My world was turned upside down three weeks ago, when we decided as a design team to work remotely due to COVID-19. Leading a large portfolio of design teams or squads as we call them, from my Mac was a scary reality. How would I manage, would I require to learn new skills, how would it affect the culture of the various humans we work so closely with?

Day one was filled with excitement and enthusiasm. I achieved so much. I felt closer to the work. My team were solving problem and delivering work faster that I had ever seen before. Why was this possible, I don’t understand! Day 2, 3, 4 and 5 was the same. Wow, why did we not do this earlier I asked myself? Then the weekend came…I totally crashed! What I hadn’t realised was that I had been working twelve, thirteen hours a day. No wonder I was feeling exhausted!

Something had to be done! I could not sustain this pace for much longer…it reminded me of my former life in advertising! It reminded me of why I left the ad world!

Luckily there are some amazing folk out there that have the experience and knowhow. My fellow colleagues and I reached out to our friends at InVision who have been working remotely for years. I thought it would be useful to share some of the tips and advise that they gave us…Obviously we had to adapt the feedback to make it relevant and valuable to our internal product design team.

Here are some of the highlights:

This is the time to Lead

• Regular checkins with your designers, ask them how they are feeling? It’s not just about the work.

• Stay calm, don’t panic…this is the time to think things through.

• Communication is key, there are various tools we use to communicate, set rules and boundaries.

• Building trust is one of the most important parts of being a great designer. Trust your team to do the right thing.

• Collaborate as much as possible. Working with others creates better products.

In light of the challenges many in our community face while trying to keep their organisations running during this pandemic, InVision have put together a collection of the most helpful, design-oriented content. Helping the world’s best teams work collaboratively is a core tenet. Hopefully this collection fosters creativity, focus, and collaboration during this uncertain time.

Below is the article by Liz Steelman

Remote work for design teams: InVision’s essential resources

Foster creativity

4 exercises for your remote design sprint

Creativity is dependent on the remashing and remixing of ideas, and a good in-person creative ideation session is an incredible boon to a product team. But when you’re remote, you have to recreate the magic using real-time collaboration tools. Here, we share how we use Freehand, our real-time whiteboarding tool for allowing independent thought and exploration throughout the ideation and product design process.

6 things remote companies must do to build great culture

Culture is the set of values, norms, habits, beliefs, and characteristics that make a company a unique place to work. But what happens when that “unique place” isn’t a location on a map but in the cloud? When coworkers can no longer participate in team-building exercises in the same room or the daily serendipitous meetings that happen in the halls or open floor plans of a traditional office? Here are the six things you can do to build and maintain a strong remote company culture.

How books became 99design’s ultimate collaboration tool

Contributors at the freelancer platforms 99designs collaborate remotely as a part of their daily routine. However, they’ve found that the set-up means peer-to-peer communication is limited mostly to the most pressing and day-to-day topics. They were greatly missing the value of conversations that come up outside the context of a project or deadline, those that organically arise while grabbing a coffee in the kitchen or during a fleeting moment in the hallway. While surveying ideas to strengthen the team’s design culture and truly connect beyond the screen, they came up with a truly genius idea: A UX book club. Read the article to find out more about how the team set it up and the benefits it brought to the organization.

How Zapier is building a remote design culture

The web-integration company Zapier’s former director of design shares the tools, communication strategies, and mentalities that helped create not only a productive remote design team, but also fostered a greater culture.

Aid collaboration

4 ways remote designers and developers can collaborate better

The biggest challenges for designers and developers working together is often lack of alignment, bottlenecks in delivery, and the fact that the two disciplines often don’t share a central hub. While these are difficult for co-located employees, the issues are often exacerbated when the team is distributed—but these four tips can help.

How to help your team excel at remote collaboration

A physical separation doesn’t have to mean a mental one, too. Companies both large and small share their best practices and tools to help reduce the friction of working together when you’re not actually together.

How ACS Technologies cracked the hybrid-remote brainstorming code

While you’re more likely to be dealing with a fully-distributed team rather than a hybrid-remote one, this case-study from SaaS company ACS Technologies details how running a design workshop and doing exercises like empathy and journey map creation using Freehand is still super helpful for any newly-remote team.

Start Creating

Designing distributed: collaboration on Doist’s fully-remote design team

Team members at Doist, makers of the productivity apps Todoist and Twist, detail how they manage to successfully rethink and reimagine day-to-day design workflows for a fully-remote team.

Webinar: Designing together across continents

In this webinar Aarron Walter, VP of InVision’s design education, and Linda Eliasen and Buzz Usborne from Help Scout, another 100% distributed company, have a candid discussion on what it means to design together when you’re miles apart. They cover tactics and tools to keep designers inspired and connected across time zones, protecting design-share channels from unconstructive commentary, considerations when working with far-flung teammates, and using video to get the feedback you need.

6 tips for remote user testing

The founder and CEO of Maze, a user testing platform, share their best practices for remote user testing after meeting with hundreds of designers who understand the potential of remote research and embrace it during their design process.

The 4 rules of remote design collaboration

Justin Huskey, head of design at Infinite Red, shares how his team used remote collaboration to develop a better design process than what they had done in person.. Read more on how they established the golden rules of design communication, recreated the whiteboard experience, and ran remote design reviews in this post.

Collaboration workflows for remote design teams

Remote designers aren’t inherently bound to a life full of miscommunication and difficulties collaborating. From simple communication habits to powerful collaboration tools, here’s how to make things easier when working with a remote design team.

Stay focused

The 3 problems everyone has when first working remotely (and how to solve them)

Just like in most disruptions to routines, productivity can be a problem as individuals figure out what works best for them in their new set ups. We reached out to our fellow distributed workforce partners (as well as our own InVision employees) for their best #remotelife tips on tackling the most common problems.

12 steps to eliminating remote work distractions

No matter your role, it’s likely you’re facing some things that make it harder to get work done during the day. Whether that be kids home from school, roommates who are also working remotely, or just silence, these 12 steps can help you gain greater control over your work day.

How Creative Market’s remote team launched a new product in 6 months

While many teams may be delaying or reframing timelines on projects after this shift, thinking that remote work can’t foster as much productivity in the office, Creative Market’s six-month project is an inspiration. Read the community-generated design assets marketplace’s recap on how clear alignment trickles down into purposeful collaboration and hiring, and can move mountains in a short period of time.

References:

• Gitlab: Resources for companies embracing remote work

• Trello: How to embrace remote work

• Remote: Office Not Required, book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals

• Remote work for design teams: InVision’s essential resources