Async Communication Format for Product Designers
5+1 Reasons to Use Screencasting Software in Your Day-to-day Activities
Collaborate with the team in a smart way
A remote team is always a challenge. And we love challenges. Whether you’re a design/cross-functional team member or a design manager, you’ll definitely love the asynchronous communication powered by screencasting software.
This kind of format perfectly fits teams working remotely, especially team members in different timezones.
All our use cases are based on the research we’ve made with dozens of designers who deal with these processes on a daily basis, aggregated their struggles and challenges into solutions, and put everything together so you can get the full scoop on how to utilize these practices in your day-to-day work.
1. Structure you meetings
It is a good call to record a short meeting overview and add it to your calendar event to guide your team through the items you want to discuss. This helps everyone stay focused on the matters at hand.
A couple of minutes is quite enough to provide the context and go through the meeting agenda and this definitely saves even more time in the future.
2. Pitch your work
Presenting something remotely is always associated with time-consuming calls. But imagine you can turn your presentation into a structured asynchronous activity, rather than a long scheduled call everyone has to force themselves to attend.
3. Provide instant feedback
Same with sharing feedback on prototypes and layouts (along with reporting bugs). Async communication format offers a set of tools to help you communicate with your team on the fly — whether you go through the file in Figma or deal with the final result on production, you can make sure recording your screen helps you deliver everything that matters in just a couple of clicks.
▸ Capture your screen wherever you are
▸ Capture your voice and emotions
▸ Record yourself while you talk to make the video more human and personal
▸ Share the result with the link in Slack, Figma, Notion, etc.
4. Save your time with async Design Review
Design review is an important milestone in product development and you can also conduct it in asynchronous format which is still about a two-way communication and can be used for enhancing your design review process at a glance.
👉 Get Product Design Review Template
Also, async videos help you to reduce the pressure by replacing a real-time feedback with asynchronous one so the reviewer has more time to think which gives you more specific feedback.
Sometimes companies implement random reviews so the design itself can be reviewed by different designers. Recording your screen allows you to provide more context about the goal, problems you solve, and highlights which are helpful for the reviewer, especially when they don’t have much context. So, despite your design can be sent to a random reviewer, you can make sure they provide valuable and meaningful feedback.
Tips to conduct great Design Review:
▸ Make sure you send your video to a couple of reviews first — it will give you feedback you can incorporate before you share it with everyone
▸ Add user stories to your design review to make it more engaging and focus on the real problems your users face in the product
▸ Store you design review video in a cloud storage until the final implementation of your design so everyone can get back for additional context at anytime
5. Contribute to the community
There’s a bunch of cool stuff you can come across and you might want to share it with the community — explore together new tools and references, demo out tips and tricks, educate your team members.
Async videos also bring your mentoring activities to the next level and provide personal interaction and human touch, which are really crucial.
6. Educate and onboard new team members
The average new hiring onboarding experience consists of more than 30 activities. Save your time by utilizing the one-to-many model to create a robust onboarding flow with clear explanations, guides, and walkthroughs.
Tip: you can record separate videos for different onboarding activities and use them in your new hiring onboarding checklist in the platform your team works.
Innovative tool everyone should have
Shortcast is an essential screencasting tool that allows you to share your thoughts and ideas in just a couple of clicks.
The ease of use, extremely friendly interface, and instantaneous Google Chrome extension make Shortcast a must-have tool for the majority of professionals along with non-tech savvy users.
What designers love about Shortcast
The ease of use
Our customers who use Shortcast across the team mention the ease of use which is the pillar functionality for that kind of product. You don’t need additional skills or explanations on how to turn your collaboration into an efficient workflow — just record the video and share it with the team. And that’s it!
Face recording
According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology research, videos that intersperse an instructor’s talking head with slides are more engaging than slides alone and videos produced with a more personal feel could be more engaging than high-fidelity studio recordings.
Despite recording yourself while you talk and making personalized videos are more suitable for sales, designers also utilize this feature for building meaningful and human communications inside the team. Still, this is fully customizable and can be turned on only when needed.
Cloud storage
Shortcast cloud storage helps designers structure their videos so they can easily reuse the existing content once they have to take a step back. They’re also excited about being able to embed their videos in the desired platform along with providing additional context.
