Tools for Remote, Collaborative UX Design

“UX designers need time to think on their own as much as they need close collaboration,” asserts Jordan. “When close collaboration is necessary, I jump on a call or video chat with my teammates and collaborate using Google Docs. Even when I need to think on my own, I’m still available by phone or email.”

“Slack, Sketch, InVision, Dropbox, and a regular old telephone all have wonderful collaborative capabilities, and all enhance each other when used together,” suggests Ben.

I like a mix of Slack and Google Docs,” says Mark. “These tools are not specific to user research—just good collaboration tools. It’s better to have a multipurpose tool that you can adapt based on the activity. As a small business, we limit our tool options because having too many makes it difficult to delegate projects to other people. But Google Docs is collaborative enough that it helps us work together.

“Remote collaborative design is a bit trickier,” acknowledges Csaba. “I love holding face-to-face design-studio sessions—something I think every UX designer should practice. During a design-studio session, designers solve a problem together, sketching many possible solutions and screens. The goal is to generate ideas that the designers can then refine and use. However, doing a remote design studio is a challenge because you cannot just pin your sketches on the wall so everyone can see them. Still, use your creativity to try to replicate this approach online because it’s worth it. The simplest solution is to ask team members to sketch on their own, then take photos of their sketches and share them on Google Drive or InVision, so everyone can see them while discussing the problem via Skype or Zoom.”

Collaboration Tools

Next, we’ll learn about what specific tools our expert panelists have used and recommend.

Atlassian Tools

Pabini: Atlassian has created some of the best collaboration tools for software-development teams. They’re continually adding to their product suite. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to use some of their newest products. Confluence is the best knowledge-management software I’ve used. Jira is a great tool for planning and tracking agile development projects. If you design in code like I do, Bitbucket lets you manage Git code repositories so teammates can collaborate on code. By designing in code, I mean doing detailed visual design and creating responsive-design breakpoints in code. Atlassian recently acquired Trello.

Balsamiq

Pabini: I often use Balsamiq for sketching or creating affinity diagrams during remote collaboration sessions. It’s very easy to use and lets you work quickly. One benefit of Balsamiq is that many product managers and engineers know how to use it. Plus, it integrates with Confluence.

Cloud File Storage

Steven: I use Dropbox. This is about procedure, method, and permanency. You have to organize your files and notes so everyone can find them when they need them, now and in the future.

Pabini: I’ve used Google Drive and Dropbox. They’re both good tools.

Communication Tools

Jordan: I don’t use Slack. I’ve tried to get on board, but I just can’t get out of the email mindset. The whole chat or discussion-board concept is too passive for me. If I’m working, I want to be asked questions and alerted about things. So my biggest collaboration tools are email, screen sharing, and a conference-line phone.

Janet: I use email in my design work so I can easily save my conversations and refer back to them at a later time. I appreciate that each thread can be as long as necessary and instantly gives me an archive for a particular part of a design. Not only can I see the current state of a design, I can easily see the history of the design. I also like that I can collaborate in a way that doesn’t interrupt people’s work.

Steven: I like email better than instant messaging (IM) or related systems such as Slack because the messages are not transient. You can take notes, file them, and search for them later to find the information.

Pabini: I hate using email for team discussions. It’s like the information goes into a black hole. I prefer keeping all project information in one place, where all of my teammates have access to it and it’s separate from all unrelated information. But I agree with Steven that using chat or instant messaging systems is worse because of the transitory nature of the information. I prefer a well-structured knowledge-base in Confluence, which lets me maintain the full history of a design’s evolution through archived discussions and sketches. Plus, I can easily connect that information to user stories in Jira.

Evernote

Pabini: As Aarron Walter described in his UX STRAT 2013 keynote, which you can read about in my review, MailChimp is using Evernote’s powerful capabilities to analyze and discover new connections between massive amounts of data from disparate sources to inform UX strategy and design. I’ve used Evernote mainly for notetaking and sharing information.

The Google Suite

Pabini: In addition to using Google Drive, I use Google Docs, Sheets, and Calendar. I’ve also used Sites. I love the ability of Google Apps to let people edit the same document simultaneously. I use Google Docs a lot when doing collaborative writing.

Csaba: As a UX designer, I have to create a lot of different documents, spreadsheets, and flowcharts. For documents and spreadsheets, I use Google Drive, Docs, and Sheets. They work well, let you work collaboratively, and they’re easy to use. I have all the templates I’ve created for user personas, a business canvas, and a design brief in Google Drive.

Jordan: I’m also a Google Apps user. I like their collaborative suite that allows a team to work on the same document at the same time.

Lisa: We use Google Drive for storing and sharing files and Google Docs for all the things that Docs does, including real-time, collaborative editing of documents. Currently, we are piloting their Wiki tool, Sites.

Stephen: Google Docs and Sheets are perfect for simple, collaborative editing. Something many of us do a lot.

Steven: The stuff that works well in spreadsheets is the most important to develop collaboratively—goals, objectives, content, taxonomies, information architecture, and more. I use Google Sheets or Excel in the cloud for this purpose.

InVision, Sketch, and UserTesting

Csaba: Even though it’s 2017, and it seems that there’s a cloud-based solution for everything, doing remote, collaborative UX design is still a challenge. In my experience, design tools—for wireframing, creating flows, or fleshing out visual concepts—are improving rapidly. You have to keep an eye on the upcoming tools. For example, InVision just launched InVision Studio in public beta, which will go live starting in January. It’s a screen design tool like Sketch, but fully integrated with InVision's prototyping features.

