How design leaders and product design teams can collaborate during a quarantine
Tips, thoughts and recommended tools to use during these challenging times
A lot has already been written in general about working remotely but I wanted to take this opportunity and contribute to the discussion focused on design teams.
Working from home is a new reality nowadays. Meanwhile finding ways to communicate and to collaborate, keeping the design thinking fresh, maintaining consistency, and delivering designs on time can be challenging.
In this article, I would like to share my thoughts on how design leaders like me can make collaboration successful during this quarantine work from home period.
Modify Your Daily Meetings
Regular daily meetings are focused on work and they are timeboxed to 10–20 minutes. However, during this stay at home time, start the day by talking with the team about their day and how they are feeling. Welcome the new day with a smile, share positivity, and help your team members to cope up with stress.
Get Your Toolbox Together
Use the power of Slack, Jira, and most importantly Figma for collaboration, communication, and efficiency — as well as Google Meet, Skype, and Zoom.
Use Figma for easy design collaboration. Figma is a cloud-based design tool like Sketch but works like Google Drive where all team members, designers, developers, product managers can collaborate for co-designing, sharing feedback, and doing remote user testing.
You can use Figma together with Skype, Zoom or Google Meet for;
- Co-design sessions for two or more designers working on the same file together
- Design critique sessions in which presenters and team members share comments on design.
- Design handoff sessions with development teams.
You can integrate Figma with Slack for automatically posting any updates on design. This is helpful when you are designing live because the changes made in a Figma file will be updated on every other instance where the file is embedded. You can instantly check the changes on a mockup and keep the feedback chain alive.
It’s Time to Change
Plan your sprint or week between focus hours, ideation hours, co-design hours with pairs, happy hours, gaming hours, etc.
Without a routine of getting ready, going to the office, meeting people, and coming back home, it can be very challenging to set work and home time balance and do things efficiently.
- Set working hours: Not more than 10 hours daily.
- Co-design hours with team members: Early morning or after the daily stand-up.
- Set focus hours only for yourself: Midday focus hours are the best.
- Set communication hours: Come together with your team, in the morning, in the evening, or both.
- Set your power tools: Start using them; Slack for a chat and Google Meet for quick calls and Figma for working in collaboration.
- Don’t forget the happy hours: These can be on Friday nights or a few times a week; you can play a game, have a couple of drinks, or watch a movie together.
For Design Leaders
“Don’t focus only on talking about work or deadlines. It’s the best time to show EMPATHY towards your team members.”
More than ever, overcommunication is the key. Schedule sessions with your team where you talk about their health, what they are eating, how they are buying groceries, what time they sleep, what they are doing on the weekend. The key is to listen.
Rethink Your Design Review Process
Online design review sessions can be long, distracting, frustrating, and even worse: Inefficient. Here are some of the things you can do:
- Assign a moderator.🕵️♂️
- Set a clear session goal.⚽
- Choose a review focus:🧐
- UX: Flow, Requirements, Benchmarks, Research, Interaction
- UI: Components, Aesthetics
4. Ask the critics to write down their feedback during the presentation and let the presenter finish the design showcase.✍️
5. Create a safe place where everyone is welcomed and feedback is captured from every participant and gives all participants a chance to speak.🙋♀️ 🙋♂️
6. Reveal patterns in thinking and group the common feedback.🤝
7. Identify the basics: ❓Questions, ⚠️ challenges, 👍likes, and 💡ideas.
Soon, I will share a full article on design critique sessions.
Rethink Remote Usability Testing
Since this is the only way to test your hypothesis or prototypes, you better do. Remember, remote testing is preferable to the alternative: Skipping the test altogether.
Maze is a user testing platform that turns prototypes into actionable insights from real users.
Maze creates amazing reports which help in Research Evaluation Sessions
Start planning for a long time
It is still unknown when the quarantine will be over. Until then you can use these tips as a guide. But try to find your ways for efficiency because not everything works for everyone. Take regular feedback from teams and modify them as per feedback.
Remember: THIS IS NOT PERMANENT.
No one can do everything, but everyone can do something. We will get through this but the only way we will be able to do this is together.
