Allo: the easiest way to connect professionals
“I’ve never seen any tool that’s like Allo. It supports project management, visual collaboration, and video chat all in one place.” - Anushri Desai, co-founder and COO at NovaHub
NovaHub, co-founded by Sarvottam Kulkarni and Anushri Desai, is an India-based remote-first design and innovation lab that helps clients anticipate, accelerate, and embrace growth through breakthrough solutions. Like other companies, the NovaHub team struggled with the sudden shift to remote work and asynchronous collaboration in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Team collaboration and efficient communication suffered as the team shuffled between various project management softwares to share information internally and with clients. The team primarily used Slack for communication, but the channels became inundated with responses that hid the essential information.
Kulkarni sought a tool to connect all his team members and the systems they already used to increase collaboration efficiency. After experimenting with various tools, he discovered Allo and found it made asynchronous collaboration significantly easier. “Before Allo, we completed projects on communication tools like Slack. What would often happen is that we would lose track of the files,” said Kulkarni.
Since the switch to Allo, the NovaHub team’s efficiency drastically increased, as Allo simplified planning projects, communicating ideas, and exchanging feedback. Their clients love the organization Allo provides, and external users do not need to sign up to use Allo. “Without Allo, there would be a lot more errors because we’d be using and collaborating on a lot of different platforms. We’d easily miss out on people’s feedback in other channels. Compiling data would be extremely hard. With Allo, everything is all in one place, so it’s easy to find references for everything,” says Harsh Ignatius, a 3D Designer & Animator at NovaHub.
Allo As An Easy Feedback Collector
The NovaHub team must regularly collect feedback on their work from other teammates and their clients. They previously lacked a central place to house all the feedback. Allo allows users to quickly leave comments or feedback on specific reference points and tag other users. Users can drag and drop various links onto the canvas, so teammates no longer need to switch between platforms to know what they should edit. Allo also allows users to create checklists, so users can quickly see an overview of the feedback and suggested edits.
Allo As A Multi-purpose Planning Tool
Allo’s canvases allow users to share progress updates and exchange ideas and feedback while functioning as an effective multi-purpose planning tool. Users can use the kanban boards as a light project management tool to track a project’s progress. The columns on a kanban board allow users to group and organize the canvas documentations they created. Users can easily label tasks or documents with different properties and can assign owners to each canvas for everyone to see who is responsible for which task.
Connecting Professionals Everywhere
The NovaHub team consists of professionals across various industries, such as designers, artists, educators, writers, and technologists. Professionals in different industries often use different tools and find using unfamiliar tools challenging. For example, a writer may find tools used by technologists to be challenging and vice-versa. Allo’s setup provides all professionals an easy, intuitively designed tool to use, regardless of their industry. Onboarding new team members is easy. “The Allo UI [user interface] is easy and intuitive and keeps team expansion easy. New team members found it astonishingly simple and therefore required no special onboarding or training session to get habituated with the tool,” says Sarvottam.
Allo helped the NovaHub team reduce the number of platforms they used to communicate and complete projects. As internal communication increased, the quality of work skyrocketed, and interacting with clients became significantly more effortless than before. “With Allo, we switched from using seven applications to using three in the height of the pandemic and without much of an impact on the clients. Bringing the team, the clients, and the vendors and associates together on one page was accomplished using only one tool, as against four,” states Sarvottam.
About NovaHub
NovaHub is a collaborative Design & Innovation Lab from India. Completely operated remotely, NovaHub drives innovation through the amalgamation of three major verticals — art, design, and technology. Team NovaHub envisions, designs and develops their own innovative products in various high-impact domains like culture, education, environment, etc.
In an attempt to make boring age-old information both interesting and relevant for today’s youth, they launched their first product, the Nova AR Calendar in January 2020. The Nova Calendar is a first-of-its-kind augmented-reality-enabled inspirational calendar that celebrates the work of legendary Indian personalities like Lata Mangeshkar, Sachin Tendulkar, Amitabh Bachchan, Raja Ravi Varma, Sudha Murty and many more.