Show HN: Stoodle - free, collaborative whiteboard built by 3 teens

[divyahansg]

Hi all,

I'm a senior in high school and I recently co-founded Stoodle, a free, realtime whiteboard with voice chat made to help students effectively collaborate and tutor online.

I built it Firebase and Twilio (we are getting discounted pricing from both). We are also incubated by the CK12 Foundation. Our press release recently was posted on CNBC and Yahoo! Finance.

http://stoodle.ck12.org

I would love some feedback from HN.

[pranavpiyush]

Looks promising. Lots of small UI/UX things: 1. Wasn't clear how to move objects around (the iconography for the buttons can use some improvement). 2. Delete/erase button is pretty confusing too - again, it wasn't clear how to actually erase something. 3. The bg music on voice chat is unnecessary in my view. I hate that in most conferencing solutions.. :P 4. If conferencing/collaboration is high volume use case, i'd be curious to know why you chose to hide those options under a menu...

Hope this helps.

[davissorenson]

Another small UX thing: Never use window.prompt(). On Chrome at least it prevents me from switching tabs, I know on some systems it also plays an annoying sound.

[jcutrell]

This looks like an awesome idea. Honestly one of the better executions I've seen in quite a few senses.

There are quite a few things I'd say make this difficult to a first time user.

1. The tools being on two separate sides of the site seems strange to me; the left side seems to be drawing (or otherwise "putting") tools, the right side seems to be "editing" tools. Except that the pen is on the right. And so is the text box.

2. There is no "active" state for the selected tool, so I may very easily get confused about what is going to be done when i click.

3. The modality of any of the tools could be changed in some ways; for instance, having a delete "tool" rather than a delete "button" is more like erase, as pranavpiyush mentioned.

4. Using prompt for entering your name isn't great; using prompt to enter text onto the canvas is really very frustrating.

5. The trash icon is confusing. I'd rather have a "clear this board" icon, or go full-fledged whiteboard with it and show me a whiteboard eraser. I don't throw my whiteboard markings in a trash can - I erase them. If you're going to take advantage of skeuomorphs, make sure they are the right ones.

6. If sharing the URL is a core functionality, make that url easily copyable inside your interface. Most of the time, I am not going to share this on Twitter or Facebook. Most of the time, I'm going to send that url to a coworker or friend.

7. I have no clue where to "save". With something like this, I don't think we've yet reached the implicit "auto-save" feeling. I need to feel secure about my board and accessing it at another time.

8. Uploading an image is a great idea, but don't make me drag unless you're going to keep my dragged area visible; when I drag, the marker goes away and the modal replaces it - that makes me feel like I made a mistake.

9. When I drag a shape over another shape, a new bound shows that implies that the two shapes may be merged, but that doesn't happen when I drop the shape.

10. Many move tools also "select" an element for further manipulations (like moving with a mouse) - a simple version of this might be a good addition, along with basic scaling operations.

11. I like colors - I like picking my own, too. Any regular old color picker will do, or at least a hex input, so I can use my brand colors (or whatever).

12. Not sure if it exists, but I don't see a way to add a new board. This is a space where this could be hugely beneficial - multiple boards, with titles. Then this easily becomes a teaching tool that maintains its own history; export to PDF? Sure. Export to PPT? Sure. Autoupload to slideshare? (Up to you. :) )

I'd be super interested to follow this project and contribute to some of these design tweaks if it were somehow open (or if contributions are a possibility).