ux jam session x miro — Lauren Nihill

During our UX Jam Session last week, I asked our group to do some UX research and give feedback about a new advertising and branding campaign microsite that we’re currently working on. They gladly pointed out accessibility issues, design and layout recommendations, and how to improve the user experience of the site. In case you’re unfamiliar with UX Jam Sessions (I was at first!), here’s a great article on how to conduct one with your team.

For the next step, I used a Miro board to compile the results, and I felt this was the fun part. Miro is a digital whiteboard that can be used in realtime for collaboration, research, building, planning, and so much more. I took screenshots of all the pages and used sticky notes to indicate the feedback for different sections under labels like “UX/UI,” “Design/Layout,” and “Comments.”

Here is a live link of the board https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVNYQvfr4=/ and I put a screenshot below of visually how it turned out. I then presented this back to the new ad campaign team to go through all the feedback, and is felt so seamless to go through. I even started adding their comments to some of the sticky notes! Because it is a live board we can iterate and others can reference it at any time.

What did I learn from this? Miro is not only a great tool for team collaboration, but archiving, cross-team collaboration, and keeping track of all the “things” especially visually artifacts, in a project. I can’t wait to create more miro boards. The more I use it, the more I find different use cases for it including for ice breakers, Kanban boards, workspaces, product planning, frameworks (e.g., SWOT Analysis) , vision boarding, and really so many more possibilities. As I continue to use it and explore I will give updates on this blog.

Miro can also generate new ideas, and questions when you’re brainstorming or ideating. I used one of their brainstorm templates to explore topics related to “UX Best Practices” and this was the map it gave me. You could continue to expand the ideas by asking an additional question and prompting the AI to generate more ideas or questions. I love this!

Miro also have a wire framing library built-in. You can easily build a wireframe for a website, tablet or mobile phone by simply selecting the [+] More Apps icon, and it gives you components and icons for mapping the user journey. There's so many great features with the just the free version, and you get three boards! That’s great for the basic UX purposes for any project or experimentation.

I think Miro could be used for lots of personal projects, as well. I would love to use this for trip planning, digital bullet journal tracking, sketching, brainstorming and ideating, collecting photos, etc.

☕ What I’m Drinking: Taro Milk Tea

🎧 What I’m Listening to: NewJeans 2nd EP “Get Up” and Erika de Casier “Essentials” who is the writer for many of the NewJeans songs!

📺 What I’m Watching: Beetlejuice (1988)