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Since I get to meet InVision I've been amazed how technology has been improving design process and workflows. I remember when I start working as project manager the most popular tools availables were excel, MS project and some other more complex like SAP. Now with the amount of tools out there it can simply drive you to decision fatigue and probably end it up getting back to long spreadsheets to manage time, scope, tasks, time tracking, etc, etc, etc.
During my first job in an Agency (DigitasLBi) the use of spreadsheets for almost everything was a daily bread. From requirements and blueprinting to launch control! Almost every stage of a project has its own excel hosted in drive or dropbox and ready to be update it by the whole team.
Do we have the User research documentation?
Last week discussing a couple of ideas with Felipe (our drupal front end dev) he mention to use Trello to track a couple of project tasks. So I sat down to set up the project and I was thinking how to integrate all our project management, design, AI and development tasks/tools into a single place. Thats where the idea pops ups! during the reading of this article about Design drive project management my mind start thinking about improvement and agilization from my previous experience in the AEC industry.
What about if we can have InVision as the app to go for all our design and development projects? (The BIM for Design projects)
What Is BIM | Building Information Modeling | Autodesk_Why BIM matters to your business Whether you're looking to comply with government and commercial BIM mandates, or you…_www.autodesk.com
So after this brainstorming in front of trello I remember how BIM has become the app/process to go for AEC projects(I spend three years studying Architecture). Every Architecture and design studio have BIM as a must for every project and architect. So what about to build something alike with invision for UX? I know some people would love it, some would hate it, but for me the most important thing is to create something in collaboration to simplify our lives, to collaborate across the team and work smart!
“Any fool can write code that computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand David H(Rails creator)”
Let's get straight to the point! right now Invision allows us to assign screens, tracks time, comment on a prototype and drag tasks(please let me know if I'm missing any other feature). That’s cool! but I would like to propose the idea to integrate User Stories, User workflows and Information architecture plus Zeplin and Github into Invision.
BIM proposal for AEC projects is the PLAN+DESIGN+BUILD+MANAGE workflow to increase productivity through a centralized platform to manage the E2E process in real time collaboration with all the project team and stakeholders.
In our case lets propose the same thing but lets try to set up a simple architecture to integrate it:
PLAN:
I know a lot of people storing user stories in a spreadsheet under the agile format: _As a <type of user>, I want <some goal> so that <some reason>._What about to have a similar feature where I can store my user stories within invision and I can Assign each one to the prototype feature that way the UX designer can validate each user stories within the visual design and discussed with the client/stakeholder through liveshare!
User flows; would be awesome to assign a screen to the diagram, that way it will illustrate where in the flow the screen is located.
Information architecture is still under development! (I have so many ideas on this that I would discuss it later) but what about to store our IA diagrams and integrate them with the visual design, so we can have the UX designer communicating to the visual designer how the digital product should be and in the same way the developer understand how everything is created before it knock his door through Zeplin
DESIGN:
Let’s take the wireframing, integrate the user flow and add it into the Invision with the visual design and make it a prototype! (Sketch, Adobe UX, PS, AI, justinmind, use your favorite)
BUILD:
Invision definitely needs a way to communicate prototypes with tools like Zeplin or Sympli. Once the prototype is approved we need to easily send the assets to any of this tools that way we can speed up the front end development and move forward to the versioning in Git (Yes I think designers should be in git as well)
Manage:
If we can communicate Invision to Zeplin or Sympli what about if we can have the front end developer pushing their code into git and have Git communicating to Invision. That way the UX designer or the project manager can keep track even for the development process, or if the project is on Agile UX we can keep the backlog updated for real time communication for the whole project team and stakeholders. So that every time they have a stand up meeting through liveshare they keep track on the development stage as well.
So what are our next steps?
All this ideas comes from a couple of conversations within our team on how would be the best way to improve our workflow to increase our productivity and collaboration.
We would love to see this happening however without an Invision api would be difficult to accomplish it! Meanwhile we will try to set it up with Zapier .
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