A Guide for Creative Teams Working Remotely
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Introduction
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What is MarkUp?
MarkUp is a collaboration platform for any piece of digital content. Upload any website or image and MarkUp will render it into a digital canvas ready for commenting.
Yes, it’s hard to believe, but most of us have been working from home for six months. Working remotely—something few of us actually did—is now the new norm, and most of us are really getting the hang of it. In fact, many of the key aspects of work that you and your colleagues thought would be impossible without sharing a fixed location (you might have called it “the office”) can be achieved from anywhere. And that includes collaboration. In fact, judging by the uptick (see TK) in use of both Invision’s digital whiteboard Freehand and Cero’s new commenting tool MarkUp, it’s clear that creative teams are finding new ways to work together when they can’t be together. Over the years, both InVison and Ceros have learned a lot about remote work and the collaboration process—and we’re here to share. InVision has always worked remotely, while Ceros has had a mix of remote and co-located employees. Both companies have learned that effective collaboration has more to do with trust, respect, and communication than location. Over the past few months, we’ve developed tactics and tools for designers to better work with their cross-functional partners (engineers, product managers, marketers, sales folks, et al.) to ensure that remote creativity not only survives, but thrives. Because if there’s one thing we’re certain about creativity and collaboration: it can happen anywhere. It’s all about the people, not the space they inhabit.
Working remotely—something few of us used to do —is now the new norm, and most of us have really gotten the hang of it. In fact, many of the key aspects of work that you and your colleagues thought would be impossible without sharing a fixed location (you might have called it “the office”) can be achieved from anywhere. And that includes collaboration. Judging by the uptick in use of both InVision’s digital whiteboard Freehand and Ceros’ new commenting tool MarkUp, it’s clear that creative teams are finding new ways to work together when they can’t be together. Over the years, both InVision and Ceros have learned a lot about remote work and the collaboration process and we’re here to share. InVision has always worked remotely, while Ceros has had a mix of remote and co-located employees. Both companies have learned that effective collaboration has more to do with trust, respect, and communication than location. We’ve developed tactics and tools for designers to better work with their cross-functional partners (engineers, product managers, marketers, sales folks, et al.) to ensure that remote creativity not only survives, but thrives. Because if there’s one thing we’re certain about creativity and collaboration: it can happen anywhere. It’s all about the people, not the space they inhabit.
What is Freehand?
InVision’s digital whiteboard empowers the entire team to create together in one place, no matter their locations.
Yes, it’s hard to believe, but most of us have been working from home for six months. Working remotely—something few of us actually did—is now the new norm, and most of us are really getting the hang of it. In fact, many of the key aspects of work that you and your colleagues thought would be impossible without sharing a fixed location (you might have called it “the office”) can be achieved from anywhere. And that includes collaboration. Judging by the uptick (at right) in use of both InVision’s digital whiteboard Freehand and Ceros’ new commenting tool MarkUp, it’s clear that creative teams are finding new ways to work together when they can’t be together.
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table of contents
InVision’s digital whiteboard empowers the entire team to create together in one place, no matter their location.
Over the years, both InVison and Ceros have learned a lot about remote work and the collaboration process—and we’re here to share. InVision has always worked remotely, while Ceros has had a mix of remote and co-located employees. Both companies have learned that effective collaboration has more to do with trust, respect, and communication than location. Over the past few months, we’ve developed tactics and tools for designers to better work with their cross-functional partners (engineers, product managers, marketers, sales folks, et al.) to ensure that remote creativity not only survives, but thrives. Because if there’s one thing we’re certain about creativity and collaboration: it can happen anywhere. It’s all about the people, not the space they inhabit.
