Top 10 Tips for Collaborating Remotely
Icons by Gregor Cresnar and i cons from the Noun Project
A curated list of best practices for designing with distributed teams
There’s a good chance that you, like many UX and product designers, are working from home in the days of COVID-19. For some of us, this requires a mindset shift and new habits. We all want to know: how can we stay connected, productive, and happy when everyone on our design team is working from a different location?
There are already countless well-written articles out there on how to design and collaborate remotely. So with this post, I’ve taken a different approach by curating a list of the best of the best tips out there. I’ve read through dozens of articles written about remote collaboration for design or product teams, as well as hundreds of recent Tweets (scroll to the end for links). I’ve complied the top 10 tips that were repeated over and over and organized them into three themes that emerged.
My own experience in remote collaboration and design comes from 8 years working on teams with people across multiple locations, as well as my current role as a UX consultant where I work from home most days. So I’ve included some of my personal experiences with these tried-and-true methods as well.
My hope is that we can turn a difficult time into an opportunity to learn from and support each other.
Theme #1: Today’s digital collaboration and design tools are truly ground-breaking
First, the good news: we are very fortunate to be in a field where we can work from home, and we live in a time with tools such as Figma, Mural, Miro, Trello, Zoom, Google Docs, and many, many others which allow us to collaborate with each other online. We can sketch, whiteboard, do post-it note brainstorming, and conduct user research online with little-to-no loss in the experience. I’m thankful that technology has come a long way in the years I’ve been working with distributed teams, and it’s getting better and better. Tools like Figma in particular are game changers in allowing us to literally see what our teammates are designing in realtime.
In addition, many of the articles I read pointed out that working remotely can end up having positive effects. Justin Huskey from Infinite Red, for instance, says that his fully distributed team “found that remote work makes for a better design process.” Take virtual whiteboards as an example. He writes:
“…we’ve noticed that virtual whiteboards can give everyone a better opportunity to contribute because no one person is dominating the board or conversation. This is incredibly important in giving everyone a voice so that we can drive better ideas and decision-making.”
Another good thing about remote collaboration that people pointed out? Instead of having to go online and digitize post-it notes or whiteboard scribbles later (a step that often gets forgotten), the team’s thoughts are already online and documented.
Virtual sticky notes can easily be searched and saved, plus they’re easier to read!
Top tips for collaborating / designing remotely:
Show your progress often with the rest of your team. You can do this by simply uploading images into Slack, or you can create a video walkthrough of your work that you record and share with others.
For feedback, jump on a video call if possible—detailed written feedback can be difficult to understand for the recipient. Many teams schedule weekly critiques specifically for this purpose; Slack’s video call feature also makes it easy to go from a chat to a call.
However, if you are located in very different time zones, you might need to write down feedback and review it asynchronously, and that’s ok too. Or even better, you can record yourself walking (and talking) through the design—Loom has a whole case study on how to do this. As Ana Ferreira from Doist points out,
“Yes, you need to be precise on the kind of feedback you are looking for, but usually, you get more thoughtful, accurate and considered feedback when someone has time to look through your work, think about it deeply, and give a nuanced response.”
Yes, you CAN still sketch by hand. One easy way for example is to use a paper and Sharpie to sketch at your desk, then take a photo of your sketch after you’re done and share it with your teammates. Hannah Oppenheimer writes about her team’s experiences doing Crazy 8 exercises remotely, for example.
A personal story:
While Figma is great for designing together, jumping into digital tools too soon can result in focusing on the interface before you’ve worked out the user flow and experience. I once managed two designers who were split between Denmark and Germany and wanted to figure out a way to have a sketching experience together. They decided to rig up a webcam aimed at a desk in each location and set aside time to video chat for an hour or two while sketching on paper which they put under the camera. This allowed them to live-stream their hand-drawn sketches with each other during the early stages of a project before jumping into designing on the screen.
Theme #2: Online meetings can be productive with a few best practices
There are many, many tips out there about how to have better online meetings. The tools vary year-to-year; the preferred video chat tool of choice today seems to be Zoom but regardless of the application, there are three must-do tips for online meetings that came up again and again.
Make sure everyone knows how to use your tools. If you have never used online meeting tools, take the time to learn how. Managers should set aside 10 minutes during a meeting to make sure everyone knows the best practices for your chosen video chat system and discuss ground rules that your team wants to implement. Some teams, for example, make it a rule that everyone should mute themselves when not talking. A few of the linked articles at the end go into detail on their team’s best practices for online meetings.
Invest in good equipment. Relying on your laptop’s built-in microphone and not using headphones is a rookie error and will often lead to feedback or echos which is distracting and can completely derail a meeting. A pair of headphones with a built-in microphone is fairly inexpensive and will help immensely.
