Keeping Remote Meetings Collaborative
The collaboration process in Design is so critical to building great products. Typically, you see these sessions take place in person with specific frameworks and sticky notes. Our remote adaptation of this has been to lean into online whiteboard tools so that meeting participants are together in this virtual space.
While there are topics for which screen sharing a slide deck is the appropriate format, we’ve found that the collaborative nature of online whiteboard tools has been much more effective for most design meetings.
The design team uses whiteboards for brainstorming ideas, conducting retrospectives, analyzing information architecture, synthesizing research, and much more. Let’s get into a few suggestions on how to best facilitate these sessions.
Canvas Prep
The meeting facilitator should prepare the canvas space prior to the meeting so that everyone can jump into the activity right away. As with all meetings, the goal and agenda for the session should be clear and can even be posted within the board for extra visibility.
All attendees should have access to the link and be able to edit in the space provided. The facilitator should structure the session so that each participant is free to interact with the space and actively encouraged to step in, this will avoid a situation where only one person is doing most of the work.
💡 Tip: Make sure to rotate the facilitator role so that all designers get to practice this part of our tool belt and responsibility gets distributed.
Sketching Ideas
One big challenge of an online whiteboard is sketching. There are a few folks who have mastered the art of drawing with a mouse, but for many it is both more difficult and slower than using a marker.
The best solution we have found is to keep sketching on pen and paper, then simply upload the image to a shared space for review. This also brings a nice organic element into the space versus purely relying on technology. Be sure to include the reminder that sketching is supposed to be rough and messy, for any non-designer participants that may be hesitant to draw.
🔵 Tip: Miro and Mural are both excellent tools. If you use Mural, the circle post-its work as great dot voting stickers for any images uploaded to the canvas.
Facilitation
Encourage roundtable discussions where a question or topic is posed and each meeting participant responds. It is easy for subtle gestures that people make when they’re about to speak to go unnoticed in remote meetings, even if cameras are on. This ensures that everyone has an opportunity to contribute to the conversation, stay more fully engaged, and avoid speaking over one another.
Use a timer to keep track of the session and place it somewhere visible to the whole team. This will help with both managing speaking time per person and provide ensure you stay on track with the schedule. It is really important that we continue to respect meeting end times in the remote environment even though it is easy to stay put on a Zoom call.
🎶 Tip: Keep a few playlists ready for any heads-down time and start up some music so that there isn’t an uncomfortable silence. Here’s one from the Design Sprint folks. It’s also a fun design team activity to create a collaborative playlist that everyone can contribute to and grow over time.
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