Content
INtroduction Creating a culture of trust in a remote environment Building a culture of trust in a remote environment Creating inclusivity Fostering creativity General tactics for remote collaboration
Specific tactics for design to better collaborate with key partners:
design & engineering design & product management design & marketing design & sales Design & Executive stakeholders Talk to Invision & ceros
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Yes, it’s hard to believe, but most of us have been working from home for six months. Working remotely—something few of us actually did—is now the new norm, and most of us are really getting the hang of it. In fact, many of the key aspects of work that you and your colleagues thought would be impossible without sharing a fixed location (you might have called it “the office”) can be achieved from anywhere. And that includes collaboration. Judging by the uptick (at right) in use of both InVision’s digital whiteboard Freehand and Ceros’ new commenting tool MarkUp, it’s clear that creative teams are finding new ways to work together when they can’t be together. Over the years, both InVision and Ceros have learned a lot about remote work and the collaboration process—and we’re here to share. InVision has always worked remotely, while Ceros has had a mix of remote and co-located employees. Both companies have learned that effective collaboration has more to do with trust, respect, and communication than location. Over the past few months, we’ve developed tactics and tools for designers to better work with their cross-functional partners (engineers, product managers, marketers, sales folks, et al.) to ensure that remote creativity not only survives, but thrives. Because if there’s one thing we’re certain about creativity and collaboration: it can happen anywhere. It’s all about the people, not the space they inhabit.
Culture is vital to a business’s overall success. It’s been proven to directly influence employee happiness, engagement, retention, recruiting, even the bottom line. InVision’s 2019 Product Design Hiring Report found that 84% of product designers identified a strong internal design culture as the number one factor when evaluating new job opportunities. Trust greatly influences a team’s performance and health, regardless of the type of work environment. A Harvard study compared employees who work at high-trust organizations to those working at low-trust companies and found that employees at high-trust organizations experience:
50
higher productivity
76
more satisfaction with their lives
40
less burnout
29
more engagement
13
fewer sick days
Trust is fundamental to any relationship, but it’s even more important in a remote environment where you must be counted on to do your job, even when no one’s watching. Trust is a two-way street: managers and employees need to be honest with each other about any challenges they are experiencing—work-related or personal—that may impact their performance.
Why it’s important to build a culture of trust
104
more energy at work
74
less stress
Creating a culture of trust in a remote environment
Teams need a clear idea of what’s expected of them, and this is especially key in the absence of regular in-person check-ins. In a remote environment, employees are held accountable for the work they produce, not the hours they work. Managers need to make it clear how and when they want progress to be communicated so that people stay committed to their tasks and goals.
Foster reliability and accountability.
When working remotely, developing empathy for your teammates means appreciating the person on the other side of the screen as a human being. One of the upsides of working from home is that it automatically creates a kind of intimacy that doesn’t exist in traditional offices. Remote integrates life and work, so it’s only natural that aspects of our personal lives—our homes, kids, and pets—are shared with one another, whether we like it or not! If someone’s kid unexpectedly interrupts a meeting and comes into the frame, we want to meet them and even ask them a few questions.
Foster humanity.
People don’t start to truly know one another until they let themselves be vulnerable. But how does that happen when we’re not physically together? By making it a priority to get to know one another. One tactic is to organize a team bonding exercise around vulnerability. Ask your team to describe a challenging personal event that resulted in an enduring and meaningful life lesson. When people share personal things with their teammates, teams connect in strong and lasting ways.
Foster vulnerability.
Building a culture of trust in a remote environment
Creating highly productive teams is about people, not places. Here are the tools and tactics you need to get your creative teams thriving remotely.
A remote team won’t collaborate and create together if every member doesn’t feel welcome and empowered to speak up. It’s essential that you invest the time and effort to make sure everyone feels included and that every voice is heard. Here are some tactics to help you create genuine inclusivity.
Be mindful of introverts.
Create inclusive meeting practices.
Create opportunities for connection.
Start team meetings with an ice-breaker to encourage people to engage and relax: “What did you want to be when you grew up?” or “What’s the first concert you ever went to?” These conversations also give you a window of your teammates as people outside of work. Looking for a good icebreaker exercise, check out InVision’s Icebreaker template in Freehand.
Send out an agenda ahead of time and ask everyone to take a look and make any comments. This creates an environment where people feel their opinions are valued and welcomed and it results in more productive meetings. Being clear about what’s going to be discussed and capturing your team’s perspectives ahead of time will make for shorter, more focused, more worthwhile meetings.
Remote working can be especially challenging for people who are naturally introverted. On a Zoom call, there’s a greater risk of the same few voices dominating the conversation, which means good ideas can go unheard. A truly inclusive working environment welcomes all voices, no matter the volume, and it starts with establishing a culture of trust so that everyone feels welcome to contribute.
