Our Remote Design Sprint: How to Collaborate in a Time of Social Distancing

Want to jump in and try the Remote Design Sprint? Read Emily Thompson’s step-by-step guide.

This process was inspired by the Design Sprint 2.0.

The Rise of Remote Work

Right now, thousands of Wayfair employees are working from home. Some are crammed into hallways searching for WiFi, or checking emails during children’s nap times, or fondly reminiscing about the days when meetings happened in real life. Across the world, teams are adapting to quarantine as the new normal during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those with remote-friendly jobs continue working, but now with everyone separate.

Even before the outbreak, remote work was on the rise, growing 91% over the last 10 years. In the field of UX design, another trend has emerged: designers as people enablers. A key part of the designer’s role is to bring people together, empowering everyone to shape the user experience, regardless of job title.

Today, the trends of remote work and people enablement have reached an all-time high. How can designers get work done when teams are fully remote and the need for collaboration is greater than ever?

Our Remote Design Sprint

Our team at Wayfair designed a process to tackle this very problem. The Remote Design Sprint allows you to design any idea with as many as 20 stakeholders in just two weeks — even if everyone works remotely.

We developed our version of the Remote Design Sprint within the past year to move faster, work smarter, and design better. Our Remote Design Sprint takes the best of the Design Sprint 2.0 and adapts it for remote teams and large companies like Wayfair.

“The Remote Design Sprint is incredibly efficient with a great outcome.” — Wayfair Product Manager

All meetings in the Remote Design Sprint are inclusive of online team members so that everyone can participate equally.

The Remote Design Sprint is grounded in three principles:

1. Everyone is a designer. Product managers, analysts, engineers, marketing creatives — everyone’s expertise is leveraged to create the user experience.
2. The user is always right. In the end, what users say (in user research) and what they do (in behavioral data) are our benchmarks for success.
3. Design is never done. Our goal is not perfection, but to continually learn about our users and improve their experience.

The process consists of four phases:

1. Vision: Understand the problem. This involves running a vision workshop and creating a user journey map of the current experience. This is also when you gather information: behavioral data, user research, competitive approaches, etc.
2. Creation: Create a design that solves the problem. The second phase turns the team’s ideas into a prototype ready to test. You run a design studio, list requirements, and design a prototype.
3. Testing: Show the design to users. The whole team watches the user tests together (we do this through usertesting.com) and comes to a consensus on the takeaways.
4. Analyzing: Improve the final design. In the final phase, you refine the prototype based on user feedback, technical restraints, and any other considerations.

The Remote Design Sprint follows four phases with structured meetings that make the most of the team’s time.

Creating the Remote Design Sprint

We started to develop this process a year ago when our team was spread thin. Our Experience Design team consisted of three designers: Norman Wozniak (Senior Product Design Manager), Emily Thompson (Product Designer), and me, Lauren Lamperski (Content Strategy Lead). Together, we supported six scrum teams — a total of 100 stakeholders in charge of the entire upper-funnel experience (homepage, navigation, etc.). Our scrum teams had roadmaps packed with large-scale projects. People were working remotely more often, whether permanently or with work-from-home days.

The stakeholders we worked with, and the company at large, wanted to make big changes to the user experience. Given this formula of many stakeholders, high expectations, and less time than ever, we set out to improve our design process.

First, we tried the Design Sprint 2.0. Created by Jonathan Courtney at AJ&Smart, it’s an amazing process that hundreds of companies have used to create large-scale projects in a short amount of time.

But the Design Sprint 2.0 reaches its limits when you have a large number of stakeholders, some of whom disagree on the project direction. Add remote work to the mix, and miscommunications happen. Conflicts arise. Timelines expand. The feedback loop goes on and on.

In creating the Remote Design Sprint, we made a lot of important adjustments. Where we used to run vision workshops in person, we now send out a survey that asks what each person thinks about the project’s goals and risks. Then, we simply regroup for a quick recap of the results. Not only does this save time, but it also reduces groupthink — everyone comes up with ideas on their own without extroverts or senior leaders dominating the conversation.

By tracking all progress in Miro, the team has full visibility into the work as it happens, and there’s no need for extra documentation.

Design studios used to be mandatory in-person meetings. But what if a key stakeholder has a cold, or their babysitter cancels, or they’re expecting a package at home? Suddenly, an important voice is lost during the most crucial point of ideation. Now, our design studios allow everyone to join a Google Meet, add their sketches in Miro, and vote on their favorite concepts. It makes good use of everyone’s time and removes an extra step for documentation.

The Remote Design Sprint leverages our everyday set of tools, making it easy to integrate it into our normal workflow.

Through trial and error, we created the Remote Design Sprint to optimize efficiency with a series of structured meetings that make the most of everyone’s time. The process is highly collaborative and inclusive of remote employees. It helps the Experience Design team avoid context switching so we can complete projects in a couple of weeks instead of months. It does all of this using our everyday tools: Miro, Airtable, G Suite, and Slack.

“The process was fun, and I felt like everyone could give their own opinion.” — Wayfair Marketing Stakeholder

Teams across the organization are using the Remote Design Sprint to make their projects more flexible, efficient, and fun. (GIF by Bobby Klucevsek)

A Scalable, Repeatable Process

We send out an anonymous survey after each Remote Design Sprint, and nearly all stakeholders give it rave reviews. 96% of respondents say they loved the process and would do it again. Now, our team runs a Remote Design Sprint about once a month. More teams across the company are adopting the process and loving the results. For us, the Remote Design Sprint has helped team morale, productivity, and the quality of the user experience reach an all-time high.

“I liked that the process combined engineering, product design, and business stakeholders (it’s GREAT).” — Wayfair Product Manager

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, our team is fully remote. Although it’s now harder for us to take soulful group portraits, we’ve been able to continue collaborating well.

Whether your team has always been remote or you suddenly find yourself working from a laptop propped on your laundry hamper, the Remote Design Sprint can bring people together. It’s easier than ever to reap all the benefits of the Design Sprint 2.0 from home. Want to try the Remote Design Sprint for yourself? Read our step-by-step guide (templates included!) to get started.

Thanks to Norman Wozniak and Emily Thompson for collaborating to create this process!