Creating a seamless feedback loop and staying organized with Cacoo

CINRA is a creative agency based in Tokyo and Singapore that helps clients like Sony, Adobe Systems, and MTV Japan with web design, content creation, and branding. They also publish the popular web magazine CINRA.NET. With so many clients and projects, they needed an easy way to keep feedback organized—that's where Cacoo came in handy.

Key diagrams:

Executive Summary

CINRA’s feedback process was getting out of control. They needed a better way to organize comments, apply feedback, and track versions of their diagrams. Cacoo automated the process, providing easy access to users of every file's revision and comment history.

Challenges

When Creative Team Director, Yuika Shiba, started working at CINRA over a year ago, her co-workers were still using PowerPoint to draw wireframes. Each PowerPoint file was overwhelmed with comments by clients and other project members, and as the number of files increased, organization became impossible.

Sharing diagrams with co-workers sitting a few steps away was easy, but it was difficult to share and keep track of different versions of diagrams caught up in email chains with external partners. Things inevitably got lost in the shuffle.

How Cacoo Helped

Shiba introduced Cacoo to her fellow directors and designers first, explaining how much easier it was to use than PowerPoint. From there, it expanded to the rest of their staff.

The revision history feature fixed version control issues overnight, and Cacoo’s unique interface allowed team members to track and respond to feedback in a timely manner directly in Cacoo. For the first time, providing and reviewing feedback became a seamless process.

Diagrams like sitemaps that required frequent updates were now simple to track and share, and files became much more manageable across the company.

Result

Cacoo saved CINRA employees valuable time sifting through files, and with features like stencils and templates, users were able to create and reuse common diagram elements over and over again, without starting from scratch. In Shiba’s own words, “[Cacoo] makes our work easier.”