The Lazy - The magical scanner

"The Lazy" is a feature showing how sometimes technology can take what should be a simple proposition and provide a simple solution to it, but in the most roundabout way.

Screencaps for all
At a high level, analysis in our company works like this: We get assigned an issue that some preliminary analysis has been done for. We then expand on that analysis, run it by our manager, then put the finishing touches on it and design the screens before sending it to our developers, who tell us what about it is possible or impossible, and then do it, because they are awesome!

One issue we're working on now is quite elaborate, despite our best efforts to keep it simple. Because of the inherent complexity in the story, it's easier to do the screens along with the first level analysis. Except that because of the complexity, actually designing the screens in Paint.net (which we'll blog about sometime) will add time onto the analysis that we really cannot spare.

The solution we hit upon was quite straight forward: since we do most of our thinking with a pencil and graph paper, why not just scan that in and add it to the story. It won't be pretty, but it will be a wireframe in the strictest sense.

So we take our wireframes and borrow the scanner from some office mates we share space with and who are on a different network. As we scan them we realize that we don't have a USB key. After they scan we realize that the programme we used to scan them in does not save to GIF or JPG. It's late in the day and we don't want to spend forever fuzzing around with options.

What happens is

1. We take screenshots of the preview of each of the scans
2. We put the scans in Word
3. We save the Word File
4. We email the Word file to ourselves
5. We go back to our desk, open the Word file and crop the sections that have the scans in Paint.net.
6. We do some work on them to clean them up a little (getting rid of all the ghosts that remained after we erased some other ideas we had)
7. We save them and post them to the story.

The effect was the same: The screens went up and were quite readable and augmented our story perfectly. We were quite proud of ourselves, and still got out of the office on time.

That night we woke up at 3 AM with a better way to design the screen. We were too lazy to write in our moleskine. (Don't worry, we did remember it).