If you think remote collaboration is hard, you’re not alone. Chances are one of these challenges sounds familiar:

• Remote meetings where attention drifts off

• Lack of personal connection with others

• Difficulty sharing ideas visually across distances

Creative work is particularly disadvantaged when it comes to distributed teams. But our research also shows that remote design is very common: of the 275 designers we polled, 2/3 said they deal with remote situations on 80% or more of their projects.

But we also found that about 50% of designers feel that the quality of their work goes down when working remotely. This is a problem. (You can see more of our survey results in a short post here.)

In this webinar hosted by MURAL, our own Jim Kalbach discusses each in more detail, with specific tips and techniques, as well as examples from IBM, McBeard and others.

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The point is that good collaboration skills aren’t nice to have, they’re essential these days. Based on our research, we put together a list of five essential best practices to help with remote design. They are:

• Meet in person

• Break it down

• Be present

• Work visually

• Experiment

Here are the slides from the webinar as well:

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Best Practices in Remote Design from MURAL

EXAMPLES

Here are some of the examples Jim mentioned in the webinar:

• A Year Without Pants, by Scott Berkun

• “Designing At Scale,” Webinar with Doug Powell

• “Lean UX Around the World,” Recap of online workshop with Jeff Gothelf

• "Getting into Remote Design Thinking with MURAL," by Laïla von Alvensleben

RESOURCES

Below are some of our favorite resources on remote collaboration.

• "Resources on Remote Design," by Jim Kalbach

• "Allen Curve" [Wikipedia]

• World Time Buddy [time zone converter]

• "How to schedule remote workshops," by Austin Govella

• "Facilitating Effective Remote Collaboration," interview with Rachel Smith

• "From the Knowledge Economy to the Human Economy," by Dov Siedman