InVision plays a key role in my work. You can upload designs, easily create a prototype in seconds, show it to clients or your team, and do a usability test. It’s worth noting that InVision offers integration with the usability testing platforms UserTesting and lookback, which I very much appreciate. The easier it is to run a test, the more people will do usability testing of their products.

Another challenge for remote teams is finding a great way to provide feedback on designs. I use InVision to share my designs because it lets all team members and clients leave comments. Also, check out Freehand by InVision. With Freehand, you can draw and comment directly on designs. Since I hate endless email threads, it’s always easier to just sketch your ideas to show to the team.

Janet: I enjoy the ease with which I can turn my Sketch designs into InVision prototypes, then share them with others.

Sarah: I can recommend only tools that I use, so I have to say that InVision is the most useful tool for remote, collaborative UX design. I’m able to walk through the UX design process from start to finish. For example, I can use Freehand to brainstorm initial concepts and create flow diagrams to make sure we’re aligned. Once I’ve created higher-fidelity screens, I can bring them into InVision so we can see them in the context of a device and do prototyping, if necessary.

The commenting feature in InVision is crucial. Although it can get challenging when you have a lot of people—or people who like to leave every thought in their brain as comments—for example, 13 comments that just say, ‘love it.’ So, with commenting, you have to educate your client or customer about how to provide helpful feedback. I suggest reading my article “User Experience: Feedback & the Case for Context” for further discussion of this topic. You can also do usability testing within InVision because they recently partnered with the company UserTesting.

Preview for macOS

Csaba: I regularly have to provide feedback on wireframes and visual designs because I always work with a team and do a lot of training and mentoring. If I have to comment on a design, I use the built-in markup tool in Preview. I can add text and arrows and draw lines and basic shapes when providing feedback. It’s just super fast and completely free. Just open an image, click Markup, and there you go.

RealtimeBoard

Csaba: I’m a fan of using Post-it notes, which is a bit difficult when working remotely. To replace Post-its, I use RealtimeBoard, which is a great online whiteboard that is designed for better team collaboration. You can map out a user journey using Post-its and get everybody on the same page.

Lisa: RealtimeBoard allows us to post mockups, copy, workflows, and ideas for team members to review and provide commentary and feedback. It integrates with Slack so whenever someone comments on any board, we get notified in Slack. I believe there are other similar tools out there, but I have not tried them.

Stephen: For something more visual, Mural, Cardsmit, and RealtimeBoard are all fantastic virtual whiteboards, each offering something slightly different.

Slack

Lisa: We use Slack for obvious reasons, but also because of how well it integrates with other tools.

Stephen: Slack is brilliant for facilitating water-cooler conversations, quickly sharing files, and so much more!

Trello

Csaba: Another tool I find useful for UX design is Trello. You can use it in many different ways. For example, I love using it to track the progress of a project or design when working with a team remotely. It’s an easy way to see what needs to be done, upload pictures, delegate tasks, and use labels to prioritize. I also use Trello to document the feedback from usability-test sessions. You can see all the feedback from participants, prioritize items, add comments, and involve the necessary people—including designers, stakeholders, and developers. Creating a backlog of development issues is also easy in Trello. If you have to provide feedback on an actual, working product, you’ll need a way to communicate with developers as well.

Stephen: Trello is so simple, yet expandable for so many purposes.

Web Conferencing Tools

Pabini: Screen sharing is the most important capability of an online collaboration tool. The best thing about using Web conferencing tools is that you can use them with whatever other tools you’re using on a project. This lets your team work the way you prefer to work—whether you’re working remotely or face to face. I’ve used a variety of Web conferencing tools, including WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Zoom. They all work well most of the time. Using a combination of phone and Web conferencing increases reliability.

Lisa: We’ve tried a number of video conferencing tools and haven’t found one that isn’t so glitchy that it grinds the productivity of a meeting to a halt and doesn’t cost more than a Tesla.

Janet: Skype is my go-to audio-communication and screen-sharing tool.

Steven: Sure, we also talk, but screen sharing is to me more effective than any shared drawing tool. You can use whatever tools you like for analysis or drawing and can just do all the sketching live in it, following the process you prefer.

Wunderlist

Jordan: I’ve also been using an app called Wunderlist. It’s a simple to-do list that you can share between people on the same team. I really like the structure a to-do list brings to collaborative projects. It lets each team member know when other team members complete a task.

ZenKit

Stephen: In the project or resource space, there are plenty of tools, but few that stand out to me. That said, I’m keeping my eyes on ZenKit because it lets you pivot between several views of the same data—a rarity among most project-management tools.

Recommended Reading

Pabini recommends the following UXmatters articles on collaboration:

• Pabini’s Leadership Matters column “Overcoming Common Barriers to Collaboration, Part 1.” You’ll find Part 2 in this edition of UXmatters.
• Janet’s Ask UXmatters columns:
• “Teamwork and Collaboration Across Departments”
• “Achieving Alignment: Collaboration Versus Wireframes?”
• “Using a Collaborative Parallel Design Process,” by Mike Myles

Whitney is the Managing Editor of the UXPA’s User Experience Magazine and recommends the following articles on remote design collaboration from that publication:

• “Remote Design Teams: How to Use Cloud-Based Tools to Collaborate”
• “Remote Friendly User Experience: How to Keep and Hire Top Talent”
• “Global Design Teams: Managing Distributed Teams Effectively”

Conclusion

As you can see from the previous discussion, just as UX designers come from a variety of backgrounds, they like a variety of different tools that they use when designing user experiences. These tools represent a combination of tried-and-true methods and new paradigms that innovative tools present. In addition to addressing issues that are unique to remote collaboration, we’ve gotten a glimpse into the wide variety of tasks UX designers complete in the course of creating a UX design.