Image credit: Daylight Design
The trouble with being a User Experience specialist is the amount of wall space you need. In an ideal world, you’d set up a war room for each project, where all your materials can stay permanently stuck on the walls. Most of the time, that’s not possible – other people in your company need to use the meeting rooms too! This is where the need for portable wall space comes in. Here are some suggestions:
Foam board (aka Foamcore)
- Sheets of white cardboard with polystyrene sandwiched in the middle. Normally used by artists to mount photos, etc.
- Strengths: light, but rigid. Reusable. Check out this neat ikea-hack by Daylight (pictured above) if you need a stand for your boards.
- Weaknesses: not cheap but stationary shops may have slightly damaged items at a reduced price. (A small dent in the corner makes a mounting board useless for mounting art, but it’s still great as a portable wall surface for your needs.)
Butcher paper (aka Kraft paper)
- Huge rolls of thick paper (traditionally used by butchers to wrap meat).
- When you get kicked out of the meeting room, you roll up your paper and take it with you. It’s easy enough to unroll and stick to another wall – provided you have the space!
- Strengths: it’s damn cheap
- Weaknesses: heavy, so needs strong anchoring to the wall using tape or loads of blutack. This can ruin painted walls.
Pattern cutting paper
- It comes on a huge roll, like butcher paper, but with a dotted grid marked on it. (Recommended by Paul Thurston of Think Public)
- Strengths: Cheap, and the grid is helpful for sketching UIs
- Weaknesses: It’s heavy, like butcher paper.
3M “Self-Stick Wall Pads”
- I’ve never used these, but they are basically giant, flip-chart sized post-it notes.
- Strengths: no messing around with blutack / etc
- Weaknesses: surprisingly expensive.
So, what do you use for portable wall space? Suggestions in the comments, please!
I use windows with a white chalk marker pen.
As shown in this picture: http://twitpic.com/1bdxdx
You can get small whiteboards from Ikea **really** cheaply. The last place I worked, everyone had them by their desks.
I *really* like that foamcore idea!
Hiya Harry. If you’ve got the space, Let gravity be your friend.
Empty the room of furniture and use the floor.
I’ve tried and enjoyed this a couple of times using memo cube paper … it’s easy to slide things around, even half a dozen notes at once. …which is tedious with stickies.
Downsides are that you can’t move them to another room and you best watch out for gusts of wind.
On Dragon’s Den (London) one time there was a pair who were showing off a roll-up plastic whiteboard sheet that clings to surfaces. Is that still around?
Pingback: “All in all it’s just a…nutha post-it on…the wall” | USiT
@Michael – I think you mean Magic Whiteboard. The problem is that once you’ve written on one, you have to leave it where you put it.
Pingback: What do you use for portable wall space? | UX Booth
Nice article. This is always a challenge.
I’ve used the 3M large post-it’s and we keep a pad in the office.
I’ve also used and recommend using “gator board” – it is thicker than foam core, reusable and looks nicer.
i use big notebooks, so i just turn pages to fresh space! ;)
@Michael, I know that guy who was on Dragons Den, he was a client of mine when he worked in the NHS as a lean thinking/six sigma expert. Then he got his car covered in a massive picture of Theo Paphitis and I never saw him again.
Hi products are still about. A true (and dull) story!
I’ve found Magic Whiteboard a revelation. Rip it, stick it up, write and wipe. My wall is covered with it. It’s not cheap, and it doesn’t last very long, but I’m capturing notes better with this stuff than anything else. The static even helps post-its to stay flat when you stick them up.
I haven’t had Harry’s problem moving it around. I give it a quick rub on my jumper and it’s super static again.
I’d like to try that whiteboard paint, but it’s still not available in Europe.
Chris…Not sure if this is the whiteboard paint you had in mind, but I bought Rust-Oleum ‘Dry Erase’ from Homebase in Hove last week (http://www.rustoleum.com/CBGProduct.asp?pid=128)
Haven’t had a chance to use it yet so can’t comment.
Sarah: at an office I was contracted to for a while, they used: http://www.ideapaint.com/, it sort of worked; although it didn’t clean as well as a typical whiteboard, plus the smell of the solvents whilst painting was unbearable (paint quickly and then leave for a couple of days).
‘Ideapaint’ was what I had in mind, but that ‘Dry Erase’ looks very promising. Thanks, Sarah!
Let us know how well it works…
Instead of the IKEA hack for creating a foamcore / gator board base, you can just use gaffer’s tape to make a hinge – tape 2 or 3 sheets together with enough of a gap so they can fold flat. Then they can be freestanding if you set them up at an angle.
Valuable article. But why don’t we use white space on walls?
I am using portable whiteboards that easily to carried everywhere.
I recommend to everyone try it one time “Many artists like it already”
Portable Whiteboards
Pingback: How to make a research wall when you don't have a wall | User research