Alexandria Goree
My staff, unfold out throughout three international locations and three timezones, had their tickets able to fly to New York. As the facilitator, I’d laid out Post-its and Sharpies, prepared for a design dash to create our subsequent massive factor.
Then we obtained the e-mail.
COVID-19 infections had been on the rise in New York City, and we’d be working from house for the foreseeable future. My staff cancelled their flights. I couldn’t simply reschedule the dash, so I wanted a backup plan.
Enter the distant design dash, a course of for turning issues into design options with the objective of making and testing a prototype with customers — besides nearly. With contributors in numerous time zones, we’d have a restricted window once we may meet throughout our respective work hours. This drastically condensed our dash schedule and meant we needed to design a brand new approach of working collectively. Despite these challenges, the staff was in a position to shortly come collectively, rally round an issue, generate concepts, and design a imaginative and prescient for the long run:
The key to success: Making Figma the easy-to-access place to get every part contributors would want.
With distant working, it’s protected to imagine that technical difficulties and different at-home distractions will occur. In the identical approach, designers curate a move for customers, facilitators ought to assist information contributors by way of the move of a dash by eradicating boundaries that would detract from the dash workouts. So to maintain us all centered and save time spent switching between apps, I created one Figma file with every part we would want — the agenda, presentation slides, workouts, and prototypes.
So you don’t have to start out from scratch, right here’s that Figma file modified right into a template for any distributed staff to make use of for his or her subsequent distant design dash.
With the assistance of different design dash sources (see all sources on the final web page of the Toolkit), I created this template as a framework for anybody to edit primarily based on what they need to obtain of their dash. It consists of pages for:
Design sprints needs to be versatile and in a position to adapt to discoveries you make all through the workouts or different work-from-home challenges that come up. We discovered it helpful to permit time every day to plan for modifications or roadblocks, particularly if the dash is on a time crunch, as mine was.
For extra tips about distant dash planning, learn Senior Product Designer Ben Dedrick’s article How to Lead a Remote Design Sprint.
Credits
Alexandria Goree
Senior Product Designer
Alexandria’s work presently focuses on getting extra individuals to find Spotify through the net. She enjoys illustration, DIY tasks, and various R&B.