Our Design Thinking System (Designing Remotely)

I gave this talk back in 2016 whilst working for British Telecom.

Overview: Patrick Mooney from Osmosoft, a team of designers, developers and UX consultants who work at BT, will talk about working remotely, focussing on the agile and lean processes they follow. Patrick will demonstrate how the web has removed the need for UX teams to be co-located and still thrive in areas like collaborative design thinking, prototyping and user testing and research. The talk will aim to give as much practical advice, including tips and tricks of the software used on a daily bases.

I am part of a remote design team. I work alone from a different country to my team yet I am fully connected to them. This isn’t normal to most, but it’s not exceptional either. Anyone can, mindful of the problems you need to be aware of, fully contribute, deliver and grow as part of a remote team once you embrace and encourage this culture/system.

Sys·tem ˈsistəm/ — a set of interacting or interdependent component parts forming a complex/intricate whole.

Design thinking is very much on trend thanks to companies like SAP and IBM. Here in osmosoft we’ve adopted our own variation on design thinking centered around communication and teamwork. We call this our Design Thinking System (above). It’s an ever evolving entity with design thinking parts, fully connected and supported by an informed team at it’s heart; without this, the system simply can’t connect and fails to exist.

Wouldn’t it be great if it was as simple as this? I’m afraid it’s not. In my talk to Dublin UX in February of this year I introduced this Design Thinking System and walked through the interpersonal challenges that you need to be aware of to build up trust to connect a remote design team. Additionally I went into detail about the tools available online to ensure a design team can collaborate remotely. Many of these tools would be of benefit to co-located teams.

The video from my talk is available to stream below, on Vimeo with the slides available to download from SlideShare.