How many times have you gone over to your co-worker’s desk to show them a design update and explain to them why your client will love it? Or how many times have your teammates ditched those chains of emails because explaining design feedback became too complicated and frustrating for your team? With 77% of remote workers saying they’re more productive when working from home and remote teams on the rise, the “Can I come to your desk and explain this to you?” or “Can I visually show you how this new update works?” becomes difficult. The need for visual collaboration thus stays high for remote teams. Let’s understand why.
Email communication just doesn’t cut it for creative tasks
Design feedback or creative feedback is often a long process. It starts from day 1 and continues till the design is launched. There could be weeks or even months in between. How do you make sure that feedback is easily accessible when your teammate could be receiving hundreds of emails in a day? Can they easily find the feedback point they had received a month back? And what if someone forgot to include everyone in the cc? This could mean a lot of back-and-forth communication and even misunderstandings popping up. And with the dozens of screenshots you will have to attach every time to denote a design change, email definitely doesn’t cut it when it comes to design or creative feedback.
The need to point and show things
When it comes to creative tasks, communicating with texts is tough. Let’s take an example. Suppose your team is working on an animation for the home page of your website. The team lead thinks that the positioning of the animation isn’t fine. So he asks the team to change it. Now, according to their perspective, this positioning is perfect as it does not hinder the features of the website and as a person scrolls down, this animation blends perfectly with the other content on the home page. Can you explain this over text convincingly? Probably not. But can you record a video comment and explain this by pointing out your reasons? Absolutely!
Scheduling video calls is tough
When you have a large remote team, finding that one suitable slot where everyone is available can be tough, especially if you have people working in different time zones. As a team lead, you would waste so much time just picking a relevant time slot. In this scenario, if you also have to include the client in meetings, this becomes even harder. Instead, wouldn’t it be far easier to have a visual collaboration tool in place where your team and client both can leave comments at their convenience and resolve them?
Inability to record and keep track of everything
Let’s assume your team is making use of multiple tools while working remotely. In such a case, it’s common to have all your design feedback and conversations scattered in different tools. For example, some of your teammates may be leaving their comments in Slack, while some of them may be leaving their “resolved” updates on email. In such a case, it becomes very difficult to keep a track of everything. And what if your designs have multiple versions? Which feedback comment is related to which version? A lot of confusion and misunderstandings may pop up in this case as it’s just not possible to keep a track of everything when the information is scattered over different tools.
Collaborating visually is smoother
When it comes to collaboration, nothing beats the “Can I show you what I am thinking?” Creators have a lot going on in their minds and to put that into words is quite difficult. But to show them, be it on a whiteboard or on a visual collaboration tool, is quite efficient. It also helps the team understand things in a better way. You can even give precise values to your team instead of giving out vague feedback comments like, “Can you please move that content on the home page a little bit?”
Now that we know how important visual collaboration is for remote teams that can’t hold meetings every day or do not have the scope to hop on to their co-worker’s desk and explain things, let’s see how visual collaboration tools can be of assistance.
How a visual collaboration tool like Ruttl can help remote design teams?
- You can comment on live websites: Instead of sharing a dozen screenshots, write your feedback comments on live websites by pointing towards the needed change and giving precise values to your team. You can even have a discussion there instead of hopping on to Slack for that.
- Leave video comments: Want to show to your team why a feature needs change? Instead of writing down a long email, simply record a video comment and tag your teammates.
- Create different versions: Manage different versions and easily keep a track of comments on them by checking them one at a time
- Collaborate easily: Tag your teammates, assign them deadlines, and resolve comments. You can even invite your clients to leave their feedback comments by just sending them a simple shareability link.
- Have everything at one place: When your team is working remotely, you no longer have to call somebody up to share feedback or send the version 2 of the website. Everything is there on the application itself.
Visual collaboration is the need of the hour and at ruttl, we have made our tool keeping in mind the challenges of remote teams and creators.
To know more about how ruttl can simplify your entire feedback process and push launches faster, start your free trial now!
