Best Practices And Tools For Effective Remote Collaboration (UX/UI Designers)

Since the pandemic, many teams have started working remotely. Today, distributed teams have become common. However, many still struggle to collaborate effectively while working remotely with product designers, developers, and other stakeholders. The key to effective remote collaboration for UI/UX designers is to keep their team short, follow the best practices, and choose the right remote collaboration tools. But before getting to that, let’s learn what you should avoid when working with a remote team.

Things to Avoid for Effective Remote Collaboration

1. Never Specify the Entire Design

Avoid sharing the whole product design at once and ask for feedback. If you work on the design solely and present it at once, that’s not collaborative. It’s a process, and every member involved must get a say and approve of what goes in the design.

2. Prioritizing Business Objectives

You will get nothing out of prioritizing your business objectives over the users’ needs. Your goal should be to help users solve the problem they’re facing. Help them with the right solutions, and you'll hit your business goals eventually.

3. Putting Thought into The Product After Design

This is the worst practice for designing and developing a product. You can’t simply decide to build a product called X, make it look pretty and simple to use, leaving the thought behind it for later. A lot of research and planning goes into a product design to make it successful.

4. Neglect or Downgrade The Role of Design

Design should be equal to product, marketing, and engineering, rather than report into any of those functions.

5. Binding Conversations

Always make room for frequent healthy discussions, brainstorming sessions, or rituals where all the members get an opportunity to think outside of the box and share their ideas. You’ll be glad about what those discussions bring to the table.

6. Dismissing Challenging Questions

Don't ignore designers or other team members when they ask great questions about an initiative. It’s best to take the time to clarify what you're trying to accomplish and why. Help them discover the answers to the challenging questions to avoid mistakes and inferior results later.

Best Practices for Effective Remote Collaboration for UI/UX Designers

Now that you know what to avoid to collaborate effectively with your distributed team, let’s look at some of the best practices you must follow.

1. Keep Your Team Small

Small teams with up to 8 to 10 members are easy to manage, communicate and work with. It makes the process slicker, easy to assign roles, track who is working on what, and everyone knows when and where to get more involved.

2. Choose a Central Collaboration Hub

Often, there are members in a distributed UX team that work across different geographies and time zones. Plus, within an enterprise organization, you must also communicate with other stakeholders. Therefore, UI/UX teams must utilize remote collaboration tools at their disposal effectively. You must choose a collaboration platform like Slack or Trello to communicate, store files, assign roles and track progress. If everything related to the project stays on one central platform, it will be easier to get it done.

Think of it as your virtual desk. Everything work-related stays there, even when you’re not available. If another member has to deliver a message or share any files with you, they leave it on your desk, and you respond to it when you return. Nothing goes missing, you don’t have to use multiple platforms to communicate with your team, and you can get things done on time.

3. Conduct Workshops

UI/UX workshops have always been an effective way to collaborate and better understand the product. They help you to get to know your team members in a fun and informative manner. You can conduct various types of workshops depending on the product you’re working on and the requirements at hand. Some common workshops regarding product design are organized to develop solutions, decide features, create customer journey maps, wireframing, design, navigation, etc.

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