Let Figjam be your remote working whiteboard
Many times during the past year I have found myself wishing I’ve had a whiteboard. Some things are so hard to explain without drawing and on a remote call, you don’t have many options. I even stopped doing workshops for a long time unless we could meet in the office.
I have always felt that that having a whiteboard speeds up communication a lot. You can draw, point, move post-its on it. It’s one reason I like to work with a colocated team and it is something remote working has taken away.
This is why I’m happy to share that Figma Jam has given me hope for the future of remote collaboration. In the past weeks, I have run several workshops in Figma Jam and it’s worked really well. I hope to share how and why with you today.
Why are whiteboards so good anyway?
A face tells so much more than the tone of a voice, which is why communicating over only audio is difficult and over video is slightly better. But not just that, as humans we take a lot of input from spatial queues.
Spatial is an overly complicated word but I really like it because it impacts so much of how we function as human beings.
Spatiality is the way things relate to each other in space.
Is it on top of, beside, below, in front, bigger or smaller? Colour and symbols are other great indicators, but placement is key.
You can easily use location to signify meaning just by using cards on a table. With post-its on a whiteboard, you gain the benefit of overview and being able to draw lines and titles to your notes.
Put cards in order and you have priority. Put them in a group and you have clustered meaning. Put them above, below, left and right and you have a two-axis matrix.
But it’s not just cards or notes. As participants in a workshop, we ourselves also carry spatial meaning. Where we stand, look or point carries an incredibly effect on how we can communicate.
I think this is why remote meetings are so hard because we don’t know what or who participants are looking at or referring to.
In Figma Jam space is king/queen
Figma Jam is a whiteboard to start with. But, it solves not just the spatial relativeness of things on the board but also on the participants.
By having your mouse move around visibly on the screen as you work in the space, you can show others what you are referring to.
Other’s can also point and quietly comment on things without breaking into the conversation. Similar to how you would move silently across the room and point at something on the whiteboard with a raised eyebrow.
Colour and symbols
Location means a lot but even more when combined with colours. Jam, of course, allows colouring your post-its and also has a really quick and easy way to stamp your post-its. For example with a basic range of common symbols, press E and a palette pop up.
As for colours, I know I’m a bit pedantic on this but I truly believe that colour coding your post-its from the start will help you more quickly “read” the final map of what you create and it will speed up working with your notes.
Miro and other solutions
Figma Jam isn’t the only online whiteboard solution out there. I have used Miro in the past. After trying Figma Jam this once though, I must say that its simplicity wins.
As for pricing, Figma is free during 2021 but will soon end up costing the same as Miro. I think we will see some further changes to these plans though, maybe we will get to see a guest type of license like Miro has in Figma as well.
I won’t dive too deep into the functionality of Miro or others as it’s done already. Here is a good article for that:
I will say though, that having used both, Figma Jam was smoother. Miro is incredibly powerful and we even linked our Jira to it and used it for planning at one time. But for getting a bunch of not-so-technical people into a whiteboard session, Figma Jam was a breeze in comparison.
I know how often users tend to skip tutorials so for my attendees I cherry-picked a few bits from it and we ran through it with the group in just two minutes and with that everyone was Figma Jam “fluent”.
How we did our workshop in Figma Jam
For our product development, I wanted to pull the team together to create a value proposition canvas. I found an excellent guide on how another company did this using the workflow produced by Strategyzer.
This workshop format relied heavily on the use of post-its and people being able to be in the same room to discuss these. I knew Figma had just released Jam and thought this would be the perfect situation to try it out.
All in all, I knew I had to make this a smooth experience for all participants so to prepare I did the following:
- I set up my own account for Figma Jam, running through the tutorial and trying out the things I thought we would want to do so I could explain them to the others
- Prepared the full board to already have all the placeholder things I knew we wanted and prepared examples of the finished output so participants knew what I was going for
- Allocated a good 15 minutes at the start of the workshop to give everyone time to log in, navigate around and get used to Figma Jam
When we got started, my board looked like this:
The flow of the workshop
I broke down the workshop as the following:
- Overview/tutorial (10 min)
- User persona 1 & 2 value proposition canvas (2x30 min)
- Prioritise actions/strategy (20 min)
- Actions next (15 min)
However, in retrospect, this was far too optimistic. Doing a single value proposition canvas will likely need 2–4h. We had a little under 2h to produce two versions. In this time we were able to draft the right-hand part (empathy map) of both personas.
Overview
I had everyone log in (so you can see their names). Asked them to do a few exercises, creating stickies, moving things, commenting. Getting familiar with the shortcuts.
Then we went through the agenda and how long each part would take and what the overall goal was.
Ideation
To come up with pains, gains and jobs for the user, I timed ten minutes for everyone to write ideas on stickies. After this, each person one by one presented their ideas. We merged, removed and rewrote ideas as we went through them and discussed.
We repeated this the same way for the second persona. As always, second time around is smoother.
Priority
I made scales ranging from important to unimportant and asked everyone to silently prioritise until happy.
This tool is excellent for prioritising quickly. I realized afterwards though, that it isn’t as good for important decisions. If the decision is long lived, more discussion is needed to clarify why something is a higher priority than something else. The silent method can act as good preparation for this though.
Collaboration takes time
The exercises above got everyone involved and we had a good pace. But quality takes time. I allocated very brief periods of ideation and almost no time for discussion.
My takeaway is that it is important to scale the time needed with the number of participants you have and make time both for diverging (ideation) and converging (discussion & decision).
Testimony
After the session I asked for feedback from the participants and all in all, Figma really stood out as a great enabled. Some had issues with zooming (on PC) but generally, it was seen as great to be able to see each other's actions and being able to collaborate in real-time.
Most of the feedback came down to facilitation instead. After all, no matter how fancy your stickies, without time management, goal and purpose you won’t have success.
Conclusions
5 things that worked well for us in Jam
- Preparing the canvas/board before the meeting
- Adding examples of the expected output
- Planning time for participants to learn how to use the tool (Figma Jam)
- When dot-pointing, using the E shortcut to make it quick and easy (the first round, we copied and moved stamps which was chaotic)
- Making sure everyone knows how to undo, it is very easy to accidentally remove things
General tips for facilitation
Figma Jam is a great enabler but for a workshop to run smoothly, the facilitation outside the tool is even more important. Here are another five things that worked well for me:
- Keep an agenda, explain each step at the start and again before the step
- Plan for how much time you need for each agenda item and add a buffer (it always takes longer)
- First workshops are seldom smooth, just be open about it, let people know you’re trying things out. Be flexible and improve for the next time. I’ve found it helps a lot to practice a bit with a smaller group or walk through the board/method with someone else beforehand as practice.
- Keep a timer, let participants know how much time is left in each step. It also acts as a reminder for yourself to start rounding off any open discussions and to stay on track
- Take notes as you go, the absolute best is to have a partner in facilitating that can clean up the whiteboard or note as you lead the discussion
Figma Jam makes workshops online doable
To sum up, using the words straight from the mouth of one of the attendees: “now we can do this anytime as we’re able to do it online”
I completely agree. I didn’t think working collaboratively online would work. Not having a whiteboard space and being able to share post-its easily between participants felt really restricting. With Figma Jam this was a breeze.
To a degree, not being limited by the physical space in front of the whiteboard, using Figma was even more beneficial. In a follow-up session a few days later we actually used it instead of a whiteboard whilst all members were in the room.
I hope you give it a go and I’m not even getting paid to say that 😅
