How to collaborate faster in Voiceflow

Imagine this : a new requirement on a new enhancement flow from your PM comes in for your conversational assistant. Your Conversation Design (CxD) team then goes off and creates a detailed design for review and approvals. It then gets passed over to development only to be placed in the backlog based on other competing priorities.

Two months later, the dev team comes back with additional questions but communicates that feedback in a wide range of places: Jira, Figma, email, Slack, Excel.

Traditionally, “collaborating” on designs meant sifting through email inboxes and threads, notes on flowcharts, diagrams and excel files, and meeting notes, to locate and collate conversation-design feedback. It was a tedious process with less than ideal outcomes as comments would be easily lost or overlooked; not to mention the lead times due to inefficient tooling and collaboration stack.

The degrees of separation between where conversation & assistant design happens and where feedback & collaboration were collected, often meant communications and design collaboration often fell out of sync.

The power of real-time collaboration on Voiceflow completely improves this workflow.

Setting the stage

Conversational AI teams and assistant designers are opening up. They’re welcoming non-designers into their process. They’re co-editing with teammates. They’re sharing their prototypes, gathering stakeholder feedback, conducting user testing, and improving interaction models.

Ultimately, they’re setting a new standard for collaboration in conversational AI.

Beyond crafting interfaces, designers must also collaborate with team members and stakeholders, build systems, manage feedback, and consistently iterate to keep the process running smoothly.

Being able to work on the same file at the same time is fundamental to true collaboration and effective conversation design. Without it, working as a team on a big assistant can be cumbersome and slow.

Introducing Voiceflow’s new & improved real-time canvas collaboration!

Our new and improved real time collaboration (RTC) allows for a faster real-time canvas experience, more granular undo and redo canvas actions, and smoother live cursors!  

With these updates, our RTC ensures that less time is wasted waiting for a conversation designer to finish designing a project or interacting on the Voiceflow canvas. This is in addition to all the prior fundamental collaboration features including sharing and commenting.

This means designers, developers, data scientists, and even client stakeholders can now hop in and out of a project and collaborate in a faster and smoother way.

What’s new?

Live Cursors!

The first thing you’ll notice when you’re collaborating with someone is their mouse cursor. We show the cursor and selection of all active participants because it provides important context. Who else is here? Where are they working? Cursors can come in handy for other things too, such as waving your cursor around to get someone’s attention or placing your cursor by an object to point at it.

Undo / Redo Features!

Flexible undoing and redoing can make sure you’re able to work freely on the canvas. In this new RTC release, the undo and redo feature allows you to back or forward track on the most granular changes. Best of all, it is local to you and your work - making versioning and changes seamless in a collaborative workflow.

The Bread & Butter of Voiceflow Collaboration

Sharing Designs & Prototypes

Voiceflow allows you to share your design/prototype via a link or you can invite a specific stakeholder to collaborate. Now you can share your designs with clients or stakeholders to get feedback or to show the progress you've been making — all in real-time!

Learn more about sharing here.

Commenting, Threads and Reviews

Comments in Voiceflow enable conversation designers and other collaborators to have actionable and meaningful collaboration right in the design file.

Voiceflow tightens feedback loops by keeping correspondence right where the action happens. A dedicated comment mode means Voiceflow designers can easily review, respond to, and resolve feedback without leaving the canvas. This makes iterating and editing the assistant/conversation based on the feedback way easier.

Learn more about Comments on Voiceflow here.

Conclusion

Conversation designers know first-hand how hard effective collaboration can be. From functional silos to content chaos, the assistant and conversation design process is made up of many moving parts.

With these latest improvements, workspace owners can invite other users to open, edit, and collaborate on the Voiceflow Canvas in real-time. Collaboration is powerful, especially in the highly collaborative and user-centric space of conversation design.


Voiceflow’s RTC helps to say goodbye to messy email threads, flowchart notes, diagrams, and excel files — making the barrier to collaboration lower than ever before. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

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