Our team’s split between the two offices in Austin, TX and good ol’ Berkeley, CA. The places couldn’t be more different. Texas and California: ’nuff said. But we’re on the same team and try really hard to behave like one: passing ideas to one another, dropping by one another’s virtual cubes to see what’s up, IM’ing, sharing prototypes and mockups, and everything else under the sun.

With the advent of Web 2.0, the big thing is social networking. It’s also sharing information. And it’s also sharing work not as a finished product, but work that’s in the process of getting there. Our team uses a bunch of tools. Some of them have been helpful, and some not. Some have been adopted with a bit more fervor than others, and thought it’d be good to write them down.

• 37signal’s Basecamp is just plain cool. Messaging, commenting, and tracking conversations so we don’t have to search through email. Posting images, screenshots, and mockups. We don’t use it as a project management tool, although I think the recent feature of adding files and comments to the to-do’s was brilliant. But we really like the fact that our conversations, ideas, comments, screens, and everything in between has a historical record online.
• Skitch is self-described “fast and fun image sharing!” It’s what we use for our virtual whiteboarding and sketching so different product stakeholders and team members can be in the conversation together, commenting on different screens they might see, having the designer revise on the fly, and then posting inline on the fly. It’s cool, it’s free, and the easy drag click and one-button upload takes care of so many in-between steps that it’s a plain joy to use. It’s Mac-only too, but not a problem. I think I was sold after reading (and watching) tap tap tap’s design session.
• We recently started using Yammer. We’re into daily status reports so we know what we’re working on and stuff like that, but it’s tough to capture a day’s events (the previous or the current day) in a single bullet point email. Yammer is enterprise Twitter, and it’s a little like peeking over into someone’s cubicle. You can just as easily walk by if you’re not interested (but at least you know they’re there), or you can see what they’re working on and say, “Hey, that’s cool. I want in on what you’re doing.”
• Fast prototyping’s done with Balsamiq’s Mockups. It’s better than OmniGraffle, InDesign, Photoshop, Visio, Illustrator and a whole bunch of other things I’ve tried. Don’t get me wrong. I think those other programs are awesome. And when it comes to working on the visual design of a screen and doing a hi-fidelity pretty pictures UI, I still wouldn’t trade anything for Photoshop (I’m really psyched about CS4). But in that step after requirements, after whiteboard sketching, and in trying to quickly communicate what the Product Manager and I have in our mind’s eye to other stakeholders and developers, Mockups is a great tool. There’s knocks against it that it doesn’t give room for innovation and creativity because you’re using a palette of already made UI elements. On the other hand, understanding where a new interaction can be introduced comes when the designer is trying to figure things out at a UI elements level, past the level of abstraction and theory.

There’s more, of course. But at the risk of overloading and overwriting, this was a foray into some of the new technology we’re playing with, trying out, and have incorporated into our workflow as a design team.