ISG Playbook
APIs
Remote facilitating and presenting can feel especially daunting. Most of the challenges of in-person workshop facilitation and presentation are simply exacerbated by remote scenarios; however the right tool selection and additional planning can mitigate many of these challenges.
Tips for Remote Facilitating and Presenting
- Turn on your camera: Showing your face can help establish rapport and trust with participants and help them see you as a real person, not just a voice. This sense of connection can be critical when you are seeking buy-in or attempting to guide a group to consensus about UX or design decisions.
- Enable connection: Plan for additional time in the agenda for relationship building with a digital icebreaker, especially if participants do not know each other. For virtual UX workshops, help participants engage with each other throughout the session by encouraging everyone to respond to each other using people’s names and making use of breakout groups, polling, and chat.
- Create ground rules: At the beginning of the session, share ground rules that will help mitigate the inevitable communication challenges of digital meetings. These rules might include asking participants to agree to state their names before speaking, not speak over anyone, and avoid multitasking.
- Assign homework: Provide participants short homework assignments that allow them to practice using the technology before the session. For example, if you plan on using a virtual whiteboard application during a design workshop, you could ask participants to create an artifact to introduce themselves using that same application before the workshop, and have them share it as an icebreaker at the beginning of the workshop.
- Adapt the structure: Resist the urge to take an existing workshop structure presentation format and simply reuse it for a remote session. Think thoughtfully about how to transition activities, slides, and content to a virtual format. This includes modifying workshop agendas and presentation timelines to accommodate for technology inconveniences and additional activities that allow participants to connect and engage.
Tools for Remote Facilitating and Presenting
- Presenting UX work: Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Google Hangouts Meet are a few of the many reliable video-conferencing platforms. When selecting a platform, consider which, if any, specific features you’ll need (e.g., breakout rooms, autorecord, gallery view), and be mindful of any limitations of free versions. (For example, the free version of Zoom caps meetings with more than two attendees at 40 minutes—not something you’d want to realize for the first time in the middle of a presentation about your latest design recommendations!)
- Generative workshop activities: If your goal is to generate a large amount of ideas or other contributions, use tools that make it easy to quickly add an item to a list or virtual whiteboard. Google Draw, Microsoft Visio, Sketch, MURAL, and Miro are a few examples that might work for this context.
- Evaluative workshop activities: If your goal is to group or prioritize ideas or contributions, consider platforms with built-in prioritization matrices such as MURAL or Miro. Alternatively, use survey tools such as SurveyMonkey or CrowdSignal, or live polling apps such as Poll Everywhere that you can insert directly into your slides.
Source: NN/g