5 Ways Creative Professionals Are Using Popplet

Popplet lets creative professionals and their teams think visually to generate new ideas and create new concepts. You can collate images, video, photos and text onto a popplet board, share comments and invite feedback, build new links between ideas, and move information and notes around until you see things from a fresh perspective.

While Popplet has been embraced by the education sector – as was evident in our recent award as one of the 2012 Best Websites for Teaching and Learning – Popplet also has the potential to support uses in other industries and amongst other professional users. Here are 5 ways that creative professionals are using Popplet in their daily work:

1. Map content ideas in an outline

Popplet allows writers, film-makers, game designers, and other creative storytellers to outline their ideas and to order the main points between each paragraph or storyboard frame in order to create a clear and flowing story. Last year, Laura Tucker from Make Tech Easier showed how she uses Popplet to plan her articles and create an outline in which her content flows smoothly in each blog post she writes.

2. Store research

While there are a heap of note-taking apps available for the iPad and for online use, and a pile of mind map software tools to choose from as well, only Popplet brings together the best of both types of applications to offer you an ideas platform that lets you review your research on the go and make new connections between ideas. For example, Business coach Edward Hamilton has written about how he uses Popplet for market research collation, and we have shared an example of how you can store research related to your target audience by using Popplet as a buyer persona template.

3. Consult audiences and gain feedback

After you have researched your target audiences, you can use Popplet to speak with them directly! Popplet allows users to make individual popplet boards public so they can be shared over the internet with anyone, even readers who don’t have a Popplet account. We recently interviewed singer/songwriter Abi Robins about how she used this functionality to undertake fan polling for audience engagement. The results helped her decide which new songs to include on her forthcoming album.

4. Collaborate across a creative team

In Popplet, sharing allows users to make their popplet public and viewable by anyone via a URL link, whether they are a popplet user or not. Collaborating allows you to make your popplet boards available only to specific other users, and permissions can be set to allow teammates to view and add to a popplet or to have full access to editing anything you have already created. This allows your creative team to share ideas privately amongst yourselves and to add ideas as you progress. Shared popplets can include nametags so that team members can see who added information every step of the way. Collaboration is only available to other popplet users, but if a team member does not have an existing account, popplet creates a free user profile and provides password and login details directly to each team member’s email that you list.

5. Present creative concepts to clients

Popplet makes it easy for creative professionals and design teams to use a presentation format to show creative concepts to clients. You can send links of the prepared popplets to your clients for viewing and can also create slideshows of pages for use in presentations with clients. The presenter format allows two modes: a full page mode in which the popplet board is shown in its entirety and an animated mode in which a presentation can be created that jumps from popple to popple in sequential order to walk through a story or workflow process with the client. Videos and images can be embedded into popples so that your presentation takes on a multimedia style.

Do you use Popplet for your projects? Share examples of your work on our twitter feed or contact mark@popplet.com to be interviewed for our blog post series “Popplet People” on how creative professionals use our web, iPad and iPhone app.