Office Lens a closer look

Digitally capture and manipulate analog sources.

I will touch one of the main features of Office Lens. What I have written below is the main reason that office lens was created. It is a tool that connects the analog workspace to a shared digital MS Office workspace such as OneNote and Word documents. I am speaking to the whiteboard scenario here, but the capabilities of the Office Lens go way bond the ability to capture a whiteboard and share it.

User needs:

People need to communicate, effectively, and quickly express their ideas visually in group settings. The use of whiteboards to interact and brainstorm ideas, keep track of scheduled activities and delegate tasks is commonplace. Whiteboards are everywhere in business offices, classrooms, and used for this purpose every day.

User Problems:

1: During meetings and or planning sessions, whiteboards are used to express thoughts, planning, and visualize ideas quickly, but there are some limitations of using a whiteboard for these activities.

2: Anyone who uses a whiteboard regularly knows that it is challenging to erase small mistake or make significant changes to the order of let's say a process without having to rewrite the whole thing.

3: At the end of a whiteboarding session that may continue at a later time, or contain critical and actionable items. People would put a big message of "do not erase." and take pictures of the contents with smartphones for later use.

Use case scenario:

During an 2hr meeting, essential planning, scheduling, and task delegation were written out on a whiteboard for multiple stakeholders working as a team. The session runs long, and the precipitants have to leave the meeting room quickly but need to and keep the whiteboard data intact and shared to the team.