As a freelancer or an in-house designer, you must have joined various design sprints for some projects during your career. Design sprints are quintessentially group sessions during which you collaborate with your team to find design solutions within 5 days. Through ideation, deep work, building prototypes, testing and reiterating, you find that solution. The end goal of a design sprint is to achieve speed and maximum efficiency.
These days, remote design sprints have started becoming popular as well owing to the global pandemic. These sprints allow global collaboration and do not limit participation. Offline design sprints need a facilitator who schedules, organizes, gathers essentials and runs the design sprint. Whereas, remote design sprints, present their own set of challenges such as striking organic conversations, aligning time zones, offering context and background or connection distortions.
Despite these challenges, you can still make your remote design sprints successful using these tips:
Get the Right Tools
Running a remote design sprint is only possible if you are equipped with just the right tools. Try and test various tools for documentation, video conferencing, whiteboarding and user testing beforehand so that on the D-day, you are all set.
Fix the Date and Time
Whether you have a global team or not, fixing date and time and sending meeting invites well in advance always helps. By doing so, you would get your whole team together and keep them on the same page.
Ask for Assistance
Pulling off a design sprint is not at all easy. There is a lot that needs to be done during its planning and also when it goes live. You do need help to make it a success. Do not take ownership of everything, ask one or two of your team members to help you out and the process will feel less overwhelming.
Stay on Video
Remote design sprints cannot showcase nonverbal cues or convey how the participants are feelings. To overcome this barrier, you must keep your video on so that the participants feel involved and can communicate with ease.
Schedule Breaks
Back to back brainstorming and whiteboarding can tire participants. Schedule timely lunch breaks, tea breaks and just quick refresher to beat all that call fatigue.
Do follow these tips to make your remote design sprints more productive and helpful!
