Can you be an effective UX practitioner in quarantine?

“I believe a really good UX practitioner who works remotely can make a greater impact than an average one can on site.” — David Hamill

The rise in remote working within the design field is becoming more and more prominent especially as workers we move away from enjoying big offices, commutes, the hustle of a big city instead wanting to gain a better work-life harmony.

Still, “remote working” is attached with sitting on a beach in Bali, sipping a coconut whacking out a few wireframes. I promise it’s more than that.

I think a lot of these roles are hiding behind the term UX. A few of my friends working remotely are finding they are just designing for designing sake. For example, going straight into the design without any context, research etc. Basic stuff.

But, if you really want to work on the beach, you can! ;)

Here are a few people explaining why it can work:

Sascha Brossman

“As long as you can reach your users remotely and are still able to communicate with your team — yes. From my personal experience, it’s possible but less effective overall. As a UX designer, you need to be close to the business, close to your users and close to the dev team. This rarely happens from the comfort of your home office.

Depends on (of course! ;)) Contra: broadband communication with multiple people at once and war rooms with large walls to work on collaboratively is hard to beat in terms of both effectivity and efficiency. Screens, even the biggest ones, just SUCK in terms of making sense of complex domains & problem fields, keeping important information tangible and making work visible for anyone on the team etc.

Tools like Mural/Miro barely cross the bottom line of what I would consider the minimum viable remote substitute for that (but, being digital, offer other advantages). That said, I would propose that the critical factor for successful design practice is much less onsite vs. remote but rather team/org culture, general collaboration skills, mature leadership, design maturity (for lack of a better term — I consider all the maturity models wrong), and the like.”

Courtney Jordan

“With international companies, it’s just not possible to get a good cross-section of your users with on-site testing. So yes, you can meet and interview and usability test users remotely.

You can A/B test remotely. You can analyze the quantitative and qualitative data to streamline the customer journey and remove pain points remotely. You can communicate early and often with your team and any stakeholders for new/evolving features on slack/email/web conf remotely.

Most customers don’t have several hours to come into your office (and that’s IF they’re local, which most are not), and smaller companies can’t afford to fly their UX to a good cross-section of customer offices. If we look to external agencies, those agencies are remote from their clients, who are remote from their customers. UX also requires peace and quiet to think through flows and data to make sure we’re not missing important use cases/pain points.

Not to mention all the extra time from not commuting that can be devoted to the user experience and to building customer relationships :). But this is for senior UXers.

Louis Valenzuela

“ I agree with a previous comment in that it depends what you define success as. I am a fully remote UX practitioner and one example of success for me is providing insight and strategic direction with an intuitive and relevant design and it actually being implemented.

In my experience, you have to be resilient, driven and open-minded, but that also applies to people working in onsite-based roles. There are limitations at the moment such as, you can’t run/attend workshops, it’s harder to sync up with devs and it is harder to garner insights from users as the golden moments normally come out of what they do and not what they say.

However, give it time and I think that will eventually change, I am sure there will be more tech-based options that will help fully remote folks. In my opinion, the biggest problem is the perception of fully remote work and the stereotype of laying on a beach while looking at a few pretty pictures and spreadsheets. I promise you, it is way more than that.”

Mariam El-Shebokshey

“Why not! You contact your team daily and you can reach your users remotely. There are many productivity tools, so you can do your UX process remotely. Working remotely can improve people’s production and lower stress. And if you have remote teams from many countries( different time zones), customers will find a response anytime. It will be good to meet your team infrequently and you can travel twice in order to interview people or getting feedback if it’s needed.”

Stephanie McNee

“There are so many successful fully remote companies so I think it’s probably size dependant. Many teams in large companies are co-located. Everyone is responsible for making it work and owns it. Including having fewer meetings for meeting's sake — this forcing you to be considerate of your time and others. Perhaps if you work at an agency then for clients this might not work so much ;)

Jon Kennedy

Not fully remote. You do need to interface with the business and, depending on the project, the users (as in face to face testing or focus groups). However, isolating yourself in a soothing and relaxing environment to whittle away creating assets and having calls with individuals and teams is hugely valuable. I do feel if you’re working with a tight team then it’s good from a personal perspective to meet them face to face periodically if it’s viable. Obviously, if you live in Russia and the client is in Peru then there are some travel & budget challenges ??

Rupert Douglas

“Yes, you can. You do need to be supported by a robust documentation and communication process, a product & engineering team that values user research, and you need to have the budget to access tools that enable remote research and testing. Obviously, you’re going to come up against challenges if you’re the only fully-remote person in a co-located team who don’t appreciate the value of UX or rely on in-person, synchronous communication. You’d likely struggle to be “successful” even if you were onsite in that instance. It also depends on what success means to the individual — is it amazing SUS scores for your product, a growing company valuation, or you’re in a job you’re happy to wake up to every day? I could point you in the direction of a bunch of fully remote UX’ers who could demonstrate “success” though each of those things.”

Lydia Elliot

“Yes — have done so successfully myself. As Chris mentioned, it depends on the maturity of the organization, the structures they have in place and above all — great communication. It becomes more important to develop good relationships with the team. The remote model becomes more about deliverables and less about “bums on seats”. Furthermore, in order to be a successful remote worker, it is imperative to be self-driven. The flexibility that remote work gives employees and partners has shown that people are less likely to have sick days, report greater happiness than their office-bound counterparts, and are more productive.”

A great post to check out — https://www.usercentredsolutions.com/single-post/Have-laptop-will-travel

Tarryn Lambert

“ It does work in my experience, but only with users who are tech savvy. It’s also impossible with a user group like “truckers who drive with a mobile device” or “70+ who need medical assistance.” Internally it’s most successful for a all remote company. It’s harder to drive influence if you work with people who don’t get on zoom. Consulting it doesn’t matter as much because of the dynamic. Just like anything in UX, context is key to the answer. They easy answer is “it depends” but yes, it’s possible and I’ve successfully had that experience multiple times with many types of research.”

And for the reasons no...

Eric Hetroy

How can you:

— Meet and interview users remotely?

— Shadowing and observe remotely?

— Feeling non-verbal communication of your users remotely?

— Work with (scrum) teams remotely?

— Seek, dig and challenge your client expectations remotely?

— Test remotely?

— Understand the context and usage remotely?

When I mean that doesn’t work, I mean “efficiently”.

Daniel G. Cabrero

The question may be differently posed: Would you, others-in-the-process, allow research to come to you remotely, and as such embrace the beauty in it? An example: I did my PhD research entirely on location, which meant and means entirely remote from da business. Example II: If you do research across cultures, such research may well have to be carried out and playback remotely, though it’s all the down to the rest of people involved, aka stakeholders, to open the design process to such (beautiful) modus operandi.

I think if you have that remotely and can take your stakeholders on the journey without being in the room with them for making important/difficult decisions.. then yes it works.

What do you think?