How to Collaborate with Other Designers on Voiceflow

Collaborating with other designers is essential when designing a conversational assistant. By working with other designers, you can tap into a variety of different perspectives and skillsets, which can help you create a more comprehensive and effective design.

Many of Voiceflow's collaborative features are created with designer collaboration and conversational design practices in mind. 

Live Canvas Collaboration

With live canvas collaboration, all team members can see updates in real-time as they are made. This means that designers can work together seamlessly, without needing to wait for updates or worry about version control.

• Live cursors are used to indicate the cursor positions of every team member while working on the canvas. This can prevent multiple designers from interfering with each other during the design process, and help facilitate team meetings by drawing attention to a particular area of the canvas. 

• Canvas markup and commenting abilities allow designers to leave feedback and additional contextual notes directly onto the design canvas on a singular source of truth document within Voiceflow. Whether you want to add a sticky note to a group of blocks, attach an image to illustrate the conversational logic, or start a comment thread conversation with other designers, Voiceflow retains all relevant information to enable well-documented collaboration efforts. Learn more about canvas markup and commenting capabilities. 

Visual, Intuitive Design Interface

Voiceflow's drag-and-drop interface is created for designers to better ideate, create, collaborate and test their work on a visually engaging platform.

• Standardized functional steps as the building blocks of a conversational assistant allow for a systemic characterization of assistant behaviour. No more shapes or coloured blocks that require legends or context - Voiceflow's built-in Chat and Voice steps are concisely configured to carry out well-defined actions like asking for user input and responding to the user. Every type of step on the canvas is well-documented and distinctly represented so that any designer can clearly understand the assistant's behaviour. 

• Dynamic flowchart navigation when testing the assistant in Voiceflow allows conversational designers to easily follow a conversation flow in a complex assistant. Instead of painstakingly tracing the steps leading up to a point in the conversational flow, Voiceflow seamlessly follows the pace of the conversation by highlighting the block being traversed in the testing conversation, greatly supporting debugging efforts and designer clarity.

• Domains, topics, subtopics and components are part of Voiceflow's organizational system that separates it from other static conversational design options. Much like breaking apart subpages of a complex website or mechanical components of a physical mechanism, Voiceflow streamlines designer collaboration and neatly breaks down a complex assistant into multiple conversational flows and folders. Learn more about assistant management here 

Personas and Assistant Transcript Overview

Before you start designing your conversational interface, it's important to understand your users' needs, goals, and preferences. Voiceflow allows multiple team members to collaborate on user research, gather insights, and document them in a central source of truth on the assistant canvas. This can help ensure that the team has a shared understanding of the users' needs and goals, by mapping these attributes to personas and evaluating user testing transcripts to update flows with ease. 

• Personas are important because they help designers create conversational interfaces that are tailored to the specific needs and expectations of the users. In Voiceflow, personas are represented by a grouped set of Variable States that represent different user attributes in the form of variables. During user testing, designers can configure the prototype to take on a specific persona to test how the conversational interface responds to different user types. Learn more about collaborating and using prototypes in user testing here.
• Transcripts overview and markup capabilities allow designers to develop a shared understanding of the user's experience with the chat assistant. By reviewing transcripts together, designers can gain insights into what worked well and what needs improvement by sorting user testing conversations and reviewing user utterances, intent matches and failures