Managing A Globally Distributed UX Team

The Global Point of View

“Distributed UX can be difficult from two points of view,” offers Simon. “Usually distributed teams are working in different markets—in which case, the brand may have a different feel in distant markets, and UX guidelines need to encompass that. The other barrier is that brands that are strong in a particular market can dominate UX expectations. Leading sites in your market may already have taught users to expect a button to be left or right aligned.

“We did a test in four European markets and found that mockups that worked well in our home market—France—failed to entice the German or Belgian markets because their market leader in our product area has created search results reading patterns that users identify with. It’s also a particularly big challenge to create user-interface design patterns for multiple-language sites, where the space that is needed to fit everything neatly with English words gets completely exploded when you try to fit the German or Dutch translations.”

Working Across Different Time Zones

“When you are a UX professional in a company whose first name is International, you develop some insight into this,” says a smiling Mike. “As a UX architect for IBM, I work on a software development team—comprising UX, QA, and Development—whose members are located throughout the US and in Brazil. I also work with a mentee who is in Singapore. Lastly, I am active in several internal IBM UX communities whose members span the globe. The two biggest challenges are the time-zone disparity and collaboration technologies.

“It would be easy for me to say that time-zone disparity is no big deal. But I work in the US Eastern Time Zone, and I would be naive to think that is not the privileged time zone. The truth is that we expect Europeans and Asians to work later and Westerners in the US to work earlier to comply with the US East Coast work day. So, if you want to have synchronous conversations, one challenge is that somebody has to get to work early and someone has to stay late. My Singapore mentee and I have a monthly call at 6:00 am my time; 6:00 pm his time. All I can say is: thank goodness Web cams are not involved!

“However, the challenges are not as great as one might think, and in reality, there are actually advantages to being remote from each other.”

Communicating Across Different Time Zones

“My boss has the policy of not having any participants in a room together unless all participants can attend in person,” shares Mike. “In that case, we all attend remotely, even if four of the five are within spitting distance of each other. (I work in Atlanta, so that might be as literal as it is figurative.)”

Pabini concurs, “It’s essential that everyone in a remote meeting be on an equal footing. The only way to ensure that is for everyone to sit at their own desk and join a teleconference or online meeting. Having people who are colocated gather together in a conference room, while others must join via a teleconference puts those who have joined a meeting remotely at a tremendous disadvantage. When some people are sitting together in a conference room, they tend to forget how difficult it is for those on a call to hear. The sound quality is usually bad, and people often forget to push the Polycom? around, so it’s near enough to whoever is speaking. Plus, it’s often difficult for those on the phone to get the floor and say what they need to say at the appropriate moment.

“Leading a remote meeting is a much more challenging job than leading a face-to-face meeting. Much more active moderation is necessary to ensure fairness. For example, it’s important to prevent a meeting’s moving on to a new topic, before making sure everyone has had their say on the current topic. And it’s necessary to remain alert to utterances that let you know someone wanted to speak but lost out to someone more aggressive or with a louder voice. Make sure you give those people their chance to speak. I designed a feature for WebEx Meeting Center that let people ask to speak next to help overcome such problems.”

“A key challenge is overcoming the lack of contextual information, both in work outputs and in day-to-day communication,” advises Peter. “Distributed teams can benefit from regular, scheduled meetings that explicitly involve all team members. These can help to ensure everyone has a voice. If a team consists of people who speak different languages—even if, for instance, English is a shared language—video communication can help to overcome some of the associated issues, by providing contextual cues such as body language. Working on distributed teams can be a major challenge, but it can also be hugely rewarding when done well. Best of luck!”

“Another remaining difficulty is that discussions are sometimes challenging because of phone-connection quality and a limited capability for handling interruptions,” notes Mike. “I know we shouldn’t interrupt people, but you might need to jump into someone’s rant about the lack of funding with the latest data. ‘Wait, the funding just came through!’ That and relationship building. But I’m finding that our daily scrum meetings are letting our personalities emerge and our relationships build.”

Collaboration Technology

“Then, of course, a major challenge is the geographic separation—not being together,” observes Mike. “This can result in two limitations. One, it is harder to build relationships when you are not together. Second, conversations are not as spontaneous as they would be if your cubes were together. The easiest solution is to just decide not to let either of those be true. But this requires some good collaboration tools and a good infrastructure to support them. I’m lucky to work in a supportive environment, and my team members have the following tools at our disposal:

• We all have conference call accounts.
• We all have online collaboration accounts for sharing our PC desktops.
• Both of those accounts are permanent, so I do not have to schedule my access, and my access numbers stay the same.
• Everyone uses the same calendar client, which lets us see everybody’s availability.
• Everyone is online, using the same instant messaging client.
• We have social-networking technology that includes wikis, forums, and activities.

“The irony is that remote meetings are much easier to schedule than face-to-face meetings that require finding a meeting room and setting up projection equipment. The main challenge has been getting used to taking advantage of these tools. I now instant-message my colleagues more readily, and we pick up the phone when typing becomes cumbersome. We also use our social-networking technology to distribute UX designs and scenarios and collect comments asynchronously.” 

Reference

Quesenbery, Whitney, and Daniel Szuc. Global UX: Design and Research in a Connected World. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann, forthcoming publication on November 15, 2011.