Screencasting your work for an asynchronous workflow

Adam Darowski
ezCater Design
Published in
3 min readOct 21, 2019
Screenshot of starting a screencast in QuickTime Player
Screencasting your work is as easy as opening QuickTime Player and starting a new recording.

When working as part of a small squad it is critically important to keep your teammates up to date on the progress you’re making, whether designing and building new tools and features or updating existing ones. Booking a meeting to share this progress used to be my first instinct. But if there are multiple people to share the progress with (product managers, other designers, developers, internal stakeholders, etc.) it can be difficult to track all these busy people down at once. Plus, there’s the fact that I work remotely from New Hampshire while some members of my team work in our Boston headquarters and others work in our Denver office.

Even though I only joined ezCater about two months ago, this is hardly a new scenario for me. My previous company was 100% remote and spread across multiple time zones. ezCater is not a remote company, but as soon as a company adds a second location (like our Denver office) it needs to start behaving much more like a remote company. A big part of this is finding ways to work and communicate asynchronously when possible. This is why I started screencasting.

Screencasting is simply the act of recording your screen. That part isn’t novel. The part that is novel is receiving an engaging update from a team member that you can view (and review) at your own pace, share with other stakeholders, and provide feedback on — all asynchronously.

The cadence at which I record my screencasts can vary from project to project. I’ve been working on the user interface for a brand new (and particularly complex) internal tool. For this project, I record and share a screencast pretty much daily. When I’ve reached the point where I could use feedback before continuing, I record my screencast and drop it into Slack (either as a direct message or in the team channel). Then I move on to a different task while awaiting feedback, rather than spinning my wheels trying to get ahold of people.

The act of recording the screencast also makes the work I share much more cohesive. My product manager sees is a quick six-minute (or so) video where I talk through the current status of the tool I’m building. But the process leading to that six-minute video helps me hone my story as a designer.

I’ll either build the screens and interactions in code or Sketch. If using Sketch, I’ll bring everything into Invision and hook up the screens into a clickable prototype that walks through an example use case. I don’t like to share Invision prototypes on their own without talking through it. At this stage, not everything is clickable and there are often certain things I want the viewer to focus on. Plus, this way I don’t feel obligated to build out interaction paths that aren’t important at this stage of the design just for the sake of a more complete prototype.

Recording the screencast also requires me to present my work verbally. Talking about your work is an invaluable quality assurance tactic. Over and over, I’ll start recording, say something, and then realize that it just wasn’t right. I’ll either refine my story or go back to Sketch and update the screens that were problematic. Talking through your prototypes also lets you surface your questions (verbally) for your stakeholders with richer context.

Screencasting is easy. On a Mac, open QuickTime Player and choose File > New Screen Recording. Don’t worry about high-level production — as long as your voice is clear, the screencast will do its job. I just use standard-issue Apple earbuds as my microphone. If you want a high-end tool to record podcasts for marketing purposes, apps like Screenflow are much more feature-rich.

These days, I’m looking for ways to avoid having meetings rather than creating more. Screencasting has been a huge boost to my workflow, raising communications levels and providing a natural feedback cycle while letting everyone work at their own time.

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Adam Darowski
ezCater Design

A daddy of three and a product designer and developer at ezCater (previously Dribbble, HubSpot, and PatientsLikeMe).