In 2019, remote work is becoming more and more popular: to hire the best talent from all across the world and keep up with the competition, startups and big companies alike are building distributed teams. There are also numerous productivity tools that support organizations as well as individuals. However, transitioning from a colocated team to a remote environment can be still challenging.

To develop products in the right direction, we need to research the experiences of our users, discover their needs and unpack the insights. As product managers, designers and researchers, we have a large toolset to discover what our users want and how it corresponds with business needs. But how should we figure out what matters the most? This is where a thoughtful UX survey can be useful. Here are some steps that can help you get the most out of a survey.

User research plays a critical function when you are building tech products and services. This practice helps teams understand the user’s perspective, including their unmet needs, delights, and pain points, but also how they connect to the brand and product in an emotional way. User researchers also serve as a bridge between customers or users and the product, engineering, and company leadership teams.

Today we are excited to share a guest post by Kyle Chipman, who coordinates process and brand content management at Chipman Design Architecture, a leading architecture and interior design firm. As one of the early adopters of RealtimeBoard, Kyle shared some of the techniques that help him reduce the time his team spends on figuring out a seating plan at the office from a couple of weeks to less than two hours.

We recently interviewed Kim Goodwin, consultant, speaker, and author of Designing for the Digital Age. Kim shared how to make user-centered values pervasive in your organization.

Great design is no longer just about how a product looks and feels, but how a company understands and listens to its customers, how it hires and organizes its teams, and how it anticipates and accounts for change. No one is more aware of this than Irene Au, Design Partner at Khosla Ventures.

Design is one of those things that can be delightful when it’s well executed but absolutely infuriating when it’s badly done. The unfortunate reality is that we’re living in a world with bad design all around us. Just think of incomprehensible airport layouts or blister packaging.

With the growing trend of remote work, especially in digital industries, UX managers are faced with the necessity of managing distributed teams, adding to the already complex challenges of maintaining efficient development, selling the UX vision to the entire company and studying mysterious customers.

The only constant is change. These words are as true now as they were when the Greek philosopher Heraclitus spoke them more than 2,500 years ago. For all we know, change might even be accelerating; after all, technology is improving at a rate unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.