantage of anyone. Every business needs a catalyst for people to realize you are solving a genuine problem for them. Embrace your established position with a functional product and solution and become a market leader by solving the current problem of the day better than anyone else! Good luck!

We tend to use Google Docs to scribble notes during a meeting. We’ve gotten good at using indentation to represent tree structures. It has less flexibility than a whiteboard but it doesn’t run out of space, is always achieved, easy to read, and most importantly everyone in the meeting can contribute at the same time.

Real-time collaboration with text is so essential that this weekend I worked on a proof of concept with a friend to bring it to Gitlab issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/21473#note_301...

Use a Wacom tablet or iPad with a stylus. Drawing with a mouse or trackpad is the problem. We use Zoom's whiteboard feature, but any online canvas could work. The Zoom option is interesting for us because we have the interactive boards in our office so remoties and in-office people can draw on the same thing.

We generally don't as far as I know. Most communication happens async anyway due to the timezone differences. When I do need to diagram things I tend to create Mermaid graphs in issue comments, but beyond that I never really felt it was necessary.

The question is why do you need a whiteboard?

What problem is the whiteboard solving?

Drawing freely with a mouse is something that can be done but also you have tools like draw.io if you need to draw something.

Whiteboards are absolutely indispensable for communicating ideas quickly in a small group of people. It's effectively just a bigger (and easier to erase) version of grabbing a scrap of paper to scribble something down when explaining or describing something to someone else.

I'm honestly more surprised that this isn't a universally known concept on HN. Scribbling on scraps of paper is something most people in western countries have done since pre-school.

I've been on a team with a super productive whiteboard user, who made ideas more clear by the ability to draw diagrams. I have also been on a team with a unproductive coworker whose whiteboard drawings were confusing, took lots of time to draw, and were generally unhelpful.

Both people thought their whiteboarding was indispensible. Neither person's actually were, even the guy who was quite effective at drawing his ideas.

I'd actually prefer less whiteboarding to people spending a bit more of their own time on their ideas. Think about it and research it for a few days before calling a meeting.

If three people have 1/3rd of the knowledge needed to solve the problem (for example, a front end designer, a back-end designer from team 1, and a back-end designer from team 2), the total time expended is shorter if the three people research their part for 2 hours and then get together for an hour than one person writing based on faulty assumptions and having to go back to the drawing board anyway.

The larger the organization, the less one person can hold the entirety of the solution in their head.

Yeah I can think of several times when I or someone else came prepared to a remote meeting with a PowerPoint. Of course that took more work, but the product would often be reused and shared long after the meeting. Not only that, a higher quality work conveys the idea much better.

I don't know. A whiteboard alone isn't a solution.

I think it depends on the communication skills of the team.

Anyone who plays some form of "Win, Lose or Draw" or "Pictionary" will quickly realize that most people aren't as good at visual communication as they think they are.

Myself, I've been in too many whiteboarding sessions where the whiteboarder either spent too much time trying to "live bake" their idea on the whiteboard or simply produced an incoherent mess.

I think it depends on what you want to accomplish with the whiteboard.

If you just want to capture a list of ideas, google docs will let people collaboratively edit a document or you could just have one person share their screen and capture verbal ideas.

If you want to diagram things, pen and paper + a camera can be just as effective if not more effective than a whiteboard. Often it's better to have the whole team do a sketching exercise and share their results which isn't really effective on a single whiteboard.

More importantly, whiteboards are never going to be effective for remote organizations for the same reason hallway conversations / voice chat aren't effective. It builds knowledge silos as only the people who were there understand the context of the whiteboard even if you photograph it.

Indispensable for who? Perhaps designers? As an engineer I spent 5 years working remote and this has never been an issue. We just never needed—or even considered—drawing things.

Even now that I’m not remote all we use the whiteboard for is bulleted lists which easily can be done with notion or google docs

I'm a software developer and I always find that grabbing a whiteboard and drawing diagrams or other such information is very useful when trying to agree on a solution (or even agree on the problem). I work remotely and very rarely see the rest of my team in person, so the clear benefit (to me at least) of in-person whiteboarding in those situations is very stark.

Yes, you could probably accomplish the same thing by writing up a proposal spec document (which you'll need to do eventually) but the downside of doing that during the drafting stage is that it lengthens the feedback loop and not everyone will read such a document thoroughly and leave a thorough review. In-person whiteboarding is usually much faster and everyone in the room is almost always on the same page.

Yes, I was born and raised in western countries. So yeah.

