Design

Clever tricks for design collaboration in the cloud

4 min read
Margaret Kelsey
  •  Jan 12, 2015
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It’s tough to replace spontaneous elbow-rubbing meetings when you’re working remotely—but it’s not impossible. Here are a few of the ways we create close collaboration between members of our far-flung design team.

1. Visualize your roadmap with Coggle (or Mindjet)

Before you dive into a project, it’s important to agree on a roadmap.Twitter Logo And as creative professionals, it’s most intuitive to do this in a visual way rather than with lists—or even worse—spreadsheets.

Mindmapping tools like Coggle (free) and MindJet (paid) are powerful, but easy to use. Try one in real time to visualize processes, project flows, and related ideas with your team.

2. Integrate Trello with Slack

There seems to be a cloud-based collaboration tool born every day lately. But before you add another tool to your arsenal, make sure it plays niceTwitter Logo with the tools you’re already using.

For example, we integrate our Trello boards with Slack to get real-time updates on the status of projects. That way, we can have fewer status meetings and there’s a clear place for people to go if they have questions, instead of interrupting others’ workflows.

3. Define your UX metrics in Google Docs

Whether you use Google’s HEART framework for metrics or the Goals-Signals-Metrics process for goals, using Google Docs to host and share your metrics will help you work faster and keep track of everyone’s work. Give everyone editing rights to make “living” documentsTwitter Logo that reflect everyone’s contributions.

(Or don’t—when I’m writing copy, I give people commenting rights, so they can weigh in without directly altering my wording. –Ed.)

It might also help to video chat so you can have richer conversations. We tend to use Google Hangouts, but Skype can work too.

4. Collaborate on UI and visual design with LiveShare

When you start collaborating on the UI and visual design, you need to be able to:

  • Visualize what your team members are thinking
  • Indicate what part of the design you’re discussing
  • Hear other team member’s initial reactions
  • Iterate quickly
  • Keep track of comments and suggestions made in the meeting

Our advice? Try using InVision’s LiveShare. Yes, we’re tooting our own horn, but we use it all the time. LiveShare lets you open up your design in your browser and invite whoever you’d like to collaborate. Each person gets their own cursor and can either chat in the browser or call in to a conference line. If you get stuck on your current design, switch over to whiteboard mode to visualize your ideas.

5. Gather project feedback with Prezi

Once your project’s shipped, it’s important to recap.Twitter Logo We’ve used Prezi to postmortem big projects with great success.

Invite everyone to a Prezi project and have each team member identify the following:

  • What worked
  • What could be improved
  • How they’d grade the project

Then, take a few minutes to sort out the common themes and present.

What cloud collaboration tools do you use?

Of course, these are just the tools we use. Hit us up with your favorites @InVisionApp! And learn more on designing your remote process from Shopify’s Serena Ngai.

Collaborate in real time on a digital whiteboard