January 22, 2021 (Updated April 25th, 2023)
“It allows us to capture our wildest thoughts” – Case study with Faceware Tech
Ever find it hard to contain all the inspirational ideas you have flying about in your head? Well like many of us, the team at FaceWare Tech have precisely that wonderful problem and turned to Ayoa to help them.
Interestingly enough, their company devises some incredibly smart technology to digitally recreate every miniscule detail on people’s faces. If they were to apply it to themselves during their design sessions in which they utilise Ayoa, they would probably generate crystal clear concentration frowns, eureka moment grins, and intensely focussed eyes; FaceWare Tech captures how every idea, thought or emotion from within your head appears outwardly on your face.
Their facial tracking work has resulted in them working with clients in the movie, gaming and medical industries to produce animations for a variety of purposes. Most famously, they were responsible for facial animation on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and in all of EA’s games, bringing realism to footballing stars such as Messi and Ronaldo in FIFA.
To continue to attract high-class customers, Josh Beaudry, Technical Account Manager at FaceWare Tech, sought a way to better organise his team and enhance their creative processes. We caught up with him to find out how Ayoa has enabled him to achieve just that:
“I had been looking at a variety of mind mapping software but settled upon Ayoa because in comparison it was far more visually pleasing and I found it really easy to get started. Apart from those important initial impressions, as I continued to use Ayoa it became very clear that it meshed with my vision of what a mind mapping software should be – its general setup and format meant that what I created within Ayoa and saw on my screen aligned with the picture I had in my mind.
When using Ayoa with my team though, it is extremely helpful to have in order for us to be organised. We have a lot of different ideas of what we want to do next and how we could approach specific problems, but with so much going on it can sometimes be “noisy”. For instance, when we reach a decision point for something, more often than not we come up with so many ideas that it could see us go forward in a million different directions. By using Ayoa’s mind maps to start documenting our ideas and then using features such as being able to group and colour code them, it means we can collate everything to give us a clearer picture of both the problem we are facing and what our solution could be. This is invaluable for our designers and product managers.
Another couple of really useful features which we use time and time again in our design sessions is being able to link mind maps together and create tasks directly from mind maps. The first option means that we can easily open a new space if a certain idea requires more breathing room, and the latter is brilliant because if an idea is something we want to take action on, we can instantly turn it into something functional. I in fact really like the task generation aspect of Ayoa because it is so fluid and smooth. The interoperability of resources within Ayoa is very well thought out; you can go from viewing all of your ideas in mind maps to a task board where you will be able to assess just those ideas which have been selected as your final decisions.
Ayoa is overall a brilliant place to organise my thoughts and the thoughts of my team, and the innovations which it has come up with to ensure this seems endless. For example, another favourite feature of ours is live share. It enables one person to drive a meeting from within a mind map and ensures everyone is looking at the right area on their screens. No longer does anyone bother sharing their screen, we all just login to Ayoa, and “follow” our colleague’s live share. This is such a better way of working because it gives more structure to our meetings which we conduct via mind maps and enables people to add branches in other areas without disrupting the flow of the ongoing presentation.
I think the appreciation we have for Ayoa mainly stems from the fact that it gives us a space which allows us to capture our wildest thoughts in a visual way which we can always come back to and take action on. This is best reflected by how my colleagues keep coming up to me with questions about how they can better apply Ayoa – there’s a real appetite for it!”
(We are pleased to say that the team at FaceWare Tech have been given the Ayoa support email address again so that Josh stops being bombarded by Ayoa technical questions from his colleagues and can instead continue to focus on his design sessions!)
Ayoa aims to make app-switching a thing of the past! Discover the wide range of features and integrations available in Ayoa – from whiteboards, task management and mind mapping to video chat, instant messaging and so much more, it’s the perfect tool for remote and distributed teams.
Ross McGee
Ross studied English Literature at Cardiff University, enjoying the rich diversity of perspectives and experiences which texts presented to be analysed. Graduation took him into a marketing role where consideration of various interpretations and drivers could be continued. Today his interest in understanding different standpoints has turned into a passion for supporting neurodiversity - a catalyst for alternative, creative thinking and societal breakthroughs.