Web-based collaborative user story and journey mapping tool
4.2/5 (168 reviews)CardBoard is a an online solution for team-based project planning, providing a "workboard" environment for the purposes of user story mapping. Hosted within the cloud, the SaaS-based product's per user per month pricing plans begin with free sign up "for life" and an unlimited allowance of public boards. Essential, Professional and Enterprise paid packages then bundle more advanced features, including real time collaboration. Team members can then be invited in rapidly to share board views and work collaboratively on story maps that describe customer journeys or visualize user experiences, workflows, cognitive flows, narratives or test paths. In its own words akin to a blend of Google Docs and Post-It Notes, CardBoard leverages drag and drop editing to arrange "cards" within an infinite browser-based workspace. Adding custom titles to the front, detailed text to the back, the cards can be quickly re-positioned and rearranged on any device thanks to intuitive snapping, while annotations, images and color themes can also applied to deepen the discussion.
CardBoard also easily connects to various popular tracking tools such as JIRA, Confluence, TFS, VersionOne, Pivotal Tracker and Rally. Once linked, Professional users are then able to visualize product progress and card estimates by toggling status on or off, supporting any planning and re-planning as necessary. Additional notable features include CSV data upload and access to customizable public templates, while data encryption, user activity reports, invoicing and Single Sign On (SSO) support augment the core functionality.
Pros
* Very easy to start using it. After you get yourself familiar with the Story Map Concept and sign up for CardBoard, you can start doing the mapping exercise in no-time.
* Simple, yet powerful interface. There aren't too many features in the interface (and I'm not saying they are needed), and that makes the UI nice and clean. You won't get lost in tons of unnecessary or rarely used features, everything is at hand and useful.
Cons
The app itself is great, the following points are not criticism, rather ways of further improvement:
* Story mapping is not a wide know concept, so some tutorial(s) about story mapping would be great. For example, the competitors storiesonboard offers a "User Story Mapping for beginners" guide. Something like this would be helpful for CardBoard users as well.
* UI could benefit from some additions, e.g. to allow to increase the card titles font.
Thank you for the review and suggestions for future improvements.
Overall, this has changed my teams approach of how we work with the business! It is a great interactive tool and our business stakeholders love walking through the roadmap and scope in this collaborative tool!
Pros
The software simply and quickly allows us to build the framework (skeleton/backbone) of the business process and how technology supports through through the power of cards. Through this process we able to quickly understand our knowledge gaps. The journey feature also provides focus during deeper discussions.
Cons
Most of the quirks were address in the latest update (biggest being the introduction of colors and new layouts). However, we still struggle with the printing capabilities and how if needed we need to share in a planning session.
Thank you for your review!
Anyone who has read the User Story Mapping book gets why a tool like CardBoard is great for doing/saving story maps. It did install easily and I got started quick enough.
In my searching/research, I eventually came across StoriesOnBoard, who also follow the tenets in Patton's book. However, they clearly have the imagination to take it further and built in better tools for managing multiple stories, etc. We ended up choosing SoB, despite the fact that (at the time) they didn't have TFS integration.
And while this wasn't a factor in my decision, the CEO himself did a late night (for him, in Europe) walk through demo with me to answer some of my questions.
Pros
I learned about CardBoard from book, User Story Mapping. I so wanted this to be more, but it's a basic implementation of story boarding. It did have TFS integration, which I wanted. I also loved the whole premise of a virtual board for doing story mapping with a remote team.
Cons
I found it to be too basic and not very imaginative in its implementation. Given that we'd want to use it with multiple stories and have one place, I felt it didn't give us the tools to do that.
I found the software quite useful for basic storyboarding and brainstorming new projects. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of the JIRA integration and the nature of the work I'm doing, it just wasn't useful for anything other than large/complicated projects that need a fair amount of planning and it could only be used in the initial stages. Once I had the list of story "slugs" it was better to manually migrate the list over to JIRA and cease using Cardboard.
Pros
I quite liked the intuitive interface and ease of storyboarding things.
Cons
The JIRA integration left something to be desired. The software did not do a good job of informing me of what it would do when I synced the two. It was also not clear to me that this was not a constant sync. Changes in one product were not automatically migrated over to the other. This was especially problematic because later syncs of the stories and epics caused duplicates of the previously synchronized items to appear because the system did not identify previously sync'd stories.
I stumbled upon CardBoard a long time ago (2011) when I wanted an easy way to capture a Story Map. I really liked how easy it was to drop cards, move them around, and add some comments. The Team really enjoyed the look and feel of it. It did what we wanted and nothing more. I'm not a heavy user of it, but when I do need to put together a Story Map, CardBoard is what I turn to.
Pros
The simplicity of the tool, it provided me with what I wanted and did not over complicate it with features I did not need.
Cons
The export to excel option was pretty messy, but then again why export it?
What I wanted was a way to capture the full board visually to put into a document or communication, to show the overall Story Map (which I could not get in screen shots) I realize I could provide a link to the board for people to access and see the actual Map, but sometimes you just want a picture of it to support a communication.
$8 - $12 per user per month
Below are some frequently asked questions for CardBoard.
CardBoard offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: USD 8.00/month
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Free Trial: Available
$8 - $12 per user per month
CardBoard offers the following features:
CardBoard has the following typical customers:
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Small Business
CardBoard supports the following languages:
English
CardBoard has the following pricing plans:
Free, Subscription
We do not have any information about what devices CardBoard supports
CardBoard integrates with the following applications:
Atlassian Confluence, JIRA Software, Pivotal Tracker, VersionOne
CardBoard offers the following support options:
FAQs, Online Support, Phone Support
I've become interested in product management and read about User Story Mapping technique. Then I googled for a story mapping software and that's how I got to CardBoard. I tried it for a few of my own projects and it worked nice! I was able to create a visual backlog of things I had to do, and track my progress against the backlog. Everything was very transparent and easy to understand, so I highly recommend learning Story Mapping and trying Cardboard to everybody.