Distributed Teams: Jim Kalbach on Remote Design

Jim Kalbach is a user experience designer, author, and jazz musician (that cover image is from his TED talk on jazz and teams) who occasionally jams with our friend Jeff Gothelf. He recently hosted a webinar on remote design with usertesting.com and had some interesting takeaways.

Jim surveyed 275 designers from around the world, mostly in digital product design. The percentage of people who said they never do remote design? 2%. That means that 98% of designers are doing some sort of remote design collaboration.

The big challenges?

• communication suffers
• spontaneity is lost
• lack of interpersonal relationships
• unable to sketch
• technologies are insufficient
• scheduling across time zones

Many of you won’t be surprised to hear that almost 50% of polled designers said that the quality of design work was worsened by being remote. But therein lies the rub of our reality in modern product work:

Remote working comes with frustrations, but it is our reality. We have to learn to make the best of distributed teams, from how we think and interact to the tools we use.

Jim did some polling on tools. Here were some of his tooling areas and the winners:

• conferencing: Skype (Google Hangout second)
• chat: Slack (Skype second)
• fire sharing: Dropbox and Google Drive
• online prototyping: InVision (Marvel second)
• online testing: UserTesting.com (UserZoom second)
• visual workspace: Mural (where Jim works)

Interestingly enough, Jim’s talk, like most articles we have seen on remote teams, focuses on collaboration and how the work itself is done. At Neo, where we have multiple projects with teammates across the country from each other, we have also seen a huge benefit in a tool for *synthesized knowledge sharing during and after the intense collaboration*. This is where Jotto has come in and played a huge role for Neo, actually working more effectively for us than all-hands video meetings and email threads.

Jim also talks about mode of interaction when it comes to remote work. Amongst his survey takers, 45% are a mixture of local teams with some remote personnel. We have found that to be a dangerous no-mans land. It is almost better to force everyone to act like a remote worker, even if they are in the same office, then try to mix and match. But I will admit that is easier said than done.

Jim has a number of great recommendations here as well:

• meet in person initially
• post designs daily
• schedule standups and reviews
• go “all remote” for meetings
• ensure everyone joins individually

One of Jim’s key points at the end is piloting an all-digital effort. As he writes on the Mural blog:“Learn how your team can work best with your processes in a remote context. Take a small effort and force yourself to work remote. For instance, take an upcoming user research project and try it out remote: no paper, sticky notes, flipcharts, or printouts allowed. You’ll learn a lot about your habits and behaviors that needs to change to be effective remotely.”

Remote work is our reality. It is still frustrating today, but the good news is that our industry is getting collectively smarter at how to do it.

This post originally appeared on the Jotto blog.