Creating inclusivity
Working remotely has its advantages. Some tasks take more time and consideration but distance does not have to impede on your team’s creation and collaboration. Remember, outcomes come from people, not places. You and your team can be just as successful working remotely (perhaps more) but it may require rethinking your processes. Here are a few things we’ve learned about what works:
InVision’s own Freehand was created to solve for the inclusivity and speed of in-person brainstorming. Freehand’s intuitive digital whiteboard allows anyone on the team (no matter their role) to sketch images, type out notes, and review designs together. Teams can also be on the same whiteboard at the same time, or can work/review at whatever time works for their time zone. And collaborating remotely in Freehand just got easier with the recently launched sticky notes, arrows and templates. At Ceros, MarkUp is the platform of choice for customers leaving feedback on live content. Once a Ceros experience is built, users can leverage MarkUp to add comments directly on that experience and freely share it with colleagues or stakeholders. And MarkUp doesn’t just work with Ceros; it can be used over any website or image.
Ideating in a remote environment.
At InVision, each design team gets one hour a week for critique. Time is divided equally depending on the number of projects that are flagged as needing review for the week. Critique sessions are facilitated by the design lead of each team and partners in product management and engineering are invited and encouraged to participate. All of the work to be reviewed is placed in Freehand along with a uniform outline the designer uses to provide constraints for feedback.
Mastering the remote design critique.
It's often easy to know when you’re near a team of designers because the walls are typically covered with their work, everything from hundreds of sticky notes to print-outs of nearly finished designs of an application flow. These are the artifacts that business folks tend to gravitate toward because they provide evidence of their money being well spent. It's vital that your team doesn’t lose this visibility when switching to a remote environment. Post links to prototypes in Slack. Add the links to your team’s Confluence page. And add Trello cards to “Review Design Activity” in various backlogs. Get creative and be seen! Making comments clearly visible and contextual in a platform like MarkUp helps keep your team aligned and accountable. Maintaining those comments as an open list of action items drives empowerment to accomplish tasks at hand. This way, everyone has a better sense of who placed certain comments and a dialog, or thread, can begin about the changes taking place. Additionally, a resolved tab in MarkUp keeps a historical record of changes that your entire team can refer to.
Ensuring visibility of the work.
When collaborators are co-located, key stages of the creative process emerge organically. This can be as simple as stopping someone in the cafeteria to show them a new user flow, to jotting down an idea for a colleague on a piece of printing paper. All of these activities remain just as critical in a remote environment as they are in person, but achieving them may require more intentionality. Being more deliberate about aligning, documenting, and communicating your process with your team is key.
Making creativity explicit.
Critiques are crucial to the design process. To do them well while WFH, schedule a standing meeting in order to share feedback on projects up for review. Team leads should facilitate, while partners in product and engineering attend as a way to foster collaboration and alignment. Participants should keep video on during the meeting to encourage empathy and engagement. Finally, using a tool like InVision Prototype to present design work helps stakeholders understand the real-life experience of your design and allows you to quickly update your design based on feedback.
Everyone attending the critique is required to have their cameras turned on at all times. This helps to show that people are engaged, but more importantly it conveys the tone of the feedback and provides a sense of shared vulnerability. Providing feedback through voice alone comes off as devoid of empathy. Sessions are recorded and shared out afterwards which lets the designer focus more on interaction with the people providing feedback and ideas during the session (rather than trying to document everything).
Fostering creativity
table of content
Working remotely can make collaboration a bigger challenge, but it also presents an opportunity to more deeply understand your partners’ needs. Here are a few basic, but essential steps to building an effective collaborative relationship:
General tactics for remote collaboration
Create empathy.
Work together in a shared toolstack.
Allow collaborators to work on their own schedules.
Set aside time for you and your collaborators to work together and run through discovery exercises so you can build empathy for each role. Keep doing this until you reach all of the major roles that you need to work with. Share these techniques and get more people in your company developing empathy for their partners. Start by identifying what each role needs from each other throughout all phases of a project and who is responsible for delivery, communication, or both. Set up regular and ongoing times to check in cross-functionally.
