Think of your design as a child that wants to grow up and become an astronaut. Your voice and tone can be loud, outgoing, and optimistic Step 5: Direction If your style is bright, bold, and youthful. Then choose 4 that best align with your emotions and style. Similar to step three brainstorm 8 adjectives that define how you want people to perceive your mood. The voice is the personality of your mood. Here are some popular keywords to get you started: You don’t want to have too many so after you’ve jotted down some adjectives remove as many as necessary until you have only 4 keywords that complement each other. On sticky notes, on a whiteboard or in your notebook jot down as many adjectives that define the style you want to achieve. The visual style is how the design should look, the fonts you’ll use, the colors and photography. The emotion the mood board triggers should align with your mood statements. These emotions are what people should feel when looking at your mood board. Highlight the emotion in each of your mood statements or write them down separately depending on how many user personas you have you will end up with 2–5 emotions. Now that you have all your mood statements you can set the mood by defining an emotional response. Product/Service: What feature is the persona interacting with when creating an emotional response. Verb: What action is the persona taking that triggers this emotion? Noun: The noun is a user persona make a mood statement per personaĪdjective: The adjective is an emotion, a feeling. Mood statements are short sentences that define how your user should feel when interacting with your product service or feature. “A mood is a temporary state of mind or feeling.” Before we get into the statements it's important to know what a mood is, according to Oxford dictionary The first step of your mood board is to define user-centered mood statements. See what competitors are doing wrong and what they are doing right: conduct a competitive audit.

Look for market standards in color psychology, typography, and overall design. Pay close attention and look for keywords most clients use terms like clean which tends to mean lots of negative space and organized layout they just don’t know our design lingo. What should the product look like? How should it feel? These are questions you should be asking stakeholders. Ask for brand guidelines, if there is none don’t be afraid to ask for visual design references. Before starting on a mood board make sure you have enough insight on your audience it’s best to define personas first.Ĭonduct stakeholder interviews. Here are a few tips before getting started on your mood board:Ĭonduct user research. As everything in user experience design your mood board should be focused on meeting user needs and problem-solving.

In UX Design and product design, a mood board is a collage of images, fonts, interactions, features, icons, and UI elements to communicate the artistic direction of a project. It helps designers and stakeholders get on the same page for the visual aspects of the project. Setting the mood is a very important step for any design project.

A UX guide to designing better mood boards

Mood board