From the T-shaped designer to a online creative technologist

As worldwide events are changing everyday life, so are the expectations of today’s experience designer. This designer is becoming more of a conduit between business and tech, between marketing and development. Linking these disciplines together is the UX expert, whether that be instituting Design Thinking or facilitating workshops, the bar is getting set higher and higher and today modern UX’er needs to be ready, and needs to be T-shaped.

For the past few years User-Centered Design (UCD) and Lean UX has been top of my agenda and prioritising the very best elements of those ideologies is a skill I’m fine-tuning everyday. UX Workshops, in their many different guises are designed to empathise, to understand and then lead on towards a POC or some flavour of a prototype. This has many benefits from collaborative thinking through to group alignment and collective contribution. Like ideation and journey mapping all in a face-to-face collaborative style.

In these more challenging times, how do we design professionals help to facilitate that collaborative nature from behind a computer screen and without having that face-to-face connection? Build relationships with teams distributed across the country or globe and communicate the value of journey mapping while engaging people in the process is even more challenging, especially when those people can’t witness the actual activity. Ideation and mapping exercises over-the-wire is a challenge so here is my perspective following a recent remote workshop I chaired with a real estate client.

Pre workshop – Be like a boy scout

I’ve said in previous articles, you roughly need twice the presentation time for preparation and this is equally true when you’re delivering the remote flavour of a UX workshop. Leading from the front as a facilitator and as a creative technologist ultimately the success of a remote workshop does revolve around the technology you have to hand. Make no assumptions, if your connection is not strong enough or your cameras are not clear enough the success of your remote workshop is that risk. 

Include an agenda to manage expectations

Unfortunately you won’t have those two minutes pre-KO to ask about the weather and to build bridges so make sure introductions are timetabled. Keep the conversations flowing by including the Product Vision and The Challenge Definition as early pieces on your agenda. The remote nature of these first interactions are crucial, it’s important to allow all to contribute and keep the conversation flowing by iterating what has been done, what we are doing and what we will do.

It’s important to gauge the creative intelligence on the people in the virtual room. This should come both from your research of the attendees pre workshop and by calling out by name to promote engagement, asking people for their introduction at the top of the hour. My experience says go with the lowest denominator and bring everyone up to speed on process, on base level concepts behind Design Thinking and on how collaborative session usually work and ask the big questions (see My 5 Big Questions above). Don’t forget to share pre-prepared documentation or links to aid further reading across your comms channel of preference.

Keep your process, but adapt

Activities like early hypotheses session, through to personas building, demo’s and deep dives into feature lists discussion all still have their place in the remote workshop scenario – they just tweaking to ease them through. Everyone must understand the purpose and the outcomes of your activities. For instance customer journey mapping; recognised as one of the more challenging workshop activities especially amongst debutante participants I recognised I had to most of the heavy-lifting myself. My goal for this instance was to quickly understand the current journey within a limited time, involve as many internal stakeholders from bus dev, legal, CS to engineering.

Have at hand your collaboration doc, detailing activities with timings and outlining techniques. This acts a guide through all your calls and should be shared on screen and as a single point of truth when concluding the workshop. My take out here is keep it simple, use bullet points and subtle branding.  Google Docs is your friend here. It’s also a good idea to later move your visual findings to Mural and Miro (formerly RealTimeBoard)

Ideations well handled in a low fidelity way 

When mostly everyone is remote, take advantage of Real-time board or Muraly or Sketchboard. Even splitting participants into columns on Google Sheets and allowing real-time contribution is a workable solution. For instance, a spontaneously pencil sketch can be captured on your mobile and shared relativity instantly across Slack, great for what I call remote ideations. These can then be cataloged in your collaboration doc and / or uploaded to your Miro board.

Digital Prototyping from the Digital Experts

There is a benefit to being digital designers thinkers in a digital world. So take advantage of this when building and eventually sharing what is in most cases, a digital prototype. Use industry standard tools your clients should be familiar with that can aid both sharing and collaborating within a remote environment. You should still be starting with low fidelity sketches from you Ideation Sessions (see earlier) but eventually this will lead to the big reveal. InVision is my weapon of choice here, it’s quick, it’s collaborative and it’s becoming the industry standard.

Post workshop wrap-up 

In true 360 fashion and in the spirit of UCD from my remote perspective it is good practice to reach out to evaluate the effectiveness of the workshop, so ask for assistance in completing an evaluation. Leave the door open to respond say within a limited time period to keep the data fresh. There will always be pitfalls to this type of distance collaboration, my key take-outs are;

• Reduce friction by introducing activities more appropriate
• Tell your team what you are about to do
• Tell them what has been done
• Follow your script set out in your collaborative doc

Finally, inform the team that there is a central repository (Dropbox or Miro or other cloud share is ideal for this) and ensure all have access; this becomes a great place to dump visuals, photos, text files or movies. This is also a great place for the collaboration doc which eventually evolves into your UX report.

So, have fun by keeping the dynamics high, reducing distractions don’t forget to learn yourself and document religiously. Ramp up your note-taking skills, you’re going to need them!

Appendix

Your remote toolbox

• Google Docs, Sheets and Slides – the go-to applications for collaboration.
• Real Time Board — A remote whiteboard tool for stickies and comment
• Go To Meeting / Zoom — Video conferencing that allows you to show slides and record screens.
• Slack – Document your chats, and share group or personal videos.
• uxpressia.com – Online journey maps and personas

* Please note this toolbox is by no was exhaustive. This industry is booming and pivoting every day.