My point was more why does it need to be a physical thing. Like a whiteboard.

we, for example, use hackmd.io and draw.io/figma for quickly drawing. It is also easier with this to archive this and change or copy later.

I don't really do that.

A collaborative text pad is way more productive for 99% of the use cases.

Google also has a tool for this that seems promising:

https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en/products/jamboard/

I can access it under drive.google.com > New > More, on my gsuite account

I knew that existed as a physical product but I never knew it was available as digital-only too. My non-gsuite personal account seems to be able to use it just fine for free.

No. Whiteboard is not essential. It is NOT inseparable form teamwork. That is just one possible tool. Maybe the only way you know perhaps? If you must use it because that's the only way you know for collaboration then look around for better ones than the ones you know. There are physical ones connected to net (practically a huge touchscreen on legs), or there is this novel concept called tablets, those usually come with online connection too, spectacular, eh?! Alternatively you may use the traditional whiteboards to brainstorm about remote whiteboards. ; )

I don't need a whiteboard often, but have tried Microsoft Whiteboard and quite like it: https://whiteboard.microsoft.com

I believe it's built into Teams now too.

Actually I wrote just such a solution: https://whiteboardfox.com

It's a canvas solution, but if you have a stylus with a table then you can get pretty good outcome: https://s1.whiteboardfox.com/s/27e946824d29abc2.png

You can also 'replay' your whiteboard session: https://whiteboardfox.com/1428618-3583-6927?replay&speed=4.0

Get some kind of device with a stylus (drawing tablet, iPad, Surface, etc) and use that to whiteboard. I think remote canvas whiteboards do work, you just need the proper tools to use them.

After watching a lot of MOOC courses, people get a lot better writing with a mouse with practice. I think a much better solution is a Wacom or a tablet. I just dusted off an old Wacom for my wife to scribble personal notes now that she's working from home. For awhile she's been using an iPad in meetings.

I've often pushed for having a personal white board just do dump out my own ideas for both personal and group settings. For lectures, we've just pointed a camera at the whiteboard. This is problematic because many whiteboards are shiny and you have to get most web cameras pretty far away to frame the whole thing. I've seen some experimental software that will detect markers and composite it over the image (for when people stand in front of the whiteboard--another common issue) or just increase the contrast of the writing.

I think it's a mix of new tools and new software instead of just new software using the same mouse+keyboard+Internet.

There is tools like https://miro.com/

That might be good for creatives like designers, but it's horrible for software devs. Plain confluence page is better than that.

SWE here-- we use miro heavily at the remote-first company I work at. I barely use my whiteboard these days.

A better tool would be something like mxGraph, which allows for UML/Architecture diagramming in an easier way. (https://jgraph.github.io/mxgraph/)

Hackerrank (I work here) has included this in the remote/pair programming service. You can run it by going to https://www.hackerrank.com/products/codepair and clicking "Start session", and sharing with the ther user.

Obviously this is cost prohibited, and not collaborative - but historically I've used an iPad, QuickTime to capture the screen of the iPad, and then share the screen of my laptop.

The way you're thinking about solving the problem is by applying the same local office solution in a different context of a virtual remote environment, which seems like the logical way to go but is not very useful in practice.

With 15 years of career in web development, I've never really seen or thought about using a whiteboard in a meeting. I don't know if it would help but I've managed to get by this far without it.

The Meeting Owl Pro will be getting whiteboard functionality soon where it will be able to recognize when someone is writing on the whiteboard in the meeting room and will focus on that. https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl

Looking forward, I think that a VR app like Google's Tilt Brush would be the best medium for this (perhaps, until we have something like the Star Trek Holodeck). But I don't think that Google or anyone else has released a multiplayer version yet.

We as a small business use IPad Pros and Google Jam Board. It’s honestly fantastic. Quick to jump into, export, and share. Especially for those moments where you only need the whiteboard for 30 seconds to get a point across

I use an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, and then use Explain Everything on it. Desktop users can use the "text" tools, and everyone else with a better set up can use the pencil tools.

I've used Draw.io over screenshare successfully, when needed

I use draw.io and screen share. Not exactly white board, but you can draw concepts drawings. Als you could use a Wacom tablet as others mentioned.

https://miro.com works well for our remote teams

You can share your iPad screen on zoom. I‘ll do sketches that way. Sadly the other person can’t interact with it.

Google offers something called Jamboard. It’s quite fantastic.

Miro and Jamboard are good.

You need a stylus so it doesn’t look like trash.

Wacom tablet? Or even just a plain cheap tablet+stylus.