Creating an innovative and engaging user experience is critical for any customer-facing product/service. In order to execute this ideal user experience, you need a detailed and accurate vision. Creating a strong vision for your UX design requires juggling many different elements and balancing them within your ecosystem, something that can be difficult through traditional collaboration methods.
In this guide, we will discuss why using online whiteboards enhances your ability to craft the perfect UX design vision and the specific strategies you can use to create it.
What is UX vision and why it’s important
It’s important to remember what defines UX and implement that into an effective UX vision. User experience is not only the buttons people press, and the pages they follow, but their emotions, perspective, and intentions while interacting with your page.
The purpose of a UX vision is to manifest a customer-centric design approach that you can align an entire business model around. By aligning UX strategies across multiple different aspects of your business, you can ensure every interaction possible customers have with your product/service emphasizes your values and brand identity.
This vision sets a benchmark for every design choice you make and creates congruence between different aspects of your product/service. By ensuring the congruence of UX vision, you inherently evaluate how likely these changes are to reinforce your brand identity. This is what the design vision is in the first place: it is a framework of an ideal future state.
Creating and operating from a consistent and accurate vision is important for any potential opportunity to transition to success, and is equally as important when you consider UX/UI elements because you are manipulating the visual elements that customers interact with. For other scenarios outside of UI/UX and direct product involvement, preparing and executing a business plan is involved with the behind-the-scenes elements and structural changes that accompany an overall shift in dynamic.
When you talk about UX, however, all of these changes directly impact the visual element that customers interact with every day. Because of this, having a shared tool that helps visualize all of your changes and plans is critical in achieving a successful vision.
How online whiteboards enable UX improvement
Online whiteboards serve as the perfect tool for design teams to utilize in order to organize, plan, and execute their UX vision. By providing a shared space that incorporates collaboration on visual elements, they embody the perfect platform to successfully achieve your vision.
If you aren’t already familiar with online whiteboards, here is how online whiteboards are defined on Fresco: “A shared, online workspace where teams can utilize visual elements in order to express ideas and collaborate together. The purpose of these virtual whiteboards is to visualize ideas, communicate with your team, and teach concepts to groups in collaboration.
As you can tell, online whiteboards enable teams to work together on a shared space where they can interchange visual elements and collaborate instantaneously. This collaborative environment is ideal for teams looking to align their assumptions and ideas regarding their UX vision. Below we will talk about some specific online whiteboard strategies that allow your design team to execute a UX vision.
Monitor market trends
The UX/UI landscape is ever-changing and often informed by the field. It is a place where small details are important to set you apart but not so much that you become unrecognizable. Having your finger on the pulse of the ecosystem is vital in determining exactly where to position yourself. This is not to say that you should copy market trends, but merely follow them closely, utilizing elements that fit your design and omitting ones that take away from it.
Being able to read the ecosystem for market trends to implement and improve your experience is a big part of making UX innovative and impactful. Reading market trends is easiest on an online whiteboard, where you have the ability to utilize pre-made structure in order to guide your assessment of the current trends, where they’re leading, and how you can most efficiently implement them.
Knowing and documenting these trends is a critical part in ensuring your UX design is targeted towards creating an enjoyable experience, and using online whiteboards ensures just that.
Storyboarding & project planning
Being able to create powerful UX features not only depends on the physical change you make to your experience, but it starts much earlier when you begin brainstorming and planning for that sprint. Utilizing a planning board such as a storyboard or a project planning template can be vital in demonstrating how exactly your user will experience the specific change you are presenting.
The actual user’s experience is at the center of any physical UX changes. They are, after all, purposefully trying to change this experience. It can be foolish, however, to assume that changing features will directly change the experience. In order to ensure that product/service changes will impact the experience of the customer, it’s vital to plan out the experiential changes that you desire and work backward from there to tweak the features that allow that process to occur.
Altering features is only the vehicle that is used in order to change a customer’s experience, and because of that it’s extremely important to map out all these experiential changes before committing to certain features. Using online whiteboards makes locating and defining these changes easier than ever with planning boards such as storyboarding and project planning.
Design evolution
While making all of your changes with visual aspects to your collaboration is important and possible thanks to online whiteboards, sometimes it can be equally important to visualize all of your changes traditionally and then implement them in a visual format. This is especially important in the very early stages of development when you aren’t quite sure how your final vision will look or feel.
Templates like design evolution boards are very effective at creating simple and separate design iterations to help teams organize and plan the future product they’re moving towards. On these boards, you are able to think about a current design solution and iterate future possibilities until you reach the end product that fulfills your UX vision.
Being able to map out your journey to a final product is critical in ensuring the quality and accuracy that the project is completed. You can use design evolution boards before the project deadline in order to best achieve your specific goals and create visual aids based on your design guidelines.
Without this, you can forget key aspects until late in the production phase or miss out on other key opportunities for improvement, and with UX features every detail counts. For these reasons, we suggest that design evolution boards be completed prior to your sprint to iron out all the details of your project.
Conclusion
Creating a UX vision that aligns with your brand identity and corresponds to the rest of your design guidelines is a critical part to ensure positive customer relations. Using online whiteboards helps ensure that you have a common understanding on this vision and can proceed with the best possible UX design.
This post
was contributed by Paul VanZandt from Fresco — Fresco is a startup focused on providing unique visual collaboration solutions and expanding the potential of virtual whiteboards.