From @990000 on Twitter
Always turn on your video! Not everyone likes being on camera, but it helps immensely with communication to see your teammates’ facial expressions and body language (pro-tip: in most tools you can find an option to hide the “self-view” so you don’t get distracted by seeing yourself). Making sure you’re in a well-lit place and looking at the camera directly will help you all feel (almost) like you’re in the room together. You might find you want to continue this practice even when you’re back in the office if you have remote workers; many writers pointed out that having those who are in the office join meetings from their own laptops and turn on their cameras is a much better experience for remote employees. Turning on our video cameras is a simple act that fosters trust and empathy. As Sarah Milstein writes,
“When you meet regularly over video and see each others’ homes, families and pets, you can easily understand them more fully as people than you do in a limited workplace setting.”
A personal story:
As a manager of a distributed team, I set an expectation that we would all turn on our cameras on our laptops during every meeting, even if a few of us were sitting side-by-side in a conference room. While it felt awkward at first, it soon became normal and helped foster a sense of camaraderie with the team.
Virtual high-fives online!
Theme #3: Make sure to invest in culture-building and communication
Everyone agrees that there’s no substitute for being together in person; all of the authors at fully remote companies reported that they get together for retreats or summits regularly. However, with a little effort you can still create rituals and use exercises to get to know each other and have fun with each other. This makes working together easier and can help ease the feeling of isolation that some people experience when they work from home full-time. Here are my favorite ideas that I came across.
Schedule a time to meet together on video chat for purely social purposes. For example, you might do a coffee break with someone you don’t know that well, or have lunch with a buddy. Some people recommended keeping a video chat on permanently that people can dial into as desired.
From @TylerNishida on Twitter
Reserve some time for team building during online meetings. When we can’t chat with each other around the coffee machine, we need to intentionally create time for non-work conversations. Some designers recommended kicking off meetings with a prompt or question. Icebreakers aren’t only for online meetings, of course, but they do seem to be extra useful in this case. You may want to check with your team members individually, though, to make sure they are ok with these types of exercises.
From @littlenono on Twitter
Communicate so often that you feel as though you’re over-communicating. Many designers pointed out the importance of checking in and being extra transparent when working remotely—updating your status on Slack with emojis to show when you’re eating lunch or in DND mode, for example. Some suggested taking a daily screenshot of what you’re working on and sharing it with your team. Many people said they do daily or biweekly standups on Slack. Checking in isn’t about proving that you’re being productive; it’s about feeling more connected with your teammates. For example Sarah Milstein writes about her remote team deciding to say hello in a shared channel when they started the workday. They found that this ritual was “useful to us for social connection within the team [and] built a greater feeling of trust among us.”
A personal story:
One team I led created a ritual of virtual standups in Slack: a sentence or two each morning to let everyone know what we were working on or what we needed help with. Even though we were (mostly) in the same office, we found that a written update took less time than a physical standup because people were more concise, and we all loved using and receiving the emoji reactions in Slack as a quick way to provide support or validation.
I hope this summary of findings from many designers’ experiences of working with remote teams will help you to make your time working remotely a productive and positive experience. Thank you to all of the designers and managers who have shared their experiences with the community.
If you’re looking for help collaborating with or managing remote teams, I’m currently conducting all of my coaching sessions and UX work online. Contact me to set up an initial half-hour consultation on how I can support your team.
Helpful articles for in-depth reading
Here are the top articles I used to synthesize and create this post:
How to Run Design Exercises on a Remote Team by Hannah Oppenheimer includes great tips for doing design sprints and user research remotely
Distributed Design: How Stack Overflow builds strong remote teams by Ted Goas contains an extensive overview of tools and methods with lots of helpful screenshots. It includes tips for online meetings and conducting remote user research
“Designing Remotely at Auth0” by Sonny Chen contains a robust list of tools and how Auth0 uses them, as well as processes they’ve created for their distributed team
The 4 rules of remote design collaboration by Justin Huskey is another one with tips from a fully-distributed team; it also includes ideas for collaborating remotely with clients
Designing distributed: collaboration on Doist’s fully-remote design team by Ana Ferreira focuses on the practices and approaches that her team uses, which she calls the “pyramid of remote design collaboration.” Her section “mindful meetings” in particular has good tips for online meetings.
Remote Work Insights You’ve Never Heard Before by Sarah Milstein is a well-written article that focuses on how working remotely is built on and fosters trust, with many examples from her own experiences (note: this is a Medium partner post)
Slack on Slack: Adapting the way we work when offices need to close—it’s no surprise that the Slack team has lots of great tips for using Slack to help with distributed teams.
Twitter threads and toolkits
This twitter thread contains lots of useful tips from the design community for teams working remotely, many of which I included in this post
In another helpful twitter thread, Daan van Klinken (@daanriver) details out the tools and methods his team uses to do remote Design Sprints
Linda Eliasen (@littlenono) also wrote a great Twitter thread on how to run a remote design team
Culture Toolbox from Hanno—a collection of exercises another all-remote design team uses to help foster community