Exploring the Benefits of Remote Design Sprints

What's the key to the success of a remote design sprint? The success relies on bringing together a small multidisciplinary team of 5-7 people! While carrying out the remote design sprint, you must demand full attention and active participation. The motive of RDS is to build a shared notion of an intricate issue and techniques to move forward while combining in a remote setting.

The Google Design Sprint approach served as one of the enormous benefits of the remote design sprints process, which was modified by employing AJ&Smart's Remote Design Sprint 2.0 in compliance with Jake Knapp, the preliminary Design Sprint originator.

What are the tips for managing remote teams in design sprints? How to run design sprints remotely? What are the essential tools for managing remote design sprints?

Let's discuss everything in detail!

Conducting Remote Design Sprints - A Complete Step-By-Step Process

In this step-by-step guide, the 3-step strategy for achieving and facilitating hassle-free remote design sprints is shown below:

Step 1: Getting ready for your remote design sprint

One of the best ways to shatter a design sprint is by overlooking the preparation phase when expediting a remote session.

Recognize the context of the issue

You must be well-acquainted with the issue when you know when the design sprint will occur. Chat with the main stakeholders and discover who's liable for what on the team. It will assist you in choosing the right people for Sprint.

Create your sprint team

It's essential as it measures the success of your design sprint. The whole point of creating your sprint team is to hire like-minded people to concentrate on a similar problem.

Organize the calls

With scattered teams, scheduling alignment is essential. People getting up at 5 a.m. or sticking up until 11 p.m. are different from what you expect. You may schedule your sessions using Doodle, and for a hassle-free timezone overview, using World Time Buddy is essential.

Build a design sprint brief

In this design sprint methodology, you may create a brief using a template once you have your dream team. It's the vital document that helps align participants on what to anticipate from the upcoming design sprint. It contains a list of items to accomplish as well as a description of the task, the timeline, and the deadline.

Problem framing

The planning process for your Design Sprint must include problem framing. Conducting just the right amount of investigation into the issue you're attempting to address.

Consultations with your Sprint team

Giving everyone a general notion of what will occur during a Design Sprint is an intelligent approach. You must ensure everyone is informed of what is coming up because the process is severe.

Step 2: The tools

Fortunately, the technology existed beforehand. All you need to select the essential tools for managing remote design sprints:

Figma: Cross-time region collaboration and live prototyping.
Zoom: Chat, connect, share screens, and record calling sessions easily.
Asana: The best project management tool that fits your team best.
UserTesting: Examine your prototypes without any hassle.
Miro: The digital canvas for today's innovators. It's a unique Remote Design Sprint Template.
Doodle: Organize meetings in a jiffy.
Notion: Keep everything from tasks to notes to prototypes in a single place.

Step 3: Conducting absolute remote design sprints using a template

One of the best online collaboration tools is Miro, which helps create a complete remote design sprint template. These are the significant elements from the template:

Private workstations for each participant
Transparent explanations and instructions
Built-in tools for making your life easier

What are The Tips for Managing Remote Teams in Design Sprints?

Simplifying design sprints is challenging, and the process gets more complicated when it's remote. Being a facilitator, the leading role is to close the gaps between resources, people, issues, and solutions. These are the major tips for managing remote teams in design sprints:

Establish transparent mandates and ground regulations

Creating ground norms is vital for remote sprints due to several distractions which can get in the way of your video call. These are the rules to follow:

Minimize notifications from emails, phones, and applications during the design sprint sessions.
Select a noise-free ecosystem where you won't get distracted.
Keep the video on during the whole session.

The more directions and clarification you provide, the better the results.

Create the authenticate expectations

Remote design sprints demand detailed attention from participants and include tremendous work. It's vital to control your expectations beforehand to make the sprint successful.

Arrange everything in advance

It assists you in getting ready for the type of week you will experience throughout the sprint. You'll probably have to cope with poor engagement, tech difficulties, being on schedule, and confronting naysayers.

Benefits of Remote Design Sprints

Remote design sprints offer similar outcomes to in-person design sprints and thereby provide these benefits:

They're budget-friendly to conduct

One of the most significant benefits of remote design sprints is it helps eliminate travel, food, and hotel expenses. Also, the cost of physical supplies will be much lower, and the need to spend hours on post-sprint transferring paper-based work to digital files will be reduced.

They're flexible for the partakers

Remote design sprints let differently-abled partakers efficiently attend without mobility. Also, it helps boosts diversity by magnifying the pool of partakers from local to global.

Challenges In Running Design Sprints Remotely

The remote design sprint is a fast-paced and agile strategy for product design. The agile project management techniques for remote design sprints allow you to implement solutions effectively. Apart from being a problem-solving method, remote design sprints have some challenges too, which are the following:

Minimal engagement

When your team works remotely, they are one Alt-Tab away from Slack.

Inefficient collaboration

A physical sprint room has a whiteboard as your single workstation. Different from a remote setup, communications get messy quickly. So, how to overcome communication barriers in remote design sprints?

You can do this easily by employing a top-notch tool for cooperative communication. It can be obtained by using a video conferencing platform where you can see and hear one another, shares screens, and more.

Differences in time zones and availability among teams

Since the Sprint calls for lengthy, intensive work meetings, organizing and coordinating scattered teams is challenging.

When you're struggling to rapidly identify a design remedy or perspective for a significant challenge, you should employ the Remote Design Sprint. These issues can occasionally include several phases or groups. Work collaboratively with your product design supervisor to acquire the data required to assist in helping product management and evaluate the endeavor when requesting to perform a remote design sprint.

Also read our blog, Creating the Ultimate UX: Best Practices for UI/UX Design in Web Applications