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Visual collaboration occurs at every stage of the workflow. It is a series of connected activities, like brainstorming and synthesizing ideas or visualizing customer journeys, that lead businesses toward constant innovation. By using visuals or a shared digital space, teams across the business can effectively communicate and collaborate asynchronously and in real-time. They can turn the shared canvas into a living blueprint containing their ideas, plans, and designs to make impactful changes and create new solutions that provide value to the business and their customers.
What are the benefits of visual collaboration?
Research shows that implementing collaborative techniques can increase productivity by up to 30%, either through technology or other processes. By leveraging the power of visuals, teams can unlock new ways of thinking and problem-solving to meet company goals and achieve business objectives.
Visual collaboration tools can provide a visual point of reference for teams to communicate complex or big ideas across remote or dispersed teams. By creating a consistent touchpoint for communication, team members are able to better understand the connection between ongoing initiatives and larger strategic goals or structures.
Visual collaboration also improves workplace efficiency by empowering teams to create a single source of truth that members can reference to align quicker and make informed decisions at any time. Because of this, collaboration is no longer limited to a real-time discussion or slow-to-respond email threads where important information may fall through the cracks. Anyone can participate simultaneously, increasing employee engagement and organizational efficiency.
If you’re thinking about implementing visual collaboration with your teams, consider these five top visual collaboration tools in 2024.
1. Lucid Software
Overview
Lucid Software provides users with the most intelligent platform to visualize, plan, and build their business with its award-winning products, Lucidspark, Lucidchart and Lucidscale. It is a leader in visual collaboration software with the mission to help teams see and build the future through the power of visuals. By capturing and collaborating visually, teams can develop a living blueprint, keeping everyone aligned to deliver the highest impact work.
It can cover every phase of the collaborative process, from ideation to planning and execution of projects. By collaborating visually through Lucid, teams can organically develop a visual documentation of the business to keep all members aligned so everyone can align quicker, communicate complex ideas and improve decision-making regardless of location or time zone. By capturing and collaborating on an end-to-end workflow, they can create a comprehensive picture of the business to innovate faster.
According to a study by Forrester Consulting, using the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite has saved teams $758,000 in operating expenses and 146,000 hours of follow-up meetings, proving it is the standard among enterprises with over 70 million users globally and over 100 integrations to better streamline workflows.
Lucid Software is the only FedRAMP Authorized visual collaboration platform, validating its security and reliability to help teams in the public sector and government meet mission objectives in an engaging, intuitive, and collaborative way. It has passed the security levels and compliance review, ensuring data protection for confidential information.
Key Features
Collaborative AI
Teams can generate ideas that spark creativity through Collaborative AI in Lucidspark and Lucidchart. Whether you’re kicking off a brainstorm activity or just need additional inspiration, you can enter relevant keywords and Collaborative AI will automatically populate related ideas on the digital canvas as sticky notes. It can also generate more ideas and sort them, moving sticky notes into categories within Containers so teams can see the big picture as ideas take shape. AI can also assist in summarizing and consolidating key information to fast-track productivity.
Data-Backed Visualizations
Lucid connects visuals with data so users can spot insights easily that they would otherwise miss. Lucidspark, in particular, provides a virtual whiteboard where teams can work together creatively in real time, regardless of their location. It helps them organize all notes, scribbles, or ideas into presentation-ready concepts and plans for faster approval to get buy-in and alignment without losing momentum.
Lucidchart, on the other hand, can help users diagram teams, processes, and systems. It can provide important metrics through data linking. Users can collaborate in real time through the in-editor chat, shape-specific comments, and collaborative cursors.
Automation
Lucid can automate the creation of visuals and generate organizational charts, ERDs, cloud architecture visualization and more. Teams can visually interact with large language models, like ChatGPT, to generate a Lucidchart diagram without writing code or test different models, prompts, and inputs to help users visualize complex ideas faster and clearer through an editable AI diagram.
Integrations
Lucid supports over 100 integrations for innovation and productivity, keeping workflows collaborative and transparent so teams can move forward with shared understanding, confidence, and clear communication. A few notable integrations include Google, Microsoft, Atlassian, AWS and more. It keeps teams agile as it houses all tools in one virtual workspace, making it a top choice for asynchronous collaboration.
Lucid Software provides versatile, scalable, and user-friendly visual collaboration tools supporting any use case across an organization. It empowers global teams to connect, engage, and successfully execute their goals while also keeping data private, safe, and secure, evidenced by compliance certifications. It promotes seamless collaboration, leaving a space for teams to innovate at fast speed with features that drive productivity and improve efficiency.
2. FigJam
Overview
FigJam empowers teams to build products together. It is an online virtual whiteboard with tools for visual collaboration so users can brainstorm, plan, and move work forward in real time and in one place. Teams at Spotify, Netflix, and Stripe trust it. It also offers an iPad app where users can sketch out thoughts or play around with ideas more comfortably, especially with an Apple Pencil.
Key Features
FigJam features a drag-and-drop interface, making it extremely easy to use with fun touches like stickers, emotes, and high-fives, so all team members feel welcome and encouraged to explore creative ways to collaborate on a virtual whiteboard. Users can set a timer and jam to music, even invite other members to join the space for 24 hours with no login required.
