Remote Design Research — How to connect with your users and co-design online

Never before this has the design world needed to pivot as responsively to remote ways of working. With the precautions for COVID-19 ruling out in-person gatherings for many workplaces, one of the more challenging activities to deliver is the beloved practice of co-design. Ever since the Google Venture Design Sprint, we’ve been fine-tuning our workshop design and facilitation skills to support the best experiences for participants gathered in a room, around a desk, creating paper prototypes, clustering around sketches and creating safe physical environments to bring the experiences of people with lived expertise to the fore.

But what happens when the world as we know it shifts, and designers need to now support co-creation activities with a diverse range of humans online? At Portable, we’re keeping all the same best practices for engaging in co-design, and adapting them to be facilitated entirely remotely during this period. Happily, we’ve built up a resource toolkit with tips, habits, guidelines and online tools for the current environment that we want to share with our partners and the wider design community through this webinar.

In this webinar, we share ways of planning and facilitating a design workshop over video conference, including:

• Common co-design activities like journey mapping, prioritisation ideating through use of simple video interactions and more sophisticated collaborative online tools
• What remote workshops mean for the role of a facilitator, and additional roles such as a tech support
• Cadence and timing of activities, and how to help participants build confidence to co-create with designers step-by-step in a video conferencing platform
• How to recruit, screen and prepare users to participate online before the workshop starts
• Inclusive design principles to adopt in a video conferencing environment
• Additional considerations to the privacy of participants in an online setting

This webinar is suitable for:

• Researchers
• UX Designers
• Design Strategists
• Service Designers
• Producers and Project Managers
• Anyone interested in hosting or sponsoring a co-design project for their organisation