Shared tools support effective collaboration and result in a more efficient workflow. This is even more critical in a remote context when you can’t turn to your Product Manager or Developer to quickly answer questions about design specifications.
Whether WFH or huddled in an office, it’s never easy to pull teams and various stakeholders into a meeting. At both Ceros and InVision, we encourage teams to use our platforms for remote, asynchronous collaboration so they can give feedback and make changes when they have time. One effective tactic is setting a timeframe for feedback (a few days or a whole week). From there, project stakeholders enter the project on their own time to view existing comments and add more of their own. Once that timeframe is up, the design team makes changes and resolves comments so their team can see what’s been completed and what remains outstanding.
Three tactics to create a culture of trust
Creating an inclusive remote environment
Tactics for fostering creativity in a remote environment
Design & Engineering
Design & Product Management
Design & Marketing
Design & Sales
Design & Executive Stakeholders
Early involvement.
Frequent check-ins.
Use the best collaboration tools.
Designers rely on developers to bring their work to life. Strong cross-functional collaboration and communication are essential to making this process successful, but can be a challenge, especially when working with a distributed team. Here’s how to avoid misinterpretations, inefficient workflows and delays in a remote setting:
Bring developers into your thinking early to discuss what’s possible and to create a shared, common goal with users’ needs at the center. Allow your development partners to give input and ideas based on their knowledge of your tech stack, which will result in better outcomes. You can use a tool like InVision Freehand to draw initial wireframes and review them with your developer teams.
Communicate constantly with respect and empathy to stay aligned as a cross-functional group. Have frequent check-ins to address problems that may arise and to develop shared solutions. There is nothing more frustrating to a developer than seeing a design for the first time when they are being asked to build it. Ditch the big reveal and create prototypes in InVision early and often and share with your developers. Add specific notes and ask for feedback throughout each stage.
Without the right tools and practices in place, developers often have to make guesses on how a design should work in their code. Developers are often handed incomplete designs, or flat images that provide little or no detail into all of the information they need to code it—think values for colors, spacing, or text on the most basic level. To reduce ambiguities when designs are handed off, use a cross-functional collaboration tool like InVision Inspect. Not only will it eliminate communication misfires, strengthen relationships and build trust, it will speed up your time to market.
Specific tactics for design to better collaborate with key partners
Design and engineering
Define your roles.
Get aligned early.
Create a one-pager.
The collaboration between product managers (PMs) and designers is critical to a product’s success. At the best product organizations, PMs and designers operate as true partners with mutual trust and respect. They stay focused on a common end goal: to plan and ship world-class products. But it’s not uncommon to experience friction with your PM due to differing perspectives and high-stress scenarios, which can be exasperated in a remote environment. Here are some ways to ensure that you’re working with your PM most effectively, even in a distributed environment:
The real work happens long before you start building a product. Start with a kick-off meeting, ideating, and wireframing with your PM to really understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Involve your PM in a design sprint to get them excited about the project.
While there’s some cross-over between the roles of PMs and designers, it’s critical that each member of the team has a clearly defined remit to avoid stepping on one another’s toes. This will lead to happier, more effective collaboration.
Develop a one-pager with your PM ahead of the project; it’s useful to have a document that you can refer back to if you lose focus. Having a clear North Star about the product and how it will improve the user experience and achieve business goals will help you and your PM make better decisions throughout the product design process.
Design and product management
Give marketing a seat at the table.
Unite around the idea of performance.
Develop one set of personas for the product.
In many product life cycles, marketing doesn’t start planning until designers are close to bringing the product to life. Though in the most successful product teams, marketers and designers collaborate closely and at every stage—from ideation to execution. Here’s how to ensure you stay aligned with your marketing team, even in a distributed environment:
Both marketing and design have the same goals, they just have different tools for getting there. Successful product teams focus on performance as an end shared goal to align marketing and design to solve problems together.
The disconnect between marketers and designers often has to do with collaboration. With separate, but equally valuable customer insights and data, both teams can learn a tremendous amount from one another. Give marketing a seat at the table from day one, so that designers can glean customer insights early on for building better products. With MarkUp, marketing teams can leave comments on what needs to be emphasized and where and organically take part in the creative process.
