How can we collaborate effectively whilst in isolation

Thinking back to a world before the COVID pandemic, there is so much that has changed in our lives. The first few weeks of lockdown seemed to turn everything on its head.

We found ourselves having to dramatically change the way we live our lives to cater for the threat of spreading an airborne virus. So much that we had taken for granted was no longer available to us. The physical restrictions on entering shared spaces meant that we had to find new ways to carry out our jobs, forcing us to work from the (dis)comfort of our own homes. It was during this time that we learned a lot about what we really rely on in our day to day jobs.

The shift to working from home (WFH) happened in a relative instant, we weren’t given the time to thoroughly plan and prepare for how we’d now carry out our everyday tasks. Sitting down with the team at The Unit, we discussed how WFH would impact us as a business.

The digital industry is one that is relatively well placed to work remotely, perhaps more so for an agency than a large organisation, but still far easier than a more physical industry. At The Unit we’d recently enforced a WFH week only the month prior to allow for office renovations, and everything had gone smoothly. However this was clearly going to be a longer-term arrangement which would bring about new challenges for the team.

One area that had always concerned me (other than my seven month old co-worker), was our ability as designers to collaborate and exchange thoughts and feedback on wireframes and designs.

A group of people congregating over a screen has always been a common sight in our studio. Be it designers sharing thoughts, developers inputting into designs, research leads shaping solutions — we would frequently collaborate around a single physical location.

On top of this, an issue for me in particular, is that I do love to use a whiteboard. Whether that’s sketching ideas with colleagues (both good and often bad!). Writing ToDo lists, or just doodling some scribbles that somehow vaguely illustrate, but certainly assist my thought process. (My ‘scribbles’ have become something of an office joke if I’m honest).

It’s just that I find having something physical, that is visible for all to see, has a certain impact and gravitas to it. It can’t ‘accidentally’ be overlooked like an email can, it’s on the wall staring you in the face. I also believe that sketching with whiteboard pens is the quickest, and least formal way to communicate a thought for dissection whilst in meetings or workshops.

Here I was forced to work from home with a big part of my working practice removed. I had two options; to start drawing on the walls in my house, or find a digital alternative. With my wife not thrilled about the prospects of flow diagrams forming a new feature wall for our living room , I opted for the latter.

So how do we collaborate digitally? Obviously we could share screens on video calls, and Slack has the floaty pen feature that annoyingly disappears after three seconds. But it was a little cumbersome to capture people’s thoughts in a collaborative way, and we lacked the ability to sketch ideas together.

I started to download and play around with a few digital whiteboards (Stormboard, InVision and Whiteboard Fox), then I remembered using Miro on a previous project when mapping chat-bot flows with a client. The work had gone very smoothly (I remember the post-it note feature that had an instant appeal for me).

So days before kicking-off a 16-week, seven-person Scrum based project to design and develop a new start-up proposition, I decided we’d give it a go. Here’s how it went:

Miro

With its intuitive interface, it’s very easy to pick up and play with (even if skipping the intro wizard as I inevitably always do). With our design lead rapidly creating lo-fi wireframes before our eyes, it didn’t take the rest of us long before we were dropping post-it comments in and around his sketches like a cluster bomb attack of feedback.

The design tools were also very familiar, meaning the team could sketch mini concepts and interactions that sat alongside each of his more polished wireframes.

One feature that proved really useful was the ability to drop almost anything onto the board. We’d very quickly created a kind of wireframe/mood-board hybrid with screen grabs of competitors and inspiration that seemed to perfectly capture both our conversation and ‘vision’.

We then progressed to map out the full journey, giving us a picture of the application’s entire flow. Unlike with single screen designs, or somewhat dry Trello boards, we now had a single source of truth that visually captured the full scale of the project at-hand.

This is such a key factor for a successful project. Having the entire project team and project stakeholders share a vision of exactly what is going to be created is often half the battle.

All in all, perhaps unsurprisingly, I found it easy to switch from a physical board to a Miro board when in the Ideation and Converge project phases. I was surprised however to see that it actually continued to offer value when moving into the design and build sprints.

Our designers started to work through the Miro board, switching out wireframes with their high-fidelity Sketch designs. Acting almost like a design backlog to track progress against, but again enabling us to comment directly into individual screen designs, to ensure that we hadn’t missed any of the all-important details.

Clearly it’s a good tool for capturing comments and notes from UX designers, project managers, and clients, but it can also be used to brief developers on flows and actions.

We’ve now used the Miro board for the first four weeks of our project, and it really has highlighted to me how useful it is to have a single, and shared, view of a project. Having one digital board to support us through the evolution from a smorgasbord of ideas, through to customer-journeys and wireframes, and then onto final designs and even development.

It did get me thinking about whether we could even take it a step further, using the Miro board to ‘chunk’ designs into sprints of work in a wider agile project. Perhaps we could capture development estimations, and even enable stakeholders to prioritise features within Miro itself.

I’ve seen problems arise in projects where multiple digital tools are used, when team members and clients start reviewing old versions, and losing login details etc. Perhaps this could be the ‘one ring to rule them all’?

There’s still lots of learning to have for sure, and it’s great to see the potential with integration to our Slack channel. If I had one word of warning however, I would point out that Miro should be used primarily as a working tool. It is not best placed for more formal demos. Speeding around a huge user-flow of designs soon becomes disorientating for stakeholders — far better to resort to a clickable InVision prototype for these meetings.

In summary, I will soon be reunited with my 120x200 wall mounted whiteboard (I’ve missed you old friend), but perhaps the use of digital whiteboards, with their infinite size and the ability to support an evolving project through ideating, converging, designing and even development, actually offer us more?

Knowing how I operate and think, I’m sure that I’ll likely always need to physically draw on something or other to help shape my thoughts. I do however feel that the use of collaborative tools such as Miro is something that will likely remain part of our way of working. I will certainly give thought to whether we should adopt this approach for more of our projects moving forward.