Help participants navigate through sections and activities.
Your template will be the home for a visually collaborative experience. Consider how you want participants to move through that digital space. Depending upon the activities in your template, you can incorporate simple design elements that make your template into a visual journey.
When viewing your mural, participants will enter and scan the space to understand the activities and experience. You can arrange elements in the mural to show the order of importance while they review the content. This is a design principle called visual hierarchy, and you can use these key principles to make your activities easy to follow while completely zoomed out or focused on the details.
This Service Blueprint Template uses color coding to organize information. The MURAL creator included a key in this template for any participant to follow and use during a meeting. If you follow this practice, include a legend to demonstrate the meaning for each element.
We recommend ordering activities left to right as the group progresses through activities like we see in the Weekly Team Retrospective. However, we’ve seen incredible templates organized top to bottom, like this Design Sprint Room. You can even use a target approach like this Challenge Wheel template.
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- Hi, Emilia here. Let's look at some good and some bad examples of template design and get your creative juices flowing. This is an Ideation template that was probably designed about four or five years ago or something. So this template definitely has a couple of years on its neck already. And some things that we learned since designing these templates is that, it's usually good to make the numbers and the titles larger so that you're able to see them and navigate when you're fully zoomed out.
Because when I look at this template now, when I'm zoomed out then I can see the whole template at the same time. It's very hard to see what the numbers are without zooming in. So it's really difficult for me from just looking at this template, understanding what order I should complete the activities. And also since the activities are placed kind of in the square with apparently, this is step one. And then here we have step two, then up here step three and step four, by moving in this kind of irregular way where we first go start up here and then we go down and then we go up and then we go down again, instead of doing this, it's usually better to move in one direction continuously. So rather moving from the left to the right or up or down or from the inside and out then changing direction too much. So an example of how this might be done in a better way.
Another template that completes pretty much the same job as the Ideation template is the Lightning Decision Jam template. There are still some steps where we go, we start in the top and then go down and then we go up again but it's much easier to follow the order since we have these huge, clear, number of boxes before each of the activities, so this is to see in which order we should complete the steps. And they're even some arrows and things that kind of pointing us in different directions.
So that really helps navigate around the canvas. So making the numbers and titles really large and easy to read really makes a big difference when it comes to navigating a template. So another example of a template that has done a better job is the Project Planning template. So here we have really large titles that are instituted when zoomed out. They're also making a great use of icons to illustrate the purpose of the different sections.
There are also some sticky notes here in different colors which makes it look much more fun and engaging. And it really kind of gives you this urge of starting to add text into the sticky notes and complete the activity. And they're also nice frames around each of the sections, so that it's easy for people to understand where they're expected to have the right ideas and kind of gives you an idea of how much content you're expected to add here as well. So, this is a very nice template that I really recommend trying out.
With good UX in a template, even the most complex methods can become easy to use. So in this example, we're looking at the Service Blueprint template. So this is the template that you can use to map your user's experience next to the customer's experience, to identify opportunities to improve the experience for both. So in this example, you can see how on the left side here we have a legend written, find out what each of the sticky note colors are for. And in the actual blueprint over here, you can actually find examples of what, complete examples of these different items look like. So for touchpoints here, for example we have the blue sticky note representing the touch points and then you can actually find here in the template a couple of examples of what this look template, what these touchpoints could be. We also said that we have things such as arrows. We have tips indicating how to use the different sections of the mural. We have different tips and hints sections that you can delete later.
So, think through how to use these different elements to make it easier for the practitioners to use your template. Think about how to use the color to guide your participants. Think about how to include examples that show what good looks like, but the good example of an answer would be look for this activity. And also use arrows and lines that help guide your participants through the canvas.
