Remote Design Review Conference Call Hosting

In order to keep your Remote Design Review Conference Call on track, it’s helpful to create and share a checklist or outline covering everything that needs to be reviewed.

Remote Design Review Conference CallRemote design review is a crucial part of marketing campaigns, website builds, and project and product development. However, what if the key participants are not geographically close?

In today’s business environment, designers, stakeholders, and project managers are likely to be located in different offices — if not different cities, states, or countries!

Fortunately, holding a remote design review is easier than ever thanks to audio, video, and web conferencing technologies. Here’s what you need to hold your own design review meetings remotely.

  1. Choose the most appropriate conferencing technology for the type of design you’re reviewing. Designs are most often visual in nature, making video or web conferencing the more popular choice for this type of meeting. With video, you could hold up a prototype, demonstrating how it works or pointing out specific features. Web conferencing is ideal for sharing screens where you can walk participants through an onscreen demonstration of a website or application.

That said, audio conferences also work, especially if you’ve shared the design files in advance. For example, if your participants have the same wireframes or blueprints in front of them, an audio conference can be a cost-effective choice for reviewing the design documents.

  1. Go in with a tightly focused plan. Remote design reviews don’t need to be long, drawn-out affairs. They aren’t the time to dig deep into conceptual matters or explore ideas beyond the scope of the project, either. Rather, they should focus on previously decided upon design decisions and whether or not the current design delivers on those decisions. For instance, if your team has previously decided the design should have an easy-to-use mechanism for adjusting the volume such as a knob or lever, part of the review will involve evaluating that mechanism. Is it intuitive and easy to use? Does it take the agreed upon form? This isn’t the time to suggest integrating voice commands.

In order to keep your review on track, it’s helpful to create and share a checklist or outline covering everything that needs to be reviewed. If you’re holding a video or web conference, consider using a collaborative note so everyone can follow along. You can do something similar on an audio conference by directing everyone to a shared document such as a note in Evernote or a Microsoft Word document in Office 365.

  1. Seek and document feedback. The design review process is all about gathering feedback so that the design ultimately fulfills all of its requirements. Keep in mind that there will likely be some back and forth between team members. Differences of opinion may lead the discussion off track, so be prepared to actively moderate the conference. Once a consensus has been reached, restate it so everyone is clear and then document it in your collaborative note.

Based on the feedback received, the design can be further refined.

  1. Record your remote design review meeting. Whether using audio, video, or web conferencing, it’s smart to record it. From there, you can either write down the key takeaways and action steps or send the recording off to a transcriptionist. Be sure to share your notes, transcript, recording, and action steps with your design team.

Modern remote design review conferencing solutions help bring remote teams together, and they’re easy and affordable. Check out our pay-as-you-go audio, video, and web conferencing solutions today.

Learn more about audio, and web conferencing.