Remote Collaboration & Communication
Remote Collaboration is the foundation of modern design and dev workflows
Remote Collaboration is the foundation of modern design and dev workflows
UI Design
Development
Testing & UX
Before Covid-19 my team worked primarily in person and only worked remote sometimes. Our clients we often worked with remote. Nearly all of our design activities were done or could be done remote. When Covid-19 prompted us to rethink working from home, my agency made the shift. We were met with early challenges, so we implemented some new processes for internal collaboration.
Trello and Jira are useful for tracking granular, non abstract, tasks. The boards below were used to track work assigned to individuals, set timelines, and allow our staff visibility into the projects progress. These boards remain active into the support of a project and act as a historical database for tasks completed.
Attentive designers are always seeking out ways to improve communication and workflows
Collaborate design software is changing the way teams can work together. The difficulties encountered through file versioning, design system misalignment, redundant work, and miscommunication have fallen by the wayside as more teams adopt tools that afford teammates to work in one document simultaneously.
The example is a screen capture from a brainstorming session with my coworker. Although basic, these two designs represent two variations of a single dashboard that we were working to define. A short collaborative session of about ~ 30 minutes can drastically push forward the direction of a design. From here, two concepts were created and then alter presented to our client's stakeholders for further refinement.
The example below is the concept further refined and detailed out with Axure Teams. Although Axure Teams does not support live collaboration like other softwares out there, by working in Axure teams, our designs could be seamlessly exchanged and contributed. The share functionality in Axure was useful for gathering feedback from stakeholders during off-hours.
These examples show a trend for how software can be used to help people work together better remote. This new kind of workflow enables teams and decision makers to create detailed prototypes faster and more efficiently. Prototypes like these can be used to support development, gain business buy in, or test with users.
Designers must constantly be learning and experimenting with more efficient ways of creating, presenting, and testing designs.
There are lots of ways to collaborate remotely. It is a teams job to be able to find effective workflows that produce results that are suitable for all stakeholders.
There are more of these everyday, but here are a few I have found useful