It also contains over 300 pre-designed templates so teams can kickstart conversations and projects. From customer journey maps to project timelines, FigJam can provide a particular model to drive teams into action. It also features an AI assistant to automate the creation of templates or visualization of timelines. It can also summarize the team’s output into clear action items with a single click.
Teams can collaborate in real time with audio, live chat, or comments to give feedback on the go. They can also put a user on Spotlight mode to guide other participants on what content to focus on. The virtual whiteboard is seamlessly connected to Figma, its sister design platform, making all assets available for creative use. It also connects to more user insights, data visualization, and prototyping tools. Overall, it offers a fun and easy way to think outside of the box with widgets to keep teams entertained. It is a versatile solution for visual collaboration, available at a reasonable price.
3. Miro
Overview
Miro provides a creative and collaborative edge for teams of every size to build out their vision. It has ready-to-use native capabilities for all stages of innovation. It connects with over 130+ apps, streamlining workflows in one scalable, secure, and shared workspace.
The visual collaboration tool offers enterprise-grade functionality and controls to manage the administration of teams and users. It is built with global security standards in mind, featuring policies, tools, and procedures to protect data and meet global privacy obligations like GDPR and CCPA.
Key Features
Miro brings together slides, real-time data visualization, action items, and diagrams so teams can become more engaged and productive for deep collaborative work. It provides a user-friendly, intuitive workspace for diagramming and process mapping.
Miro also features capabilities to manage end-to-end product development workflows in a visual and collaborative surface. It can help teams align faster so they can deliver world-class solutions at speed. Teams can visualize complex systems, ideas, and organizational structures to bring products and software to market more efficiently.
The software has Miro Assist that uses the board content to help teams work faster like summarizing sticky notes or generating sequence diagrams from plain text. Teams can automate tedious tasks so they can instead focus on more value-driven work.
4. Mural
Overview
Mural is a flexible and visual work platform designed for collaboration. It can provide the big picture, eliminating silos among distributed teams. Trusted by the world’s most security-conscious enterprises, it complies with GDPR and CCPA regulations, keeping data and employees secure.
Key Features
Mural can scale to the space requirements of teams. It provides infinite and resizable canvas options so users have a flexible space to brainstorm, tackle action items, and attach helpful links. They can also add sticky notes and text, even change the colors and cluster these elements to keep everything organized in a shared and dynamic visual environment.
Admins can set flexible permissions to control access among teams with view-only, edit, and facilitator settings, ensuring no detail of the canvas gets altered by unauthorized users. Mural offers multiple ways to connect and communicate with teams: sharing, commenting, and text chat. It also features facilitation superpowers like super locks or summoning participants.
Mural integrates with existing productivity tools like Google Drive, Spreadsheets, and Airtable and contains hundreds of built-in templates to jumpstart visual collaboration sessions. It is easy to use with enterprise-grade security and centralized control for managing collaborators.
It now has an AI service to help teams explore new ideas so they can iterate faster. It is designed to align with human values through the operation, meaning the users get to decide the inputs and approve the outputs. Overall, Mural suits organizations in need of a standard visual collaboration tool with premium admin management.
5. ClickUp
Overview
ClickUp gives users the flexibility and control to organize everything. It eliminates app chaos, consolidates tools, and cuts costs for over 2 million teams. It is an award-winning, all-in-one productivity platform, free to use with 100MB storage.
ClickUp is hosted entirely on Amazon Web Services, with end-to-end security and privacy features built into it. Moreover, it has SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, ensuring compliance with data privacy laws.
It offers an Enterprise plan for large-scale organizations with over a thousand integrations, more automation and team features, advanced controls and permissions, etc. It can accommodate an unlimited number of teams and can act as a white-label solution to match the brand identity of companies, from their logo to their colors.
Key Features
Teams can do their task management, project tracking, and workflow visualization with the 15+ customizable views of ClickUp. These views come with flexible sorting, filtering, and grouping options to keep tasks or projects organized. From workload and timeline to activity and Gantt, it can provide the insights users need to stay on top of their deadlines and improve transparency among different teams.
ClickUp contains pre-built automation to streamline workflows like assigning of tasks, posting comments, and moving statuses. It can also automate the abilities of external apps, bringing all operations into a single, shared workflow. Teams can automate over 50 actions and set the exact conditions for the automation to trigger.
ClickApps are additional productivity tools for work management, collaboration, organization, and reporting to keep all work in one place, eliminating app fatigue and reducing costs spent on third-party applications.
Conclusion
Visual collaboration aligns teams, accelerates innovation, and scales significant initiatives. Each of these tools exhibits a unique advantage over the other. Yet, all of them can provide the flexibility to brainstorm ideas or plan projects based on their ability to visualize data.
Choose from the top 5 best visual collaboration tools in 2024 and create a space for teams to engage and innovate. Surviving the digital space often requires complex or multi-pronged projects that are difficult to translate by text alone. Simplify the process by using visuals to invite new ways of thinking so teams can create new solutions that drive value for the business.
