Reimagine remote collaboration using UX Blueprint
With all of us working from home due to the pandemic, we are at a point where remote collaboration is just becoming a norm. The problem brings opportunity, so we must take this opportunity to make remote collaboration even more efficient using great online tools. In my previous post, I discussed using MURAL or Miro to create UX Blueprint to deliver your spec. In this article, I will explore how you can efficiently collaborate using UX Blueprint.
Brainstorming
In a traditional meeting room, we meet with others in-person and brainstorm to get a common consensus. At the same time, this is an excellent way of getting things done; it has lots of limitations. For example, it is hard to set up an in-person meeting that works for everyone, and even if you manage to get one, it is hard to ensure everyone gets a voice, and not the big elephant in the room does all the talking. It is also extra work to take meeting notes and ensure you have interpreted it correctly.
Finally, email, slack, etc. work well to collect feedback, but it’s tough to keep track of the slew of feedback you receive.
With MURAL or Muro, you can collaborate with your team and collect feedback without dealing with emails and slack messages. Here are a few great benefits of using MURAL for collaboration:
- Your team can provide feedback on any aspect of the design by contextually posting their feedback on the canvas.
- All the feedback gets documented in one place.
- You can respond to their feedback one by one, which will ensure that all the comments and feedback are incorporated.
- You can synthesize all the ideas and come up with a strategy to address them.
Voting
Once you have all the ideas, you can use the voting feature and assign the number of votes to the participants to help you narrow down the ideas to a few that you can take to the next level. Voting is a great way to build consensus on your team.
Design Iterations
It’s very critical to keep all the changes in one place, so your team knows what has changed and why. Therefore, keep all the versions of the mocks on the board itself by just minimizing them and placing them close to the latest design. Ensure to provide a reason for the change and a time stamp. So, you can always go back to a previous version if needed for any discussion.
Copy for design
Bring your Copy designer onboard to Mural as well, so they can provide the final text on the board itself, and developers can take the text by simply copying from the Mural board. Having copy in the Mural board will also minimize back and forth with as the copy changes based on the feedback they receive.
Design spec
Finally, once your design is complete, and you have your Interaction and visual spec on the board, you can collaborate with the team in finetuning all the edge cases. There will be questions on various Interaction and visual patterns of your design, and you can discuss and finalize them on the board itself without having to set up a meeting to address them.
Final thoughts
That said, MURAL and Muro are yet another tool for us, and they are part of the popular tools we use, such as Figma and Sketch, and it’s extra work for us to get the mocks from these tools to the board. I wish Figma starts taking some of these great benefits and build these features into Figma, or Mural builds a way to integrate with these popular tools so changes in design will automatically appear on the board.
All the projects where my team has used UX Blueprint to deliver design spec and collaborate have shown very positive results with less confusion and higher quality products. Feel free to drop a note if you have any comments or questions.