It’s not uncommon for companies to have more than one set of personas for their products. Marketing creates sales personas, while product design and development creates separate user personas. Yet by sharing insights, marketing and design can collaborate to develop one set of clearly defined personas, which will result in a deeper understanding of customers’ behaviors and needs, and ultimately better products and services.
Design and marketing
Designers who’ve spent time dreaming up and innovating products should be actively involved on the front lines with their sales team to hear how their ideas are received, interpreted, and ultimately pitched. Hearing how a sales person presents and sells your idea can give you invaluable insight into what may or may not be resonating.
Attend sales calls and listen in.
Analyze the calls.
Put yourself in their shoes.
Imagine yourself using the sales deck you designed on an actual sales call. Does it highlight the right parts? Is it clear? Is the hierarchy optimized for the task at hand? A tool like MarkUp allows designers and stakeholders in sales to comment directly on the sales decks and web pages they rely on to close deals. Having a dialog of comments allows teammates to see things from their partners’ POV. Nothing like a little cross-team empathy to remind you that you’re all working toward the same goal.
There’s no greater way to gain critical feedback on your work than through hearing a concept pitched in the real-world. Does it make sense? What sort of mood or emotions is it evoking? Is it receiving buy-in?
Tools like Gong and Chorus are useful to analyze sales calls, especially for the times when you can’t be there. Look for common threads or themes; negative themes around workflow or inefficiencies are like gold for designers as they inform and inspire new ways for them to solve user’s problems.
Design and sales
Demonstrate the value of design.
Help the C-suite uncover challenges.
Prototyping.
When everyone gets involved in the product design process, it’s harder to balance your creative vision with user needs and stakeholder preferences. However, when done right, internal partnerships with designers and stakeholders can provide the “secret sauce” to making a world-class product. Balancing creative inspiration, user needs, stakeholder preferences, and more is something all teams have to contend with. Here’s how to navigate—and strengthen—the designer-executive relationship in a remote setting:
Beyond sharing research, aim to have candid and frequent conversations with executive stakeholders. It’s important to be direct because design teams often understand challenges and constraints that aren’t immediately visible to stakeholders.
Begin by learning how your leadership views design. Do they think design is a differentiator, or do they see it as an internal service provider? Use these discovery conversations to build a business case for your C-suite to show them how design can advance the top and bottom lines. Show the potential business value of design with any existing data or simple revenue metrics. Many design leaders suggest creating a weekly or monthly email report for leadership—this can be a small brief on industry data, user research, and an update on what your team is doing to solve user problems.
Use a tool like InVision Prototype to most effectively showcase your work to key stakeholders and build the “narrative” around your design. A single prototype link with commenting features can be easily shared in a remote setting. You can even add tour points to guide the reviewer through the prototype. These are particularly useful in a remote setting because they provide context that you might have given reviewers if you were walking them through your prototype in person.
Design and executive stakeholders
Speak with InVision to learn how we can help you streamline design-dev collaboration, stand up a design system, and ship products 6.5 weeks faster.
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Ceros is a cloud-based design platform that allows marketers and designers to create immersive content without writing a single line of code.
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Remote Work for Design Teams Guide
And even though those doubts have faded away, you’re still learning about how to collaborate remotely. Over the years, both Invison and Ceros have learned a lot about remote work and the collaboration process—and we’re here to share. Invision has always worked remotely, while Ceros has had a mix of remote and co-located employees. Both companies have learned that effective collaboration has more to do with trust, respect, and communication than location. Over the past few months, we’ve developed tactics and tools for designers to better collaborate with their cross-functional partners (engineers, product managers, marketers, sales folks, and their executive stakeholders) to ensure that creativity not only happens, but thrives in a remote environment. Because if there’s one thing we’ve all learned about creativity and collaboration, it’s that it can happen anywhere. It’s all about the people, not the space they inhabit.
Yes, it’s hard to believe, but most of us have been working from home for six months now. Working remotely—which few of us actually did—is now the new norm, and most people are really getting the hang of it. You probably have come to realize that key aspects of work that you once thought would be impossible to achieve without sharing a fixed location (you might have called it “the office”) can be achieved from anywhere. Let’s be honest: you probably had serious doubts about your ability to collaborate without being in the same space—or even the same time zone.
