How to Stay Engaged in a Virtual World: Techniques and Strategies Learned from the 2020 DC Service Jam

With nearly everyone moving work and events fully online in 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the DC Service Jam is a great example of how we can still bring people together to learn about human-centered design (HCD) and collaboratively prototype services using new tools and techniques.

Last year, I participated in the DC Service Jam — which is part of a worldwide, annual Global Service Jam — where teams gather to rapidly research, design, and prototype services inspired by a shared theme. As part of the “Deep Jam,” a separate track for seasoned practitioners, I worked with others to address the problem: How might we reduce plastic pollution? The experience was so enriching, I decided to sign up as a coach for this year’s event, which Bixal also sponsored.

COVID-19 restrictions required the event organizers to quickly move to a virtual format this year, and I was fortunate to be part of the team helping to think through that online engagement. As many of us have learned first-hand, collaborating online is a different dynamic than working together in a physical space. Time seems to pass differently. Your vision, thinking, and focus can be more constrained. Fatigue sets in quickly, and it’s much easier to get distracted because all your senses aren’t being employed in the group work.

With these challenges in mind, and drawing from remote work adaptations we were making at Bixal as well as our other organizations, the organizing committee set out to design an experience that would both educate and engage participants. Below are a few techniques we found useful and how we’re incorporating these into our work.

Pre-work vs. Teamwork

Finding the balance between pre-work and teamwork was easily the biggest and most consuming challenge this year as we wanted to optimize the time we had together as a group. Normally, we would have given the participants some pre-work so they would be ready to jump right in during the event. However, we knew that not everyone would have the time or the motivation to do it ahead of time. And when some people have done the pre-work and others haven’t, how do you account for that?

We settled on prompting participants to fill out an “about me” board before the event. This solution gave people a chance to familiarize themselves with the collaboration tool, Mural, while jumpstarting a team icebreaker. The activities for getting familiar with this year’s Jam topic, civic engagement, were completed during the event so no one would feel behind.

Build in Breaks and Buffer Time

The organizing team and coaches knew the event would feel like a mad dash and that participants wouldn’t have enough time for everything they wanted to do. One point on which we got almost universal positive feedback was the breaks we built into the schedule. Coaches appreciated not having to force their teams to stop, and because the whole group was stopping at the same time, no one felt like they were missing anything.

We designed agendas to include both full audience and small group work, with some one-on-one sessions thrown in. The variation in group size seemed to keep people engaged, but it made time management more challenging. An idea that emerged from the organizer’s retrospective on this issue was exploring ways to have a visible master clock for everyone as opposed to relying solely on an agenda to keep time.

Appreciate the Quiet Time

When getting together online, awkward silences can feel even more awkward than normal. But heads-down time often is critical to the collaboration process, so it’s important to find ways to make people feel comfortable with working alone while being together. We didn’t have much time for individual work during the Jam, so we didn’t implement all of these solutions, but some ideas to consider in the future include: using music (or some ambient sounds) to set the tone for individual work time, and turning cameras off so people aren’t distracted and don’t feel a sense of being watched as they capture their thoughts.

Don’t Skimp on Icebreakers and One-on-Ones

With the desire to get a lot of work squeezed into less time — before people get burnt out from being on camera too long — it can be tempting to skimp on the icebreakers and breakout sessions. Don’t do this. Building rapport among collaborators is essential to creating a safe space where people feel comfortable opening up with diverse and sometimes outlandish ideas, especially among a group of people they may have just met. When collaborating online, you don’t get the same opportunity for chit-chat and tangential conversations as you would in person, so you must account for this time and add it to the agenda intentionally.

In addition to group work, we used breakout rooms to do random one-on-one interviews with other participants. It was a quick-and-dirty method to simulate the “person-on-the-street” interviews we typically do at the in-person Jam. It was also a good way to switch up the dynamic and get some individual facetime with participants, which is otherwise hard to do during a large group session.

Feedback and Reflections

Overall, everyone was pleased with how the event turned out. We had no major technical failures, and the participant feedback we captured on an “I liked, I wished, I wondered” board was mostly positive. A recurring feedback theme was the challenge of time. Some people felt like the four-hour duration was just right (though the event did go over a little), while others wanted more.

Another common theme was about learning versus doing. Some participants were more interested in gaining a grounding in the practice of service design, while others were more jazzed about doing service design. Regardless of how excited people are to be participating in an event, I think you’re going to see diminishing returns for any online event that exceeds half a day. During the retrospective, the coaches talked about possibly running the event over two days, with the first day focused on foundational concepts and context-setting and the second day more about jumping into hands-on activities.

Real-World Application

At Bixal, we take a human-centered approach to design, where we seek a deep understanding of the people we’re designing for. We do this by talking to them, observing their behavior, and keeping them at the center of the creation process. Bixal applies these practices (including research, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, etc.) alongside our teammates and stakeholders to co-create useful, usable, and delightful customer experiences.

While the Service Jam is a unique event in that the end goal is to present a working prototype of a design brief within hours, many of the event takeaways can be applied to the work we do with our Bixal clients. For example, how can we consistently do productive, collaborative work online without burning people out? People’s calendars are full. They want to carve out a big enough chunk of time to get meaningful work done, but they’re already in lots of video meetings. Balance is key. We frequently have to create and manage this balance by educating clients about why we’re doing a particular activity in addition to actually doing it.

As part of an engagement with the Social Security Administration (SSA) to improve the online experience for common transactions, we were all set before COVID-19 hit to conduct contextual inquiry sessions at the field offices and call centers. When offices were shut down in March, we quickly pivoted to video-based customer interviews and using tools like our Miro research wall to synthesize the mountain of data into personas and journey maps. The research team grappled with questions similar to the DC Service Jam challenges: How much work do we do together? How much do we do on our own? How do we involve the client as collaborators in a constructive way? By the end of the base research period, the team had conducted over 50 interviews with SSA customers and produced inspired, empathy-driven insights and recommendations.

Our team is currently rolling out Miro more widely at Bixal and will be exploring ways to make collaborative research, synthesis, and design sessions effortless for our project teams and clients. Regardless of what the office space situation looks like next year or next five years, we will continue to find ways to use technology to facilitate human-centered design without being hindered by barriers of space or time.

From the author: How have your online collaborative events been going? Any learnings you can share? Let us know here or leave a comment below.

If you’re interested in checking out the DC Service Jam, follow them on Twitter to hear about plans for the next one. Space is limited and tickets always sell out fast.

If you want to learn more about service design and human-centered design in the meantime, check out the DC chapter of the Service Design Network. They have regular meetups, and membership is not required.

The amount of fun I had with the DC Service Jam this year and what I got out of it was disproportionately greater than my contribution. We have an amazing group of dedicated designers here in the DC area who put a lot of time and effort into making this happen. So, I would be remiss if I did not give many thanks to the organizing team and coaches: Molly Reddy, Gabe Arteaga, Vidhika Bansal, Yosef Shuman, Peter Nguyen, Brandon Dubé, Tara Pokras, Beth Plotkins, Catie Shelton, and Seul Rhee.