Illustration of two confused people using a tin can telephone to collaborate on design

Remote workshops are hard — but they don’t have to be

8 tips to ace your remote design workshops

Roxana Cociorba
Artefact One

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Yes, it’s difficult to replace the benefits of face-to-face communication and the tactile feel of working with actual sticky notes on a physical whiteboard, but especially now that the corona-crisis has made “remote” the norm, we must adapt and learn how to carry out our workshops digitally. And to be perfectly honest, the digital nature of remote workshops actually offers some benefits of its own (e.g. access from anywhere, easy to record, direct digital documentation, … ) so let’s embrace them with a bit of love. 💕

The most important thing that we should keep in mind is that even though remote workshops follow a similar structure to presential ones, it would be a mistake to think that preparation and execution will be the same.

So here are some tips we’ve put together after carrying out quite a few of these remote workshops recently.

Note: Some of these tips apply mainly to one-off remote workshops involving users, clients, or non-technical stakeholders, as we think that the dynamics are slightly different than frequent workshops with your own tech-savvy team of designers & developers.

Animated gif of a remote workshop session using Mural
A remote workshop for architectural design using Mural

1. Choose your tool wisely

There are plenty of tools out there that allow for remote team collaboration (Microsoft Whiteboard, Google Jamboard, Invision Freehand… even Figma!). In essence, what they all offer is real-time, multi-user collaboration around some form of digital whiteboard.

But in order to run a workshop, our experience is that the cream of the crop are Mural and Miro, each with their strengths and weaknesses, but both offering a very solid feature set that allows facilitated collaboration. This means that you will have control over what participants can, and just as importantly, can’t do, as opposed to the full freedom given by other digital whiteboards.

Which of the tools you use, depends on the particular feature set that you need and/or on the tech-savviness of your participants. For example, Miro has in my opinion more sophisticated tools, great to run workshops with power users like fellow designers, while Mural’s simplicity on the other hand offers user-friendliness to non-tech participants.

So take some time to fully understand the tools and analyse the impact that each will have on the way you want to run your workshop before making a choice.

2. Prep, prep, prep

This actually applies to any workshop, whether remote or not, so don’t be stingy with your time here and make sure that you spend enough of it in planning your activities properly and setting up all the material you need well in advance. You will undoubtedly spend more time preparing your digital whiteboard if this is your first time, so bear that in mind.

3. Dry run it

You may have a lot of experience running workshops and have certain activities you’ve done often already down to a tee, but don’t be fooled! Whatever timing and dynamics you are used to IRL, does not necessarily translate well to remote, so your best shot is to do a dry run or two of your workshop with some test participants (preferably representative of your target audience), to make sure you iron out most of the kinks you come across.

4. Teach the tool as you go

Not everyone is as tech-savvy as your design team. Even though Miro and Mural offer pretty easy to use tools, there is for sure a learning curve involved and participants will need some time to adjust.

Never assume that they will instinctively know how to do “simple” tasks such as zooming and panning around the whiteboard. Invest a minute or two in covering these basics so that the tool does not feel as intimidating because the last thing you want is participants who are eager to contribute, but feel uneasy or incapable of using the tool. As the fine folks at the Nielsen Norman Group put it:

“Particularly if a tool is perceived as a “design” tool, people may feel like they are being asked to perform a job outside their assigned responsibility. Even if participants may be willing to contribute to the workshop itself, they may not want to spend the time to learn a new tool.”

An animated GIF of an example of a simple exercise to to teach basic tool functions
Teach some basic functions with hands-on exercises

A great way of easing participants into it, is to design a few simple warm-up activities at the beginning of your workshop in which they learn and apply the basic functionality that they will be using. Think for example of asking them to add digital sticky notes with their names, moving them to a predefined space, and making connections between them.

You also want to allow your participants to get familiarized with the tool as you move through the workshop, so design simple interactions for your first activities and work your way up in complexity as you move forward.

5. Create demo spaces and personalized work areas

The best way to explain an activity is by doing it yourself, so for each one of them, create a space (clearly labeled as such) where you can demonstrate to participants exactly what you want them to do, before asking them to do it themselves.

An example of a Demo space, and personalized work areas for each of the workshop participants
An example of a Demo space, and personalized work areas for each of the workshop participants

Next to it, create personalized work areas for each of your participants, clearly labeled with their names, so that everybody knows exactly where they need to be and what they need to do.

6. Lock your layout!

You will undoubtedly create a nice layout filled with instructions and visuals to support all your activities, so make sure to lock in place all of these elements with which users are not supposed to interact directly. Otherwise, they might be moved, edited or, worst-case scenario, deleted by mistake by one of the participants. Having them all locked also provides a cleaner interaction, where participants will not be accidentally selecting background elements while trying to perform the task you asked them to do.

Here are some instructions on how to do this with Mural and Miro.

7. All eyes on you

Make it a point to use the Summon (Mural) or Bring everyone to me (Miro) tool every time you are about to start a new activity, or you have something important to show, to ensure that all participants can see exactly what you want them to see.

During a normal workshop, you keep people focused on what you are talking about by making eye contact with participants and pointing your finger at things as you go. This is of course impossible in a remote workshop, and it’s easy for people to wander off exploring the whiteboard, so make sure that you bring all eyes on you when it’s important.

8. Have a secondary facilitator

While IRL you can easily pull off facilitating AND being a note keeper, during a remote workshop with everything going on and sometimes trying to keep a shared view of the board, your energy might be best focused on facilitation, so have someone else do the note-keeping on the side.

Add a “parking lot” area to all your boards, where your second in command can add general notes and comments that we want to be able to get back to at a later stage.

Final takeaway

If there’s one thing for you to take away from this article, let it be this:

Don’t be fooled. IRL workshops and Remote workshops are NOT the same.

So make sure to prepare properly, practice it, and take into account that things might go differently than expected so plan some extra time for eventualities.

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Roxana Cociorba
Artefact One

User Experience Design| UX Strategy | User Research | Service Design| globetrotter | cociorba.com