Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 16]

I work remotely and I’m not insane 🙂

There is a lot going on in the world at this time and we can’t avoid the fact that more and more people wouldn’t be able to move their families or change their environments just for one job position.

It is quite expensive for companies to relocate employees: they need to pay for the relocation and deal with plenty of paper work — plus managing the fact that those employees are difficult to let go — if they don’t perform as expected.

My space and rituals

Everyday in the morning I get up very early in order to have a bath, get dressed (even put some make up on) and have my coffee, ready to start my journey, in my studio — at home 🙂

I open my laptop on the same table, prepare for my standup on my notepad and fifteen minutes past seven I received the Skype video call from my dev team.

Then I just get complete immerse in work and I control my time being productive — seriously do it 🙂

My team and I are based in different countries so I keep my calendar up to UK time, where my company is based, and I refer all the meetings and research calls to the calendar.

Important
I do the same ‘working hours’ than my team and I take the same breaks as them. We try to be completely approachable and connected, sharing our progress on Slack or talking about any issue we may experiencing during the day.

Why I use a camera

Communication is not only verbal, we need to see other people in order to capture some emotional body language allowing us to better interpret any situation.

In the standup meetings, I notice present and absent today, what’s the weather like according to the outfits, who is not in the best mood or very excited and much more!

All those things are critical to work well in a team environment so we have to make sure we keep it! 🙂

Technology and Apps for remote collaboration

Every team can work differently but here I’m just summarising the most important ones used by my team based in Cambridge.

Trello
Helps me to be organised and complete my objectives. I mostly use it to organise and share my tasks with the team, but also as away to compile my user research in one central place.

Mural
A great tool to converge all the thoughts in one place. We can run a workshop from Value Proposition to Assumptions and questions. But we can also use it as a template to take notes in user research calls or even to paste some storyboards to summarise a user story we are working on.

Slack
We use it as an internally communication tool in the company.
It is normally the very first introduction with a person if you need something, if this person sits besides you and we use different channels for different topics. I guess channels may vary between companies but they all share the same motivation: increase visibility and collaboration.

Skype
Helps us to run calls internally as well as with customers.

Face to face visits
And from time to time you need to share lunchtime or a beer with your team mates 🙂

It does work

I’m a very happy remote employee. I’m working harder than ever but I try to ask for feedback as often as I can, I try to connect as much as I can and I interact as much as I can with my team members on Slack.

But I can’t do all on my own. My team is making an effort to make this possible, having the empathy to understand tech difficulties and try to work on every single detail to make this a very pleasant journey 🙂

Did ever have the experience to work remotely?
We are intrigued to see how does it work for you.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Natalia Rey — UX Designer at RedGate, mom of 2 little creatures & illustrator on her spare time

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Demystifying Remote Work was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Demystifying Remote Work

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles