“Kanban” is the Japanese word for “visual signal.” If you work in services or technology, your work is often times invisible and intangible. A kanban board helps make your work visible so you can show it to others and keep everyone on the same page.-Atlassian, https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban/boards
Kanban originated in the world of automotive manufacturing at Toyota, by way of Japanese industrial engineer Taiichi Ohno. Over time, many great technologists have shaped the Kanban method to be an effective tool for agile software development.
A Kanban board can be summarized simply by three main features: columns, cards, and continuous improvement. These features provide clarity and quick visualizations of progress for everyone involved in making great products. The beauty of the Kanban method is that it provides consistent guidelines for efficiency paired with the flexibility to adapt it for your specific team members and structure. I’ll dive into more detail on the guidelines and flexibility later on in the post.
Kanban is a method within Agile based on visualizing work, often on a physical or digital board where all projects and work items are transparently shared and seen by the team, often on task cards. People within UX teams using Kanban focus on limiting work in progress and finding efficient ways to get from start to finish. Kanban’s major focus is process and flow of work within the team.
UX designers often have a series of steps in what they do and the customer-first experiences they create and deliver. The order in which designers “design” may change depending on the person, but the same deliverables and stages are often synonymous throughout the UX design industry.
The Kanban methodology is a process-focused approach that allows UX designers to build cards or tasks that can be visible to other members of the UX design or cross-disciplinary team, often on what’s called a Kanban board. To use Kanban, honest and transparent tasks are required to keep the flow of work moving in the right direction.
For example, a UX designer might build visual task cards for: