I Designed a Design Research tool!

Hello Everyone,

I’m new to the discussion group but I’m excited to share my free software tool that I designed to help with research. It is called Harbor and it allows you to visually bookmark and store everything you find and think while researching on the web. It serves as a living canvas for each one of your projects so that you don’t a have cluttered desktop, a million tabs open and all your ideas on scratch paper or other docs

Check it out! http://www.my-harbor.com

Thank you and let me know what you think,

Carson

Have you posted this anywhere else? I’m getting dejavu. I feel like I’ve seen this before somewhere a few weeks ago already! Weird… :slight_smile:

Hi,

If we have a LinkedIn connection there is a chance; as I recently shared my project with a couple of groups on LinkedIn. Outside of that-no where else, and I have never posted on C0re77. Hope that helps :slight_smile:

Seems like an interesting tool, I will try it out once the PC version is there and give my feedback once I’ve applied it during projects.

I don’t think your website sells it very well, it all sounds good but I can’t see what the software looks like and what it does more concretely. I’m sure every designer has his own way of organizing and combining all kinds of materials, what is the key benefit of your software? And what can it create? What options does it allow? I am very curious because there is definitely a need for this kind of thing. I have mindmapping software but it just doesn’t work well enough for designers. You’d also want to be able to sort of create one big network created out of multiple smaller mind maps with links in between, so you can sort of create ‘meta-mindmaps’ about particular topics or design challenges.

I also see a real need for this. I’ve started to use Pintrest to collect random design inspiration, but it’s not really good for projects (no sorting, no connections, limited notes and tags) and it isn’t private. I will definitely try the PC version, post here to let me know when it comes out.

I too would like a little more info from the website. I think I can get a good sense of what the in-browser scenario is, with the small strip at the bottom. This looks interesting and could work well for collecting info (need to try it for myself, of course), but I don’t really see a screen of what to do with that info - how do I make sense of it and present it? The ability to drag pics into Adobe applications looks great, but can I make Harbor full screen to get a look at all the info? Are there ways to sort it? It’d be great to have views with pictures sorted by tag, by connections, etc.; full text search; large mind map; slideshow; or anything else it can do. And if you could print or save to PDF those sorted views and mind maps it would really help with sharing. Speaking of sharing, can you have a project shared among many people?

One more note about the website: your videos are nicely produced, but I greatly prefer it when website show pictures (often screenshots, maybe zoomed in) with brief titles/descriptions that show all the main features and use scenarios. It much easier to quickly get a sense of whatever it is that way. If I’m really excited about something I’ll watch the video, but I don’t need music, a dramatic setup, and B-roll footage to learn the basics of something

Thank you all so much for your feedback. It is informative and encouraging. I plan on raising money and getting a lot of these things addressed in my next version. The website is being re-built so that feedback is truly insightful. The PC version is scheduled to be done by May, I will have a sign-up notification platform for that on the new site. This concept is resonating with a lot of people which is great, and I would love for you guys to continue spread the word.

Great questions Seurban, right now you can grow and shrink the Harbor window as well as view your information in a few formats: collaged/free moving, chronologically, and gridded…But we are working on the architecture to allow everything you drag in to be cloned to your own url page in a more presentable Pinteresty fashion. In this current version, you can’t upload local files, but anything you pull off the web is stored. Too that end we plan on purchasing a cloud so your local files will be there as well and on a personalized web-page. As of now, you can send projects back and forth but not simultaneously work on them. Hope that helps

Thanks again,

Carson

The demonstration video showed potential. I liked that you seem to have intuition built in, no one wants to “learn” new software. The linking of data, images, text has potential. I am interested to see how this linked data can be applied to or extracted into other application: written article, presentation, design brief.

Also, PC.