Since Backboard first launched red pen annotation, I’ve been amazed by all the creative ways to leave feedback.  Each member of the Backboard team expresses themselves differently: circles, underlines, big cross-outs, arrows; you name it, we’ve seen it.

Like Carlos, a new Backboard user that posted on our feedback Backboard last week, sometimes you need a little more structure to your drawing.  If you’re not into free form annotation, you can hold down Shift while you’re drawing to create a straight line or the Option (Mac)/Alt (Windows) key for an oval.  The perfectionists out there can use both for a perfect circle.

Lately, the Backboard team has taken annotation to the next level (whether it’s a level up for its creativity or a level down for its ridiculousness is up to you to decide).  After feedback is closed on team Backboards, small red-pen animals, vehicles and other doodles often show up.  Here’s a sample for your enjoyment:

And my personal favorite, TROGDOR the BURNiNATOR burninating the countryside.  On the original Backboard, this is an animation.  Mouse over the first part of the feedback and see TROGDOR brighten.  Mouse over the second part, and see his burninating.

We’d like to share the fun with the Backboard community.  Link me to the Backboard featuring your best feedback art (in the comments) by Wednesday, February 11.  I’ll set the best annotation artist up with a complimentary month of a premium Backboard account.

As Increo is currently in a period of nose-to-the-grindstone development (preparing a new release of Backboard), I thought I’d step back and take a look at one of the articles written about Backboard just after our initial launch.

Marc Hustvedt, angel investor blogger behind seedWatcher, a blog that tracks early-stage startups reviewed Backboard back in May.

The pro’s of Backboard, are clearly its painless setup and ease of use. No mindless registration process needed, just an email address will do. [...] Anyone can comment on a document if they’re given the specific URL, adding some basic level of protection for your shared pages.

As we add functionality to Backboard, we’re careful to leave the basic lightweight use case Marc mentions intact. Our hope is that you will continue to find creating a Backboard as easy as when Backboard was first introduced.

Marc continues:
The downside for Backboard is the lack of a decent feature set, like say, a markup tool, ala recently covered Twiddla or Stickis. I’d like to see more ways to give feedback beyond the basic text comments on the bottom of the page. It’s also going to need some enhanced security beyond URL obfuscation if it’s going to get wide-scale business use. [...]

This is where Backboard has made tremendous strides over the past few months. I’m excited to launch markup support (easy enough for your most time-pressed client) in the coming weeks. We have also launched security for confidential documents.

Now, they could take the approach of rolling out a suite of collaborative products that integrate together seamlessly and end up with a packaged product that could compete with Huddle and BaseCamp. Or stick to the minimalist approach to tools, which could work in its own way.

Plans are certainly in the works to continue producing tools to help companies innovate.

At Backboard, we rely heavily on feedback from users to help us shape new features and functionality.

The process is simple (and borrowed from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs). First, we come up with a vision. At a high level, what will the product do? How will it affect our users’ lives?

Next, we build the basic infrastructure to address the vision. For Backboard, this was the no-frills initial version, launched in mid-May. While some reviewers found the product a bit too simple, others found the ease-of-use refreshing. We found that if you give users a taste of where you are going, and ask for their feedback, you can shape a product that addresses their needs spot on.

Feedback on the early versions of Backboard came rolling in, taking the form of blog posts, comments, emails and posts on our sample Backboard. We compared this feedback to our product plan and made some significant changes–prioritizing features our users asked for most. Address books and security (now launched) shot to the top of the list. Other features were nixed — they would only serve to distract from Backboard’s core functionality.

We have been working hard for the last couple of months to introduce these new features. Please continue to give us feedback!

As a feedback company, what is more natural than seeking feedback at every stage of development?

First of all, congratulations to the new Increo graduates! Ray, Rebecca, Kimber and Jeff received their degrees in computer science this past weekend.

Increo has been busy moving into our new office. We’re now located in Bayside Business Plaza and are very pleased with the new space.

In the midst of all these changes, we have been working on enhanced features for Backboard, including the ability to import contacts from your address book and save groups of contacts–making sharing a backboard quicker and easier.

I’ll change directions today and write about a technique Increo has found extremely useful when making decisions between a large number of choices with a large group of people with varied (and sometimes strong) opinions.

Increo has used this technique extensively for names (Increo Solutions, Backboard, Increo Suite) and even to narrow down interview candidates from a large pool of applicants.

1. Make a long list of all the possibilities. Brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm.
2. Remove anything that everyone agrees does not make sense.
3. For each possibility, have everyone vote whether they like it or not. Each person has unlimited votes, and voting decisions should be based on first impressions.
4. Go through the entire list, then remove half the possibilities–those with the fewest votes.
5. Repeat until only one option is left.

Essentially this results in the result that is okay with everyone–usually not a favorite of anyone on the team, but something everyone can live with. And, even better, from my experience, the results tend to grow on you. I look back at the other potential names for Increo, and I’m awfully glad we discarded them.

Thanks to Sarah Arora for first suggesting this technique.