Designing during a pandemic — how we’ve adapted
In mid-March our design team, like all the other teams at Just Eat and like millions of other businesses around the world, found ourselves working from home. Not for the odd WFH day, but for the indefinite future. Just Eaters across the globe, in every team, are all working hard to keep our service running, while juggling childcare and other priorities.
The business has introduced a number of things to keep us all feeling connected, from online chats and meditation, regular communications from senior leadership, even exercise classes hosted by our CISO! But as a collaborative design team, we have some unique challenges, so we’ve needed to discover how best to adapt the ways we work.
There’s no shame in admitting it — being a designer working from home during this strange time can be difficult. As great as it is to skip the commute, it can be hard to feel like you’re connected with the rest of your team. And let’s face it, designers need each other for feedback, for laughs and for inspiration.
We have UXers from our London, Bristol, Sydney, Zürich and Winnipeg offices. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we’d physically get together for team lunches and to observe user research, and if we needed to collaborate we’d travel between offices where needed.
Working in the same physical space isn’t going to be possible for the foreseeable future, so we’ve made some key, deliberate changes to the way we work to ensure we can keep designing products that make the lives of our customers and restaurants easier, all from our own homes.
In this article I’ll share the things we’ve tried — hopefully they can help the many other teams who’ve suddenly found themselves all working remotely.
We adapted how we research
Our user researchers regularly head out to visit our restaurants in the field, welcome customers in to our offices to test design solutions and visit those customers in their homes.
The team quickly realised they’d need to adapt how they do research in this new, remote-only environment. With their main priority keeping the business fed with the insight it needs to build great products.
We ramped up our use of existing tools
Our team already utilised the insights tool UserTesting.com for research sessions, with a mixture of users from the UserTesting panel and our own recruitment channels.
But since early March we’ve hugely increased our dependency on this tool. Many of the sessions that would usually have happened in our London-based research lab are now run remotely through UserTesting, with the participants dialling in from their own home.
In a recent remote 1-to-1 session with a customer, our researcher asked the participant to place an order of their choice, with the customer sharing their screen with Zoom so the researcher could see what was happening. Because this was streamed from their home, she was able to listen to the interactions the participant had with their family whilst choosing the food.
Hearing how the family went back and forth gave deeper insight into the food selection process and was an unexpected benefit to working in this way, something that wouldn’t have happened in a lab setting. Running moderated sessions remotely also means you can reach a wider audience, as you’re not limited to participants that can travel to your lab, so it’s certainly a technique the team will look to lean on more in the future.
Our researchers are also ensuring they are flexible in the technology they use with participants. For example, not every restaurant is familiar with using video conferencing software, so we sometimes need to switch out the video call for a telephone conversation.
We tweaked our workshop formats
Fully remote workshops present different challenges to a physical workshop. Our designers have adapted many of the ways they run cross-functional workshops.
We made them laser focused
It’s harder to keep participants engaged when they are dialling into a collaborative session. There are many more distractions; Slack, pets, snacks.
Our designers have deliberately made their workshops shorter and more focused. Removing that extra activity, making sure you start right on time, and keeping the workshop to a militant schedule make the most effective use of your participant’s precious time, and maximise the chances they stay fully engaged resulting in better outcomes for your workshop.
We expanded our collaboration toolset
Tools are an obvious, but very important aspect of running workshops remotely, and using suitable tools can make your workshop run far more efficiently.
Our teams have moved to using:
- Miro — a virtual whiteboard and a staple for remote workshopping, we have really increased our use of Miro to document research and collate activities that would usually use physical Post-It notes.
- Zoom — when attendees have to break out into small groups for activities, Zoom allows the facilitator to put people into separate breakout rooms whilst on the same call. We’ve found this to be far more efficient than attendees creating their own Hangouts/Slack calls (especially if they don’t all know each other), and gives the facilitator more control.
- Google Timer — for timed activities, we’ve started screensharing the countdown clock to keep everyone to time
But new tools aren’t always the answer
It’s worth noting that not everyone will have a license, or be able to use the tools that designers are accustomed to using, like Miro. So be careful with introducing new software when you’re pushed for time — any glitches could derail your workshop.
Some of our designers have moved to using tools that all attendees have access to and already know how to use. Dropping sketches into Google Slides or adding ideas to a spreadsheet can be a far quicker way to get the outcome you desire, without the overhead of introducing new tools to multiple people.
Remember to be inclusive
The vibe of a room can make or break a workshop, and that vibe is harder to create in a remote environment. You can’t necessarily see if someone is struggling with an activity as you can’t ‘walk the room’ as you usually might, so it’s important to check in verbally more than you generally would.
We asked the team how they’re coping
Not everyone lives with other people, in a house with a garden to enjoy the great British weather that lockdown has (cruelly) coincided with. Living and working in the same four walls bring unique challenges, especially when you aren’t able to get out and about after work.
We ran a design team retro, focussed on identifying and talking about the changes people have noticed (both the things that were having a positive and a negative effect on their mindset).
The team discussed:
- What’s still the same as before
- What’s different now
- What individuals have changed to adapt to the situation
Naturally, there were a lot of shared struggles and it was really interesting to hear about some of the more novel solutions the team were trying.
The end of ‘work time’ and the beginning of ‘my time’
Some expressed that they were finding it hard to shut off from work at the end of the day, especially if they live in a shared house or work in their living room.
Some things the team were doing to counteract this:
- Out of sight, out of mind. Physically packing your laptop away at the end of the day like you would to leave the office removes the reminder of work when you’re relaxing in the evening.
