Remote Design Week 2020
2020-04-27..2020-05-01
-- online --
who it's for
product designers, design managers, design ops managers, design directors and leaders, ux researchers, workshop and remote event facilitators, design system engineers
topics
design systems contribution models; Figma remote workflows; remote design sprints; collaborative sketching techniques; design tokens and automation; team-based design organization; measuring UX with metrics; remote offsite facilitation; inclusive and accessible product design; no-code design to production; design critique rituals; hiring and scaling distributed design
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Unity, Not Uniformity, With Design Systems | Hayley Hughes | 22m |
Argues design systems must enable creativity not enforce sameness and shows concrete outcomes: at IBM a brand‑first design language replaces a rigid component… | ||
| Designing a Remote Design Offsite | Molly Lafferty | 28m |
Webflow runs its first-ever design retreat entirely remote, with designers spread across 11 cities in 4 countries and a company that is 70% remote. Planning… | ||
| Design & Business During COVID-19 | Adam Fry-Pierce | 22m |
A briefing from a 3,000‑member forum reports that digital transformation accelerates, many teams pivot to designing for the social‑distance economy, and —… | ||
| The Atomic Unit of Design is the Team | Peter Merholz | 31m |
Claim: the atomic unit of design is the team and design quality improves when designers are organized into stable groups rather than isolated embeds… | ||
| Design Systems in Practice | Kat Davis | 18m |
Design systems speed product development and improve UX by focusing on concrete decisions: use Figma → code automation and integrate Storybook or ZeroHeight… | ||
| How Customers Helped Shape the Future of Slack | Anna Niess | 22m |
Claims a complete UI redesign improves comprehension and prioritization; team prototypes in Figma, ships incremental builds to a shared Slack channel with ~100… | ||
| Remote Sketching | Shipra Kayan | 23m |
Claims that collaborative sketching survives remote work and documents tactics that make it practical: recommends Miro or Mural and Zoom + Slack, pushes for… | ||
| Invisible Design Systems | Jina Anne | 20m |
Argues that design systems are a methodology not just deliverables and that the real wins come from tooling that closes the gap rather than handoff rituals… | ||
| Stop Solving Problems | Steve Portigal | 26m |
A taxonomy of mindsets that decide whether new things matter: copying trends “Uber for X” produces lots of easy-to-say ideas but few useful products… | ||
| Figma’s Remote Design Process | Noah Levin | 19m |
Figma’s remote design process keeps a weekly rhythm and replaces hallway talk with scheduled rituals: a Monday warm-up to book critiques, an end‑of‑week… | ||
| Design Talent Lifecycle in a Post-Studio World | Sean Rhodes | 22m |
Claims that design must scale outside studios include a concrete hiring gap: roughly 1:8 designer-to-developer ratio implies a need to grow design by ~20x from… | ||
| Design for Belonging | Lara Mendonça | 33m |
Product design for belonging means measurable choices not vague promises: claim that diversity inclusion equity must coexist and that impact happens across… | ||
| The New Balance of Things | Martin Kool | 21m |
Team leadership reports 40 designers across nine locations and nine languages, clients like Google Amazon HP and a US Air Force personalization project, and… | ||
| Designing Culture | Michelle Morrison | 20m |
Claims that culture is how teams act on beliefs and that design skills can shape culture into repeatable practices. Concrete tools: animal cards to surface… | ||
| All-Remote UX at Scale | Christie Lenneville | 19m |
GitLab grew its all-remote UX org from 16 to 60 in one year and claims it works at scale by enforcing concrete practices: pair designer program with six‑month… | ||
| Soft Brutalism & the Era of Weird & Wonderful | Cassie McDaniel | 31m |
Glitch claims it deliberately embeds weirdness into its UI while preserving usability, and the team proves it with concrete moves: a code editor hosting four… | ||
| Career Progression and the Path to Leadership | Todd Zaki Warfel | 24m |
The 2019 Design Career Index claims the largest independent global survey on design careers and reports concrete numbers not platitudes including 47% left for… | ||
| Failure: A Product Development Story | Paul van Oijen | 20m |
Builds an awkward SQL-like query box to satisfy requests to “query active campaigns” and it flops; replaces it with a simple filter UI and adoption rises. Adds… | ||
| Community Leaders Roundtable | Margaret Lee, Tanner Christensen, Mia Blume | 01h 01m |
Panel documents concrete moves not platitudes: an internal UX program launched four years ago that scales as the org grows roughly fortyfold, a retreat model… | ||
| Value of Design With UX Metrics | Leanne Waldal | 19m |
Advocates measuring design by specific, reproducible metrics not vague examples: standard measures like NPS CSAT CES SUS UMUX and SUPR‑Q, a recommended net… | ||
| Fostering Remote Collaboration | Jessa Parette, Ethan Eismann, Ola Olusoga, Jenny Wen | 59m |
Teams report concrete changes: use Slack, Zoom, Figma and an internal P2 internal blog to replace hallway bump‑ins; shift meetings to start meetings five… | ||
| Cooperation vs. Collaboration Culture | Wendy Johansson | 26m |
Argues that cooperation and collaboration map to a “hierarchy of work” adapted from John Maeda’s CX Report and shows concrete shifts during COVID: live poll… | ||
| Fireside Chat | Wendy Johansson, Khoi Vinh | 35m |
Conversation reports that video-first norms suddenly force cross-office connection, that Microsoft Teams and Slack get repurposed as water‑coolers, and that… | ||
| Career Progression | Eliane Tozman, Michael Sacca, Maria Pereda | 01h 00m |
A practical panel that names numbers and tactics: claims that IBM grows from about 300 to 4,000 designers, that Dribbble sees 700–800 applicants per role, and… | ||
| Remote Design Sprints Workshop | Breyna Braden, Iris Latour | 42m |
Claims that remote sprints work if process and empathy are set up and that the physical team room can be recreated digitally with Miro sticky capture and… | ||
| Assumption Tracking | Chantal Jandard, Cody Farthing | 47m |
A clear recipe: draft assumptions, rank each by risk and confidence (1–5), and validate only the high‑risk low‑confidence ones. A construction case study uses… | ||
| Building & Managing Design Systems | Alexis Lucio, Max Ignatyev, Laura Schaefer | 46m |
Panelists describe concrete tradeoffs: a 25–28 person design-systems group running a component library with Sketch/Figma designs and React implementations… | ||
| Remote Design with Figma Workshop | Joey Banks, Tom Lowry, Anthony DiSpezio | 52m |
Shows that opening a single Figma file lets cross‑discipline teams prototype, collect feedback and ship: they build a lightweight prototype, add telemetry and… | ||
| Reimagining Workshops | Cristina Crespo, Iris Latour | 58m |
Clear outcomes, a tight framework and staged flow drive decisions not platitudes: assign roles (lead facilitator, documentarian, timekeeper), run a dry‑run… | ||
| Leading in Uncertain Times | Vincent Ramsay, Sajid Saiyed, Laura Müller | 51m |
Teams document that a full-day virtual workshop succeeded after migrating an in-person plan online, spin up five social‑good squads to absorb 15–20 people from… | ||
| nothing matches | ||