- Bookend the working day. Going for a walk before or after work helps to switch your brain from work-mode to home-mode, just like a regular commute does.
- Create a ‘work zone’. Those living in a small space found mentally separating their work area from their living area useful — one of the team used their living room rug to separate the two zones of their flat. When they stepped off the rug, it was the end of the working day.
Feeling unproductive
The team noticed people would book thirty minute meetings for topics that previously would have been a brief verbal conversation. They were also needing to be more active and responsive on Slack. This was making the team feel like their productivity was reduced and they weren’t able to focus on their goals. They had less blocks of time to do uninterrupted, focused work.
Create less meetings
Rather than booking meetings in calendars with an explicit end time, some people found success in setting up more ad-hoc Slack calls. If there isn’t a specific time the meeting is supposed to finish at, then participants won’t feel as compelled to use the full time slot, plus people’s calendars don’t get chock-a-block. If you can make it a typed Slack conversation or a briefly written email, even better. Video call fatigue is real.
Meeting-free blocks
In order to protect ‘make time’ for our designers, we introduced a meeting free time each day, from 11am-3pm.
Flex working hours
Some people find it easier to focus at 7am, some people want to have longer lunch times to enjoy the sunshine or go for a run. People in the team are changing their working hours to suit their personal way of working. Creating team check-ins and check-outs has been useful for some of our teams.
We found some unexpected benefits
People also noticed some positive changes in their new way of working:
Play the music you want, as loud as you like
If you’re at home, nobody can judge you for listening to 90’s music, and there’s nobody there to notice your weird head bobbing.
More free time
The average commute time in London is 1hr 21mins — that’s almost three hours less travel time per day to exercise, cook or binge on Netflix.
More LOLs
Bringing your cat onto video calls, commenting on books you notice in people’s backgrounds, joining video calls as a potato — we’ve had more laughs and found out much more about each other than before.
We tweaked our team ceremonies
Our working practices were working well for us as a distributed team, but we realised quite quickly that we needed to make some changes now everyone was physically separated.
We scheduled social time
“How was your weekend?”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Hey what do you think of this lockup?”
Conversations that happen naturally in a co-located workplace often won’t happen unless you’re deliberate about it. When they are suddenly not happening, it becomes quite obvious how important they are to team culture. These moments of connection have to be planned, and usually put into people’s calendars, which can feel a little forced at first.
Working at home can also be very isolating for people who live alone, so we’ve tried a few things:
Tea-time Tenable
Two mornings a week we have a fifteen minute game of Tenable, where participants list out ten things in one category. For example, The ten westernmost capital cities of Europe. We have our morning brew whilst playing — much more fun than aimlessly scrolling through Design Twitter.
Captain Cabin Fever’s question time
Someone asks a new (unrelated to work) question each morning on Slack. It’s a great way to find out more about the people you work with. Some of the best ones:
- What’s been the worst and best thing about quarantine so far?
- If you were entering the Olympics, what sport would it be for?
- What are your biggest pet peeves?
Sundowners + babies
Those of us with young children felt they were missing seeing their friends, so we have started bringing them to our Friday afternoon get togethers. Being at home doesn’t have to mean no socialising.
We tweaked how we critique
On a remote critique it feels far more awkward when multiple people try to speak at once than in real life. Tactically un-muting yourself at the exact right time, and offering up opinions into radio silence can be daunting for certain people, and this means some may be less inclined to offer their thoughts and questions. The presenter should always ask if anyone has any other questions, and leave a good few seconds for people to have the chance to speak.
Google Hangouts doesn’t have a grid view feature (like Zoom does), so when there are more than 5 or 6 people on the crit, you’re unable to see everyone at once. It also puts the people who haven’t spoken for a while to the bottom of the list and out of view, meaning that if you haven’t spoken for a while, nobody else can see your face.
To help with this, the team have all installed the grid view Chrome plugin for Hangouts so everyone appears on the screen at the same time — it keeps everyone involved and means you can catch more visual cues that you might miss otherwise.
We proactively share work in progress
We’ve always had weekly ‘work in progress’ sessions where designers share where they’re at with their projects. Some present work as more of a show + tell as the project is nearing the end, others come with early design problems with potential solutions to discuss and debate.
When everyone is in the same space the team also get to see work on more of an adhoc basis, on people’s monitors, on print-outs after workshops, or when they’ve asked another designer for their opinion.
When working remotely, the weekly sessions aren’t quite enough visibility for people that need to see the progress of the work. If a designer misses the session one week, potentially nobody else in the team has seen their work for two weeks, so they might not have had any opportunity to get feedback from their peers.
To counteract this, a couple of times a week we share screenshots of whatever we’re working on on Slack. These can be anything someone is working on; prototypes, slides, or workshop outputs. Everyone does it. We’re a big team so this is great for visibility and always sparks off new threads and discussions.
We’re working out what works for us
I’ve described the things our team is trying to bring some semblance of normality to a very abnormal situation — they’re not perfect, and taking into account the feedback of the team we’re changing them with every passing week.
As the world slowly goes back to how it once was, we know we’ll return to co-located working. But we won’t throw away the things we’ve learnt and benefited from in this period. The awareness we’re gaining from running more inclusive crits, how we’ve got to know our peers better through meeting their pets over Hangouts, and learning to run more efficient workshops are all things that make us better designers whether we’re working remotely or in an office together.
One last tip
Don’t forget to turn off your Snapchat filter when you join a ‘serious meeting’. I found out the hard way.
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Further reading & listening
- InVision’s podcast on running remote design sprints
- InVision’s eBook on remote work for design teams
- Abstract’s webinar on leading 100% remote design teams
