Remote UX work is becoming increasingly common. As a consequence, for many teams, remote meetings and workshops are becoming the rule. In addition, the pursuit of multidisciplinary design that involves team members from a variety of disciplines makes remote ideation even more likely.

Although in-person ideation is preferable when possible, remote ideation can be just as effective, and opens up more options for how to structure and run the idea-generation process.

In synchronous ideation sessions, all participants meet together at a specific time to discuss design problems and contribute ideas.

Asynchronous ideation does not occur at a specific time, but instead allows each participant to view and contribute to a shared digital space (document, message thread, or other tool) whenever they choose, over a longer period of time.

Both structures have their benefits and drawbacks, but each has its place in your UX and ideation practice.

Synchronous Ideation

When we hear the term “meeting,” we immediately picture two or more people getting together. Video meetings, screen-sharing platforms, or even conference calls (perhaps paired with a digital-ideation tool) are common ways to facilitate synchronous ideation.

Illustration showing split screen of 4 people in a remote meeting, where three members share their webcam while the fourth shares her screen.
Synchronous communication refers to meetings where all attendees gather at a shared time, either in person or remotely (using some remote-meeting tool or simply the phone as a communication channel). In this illustration, four teammates meet remotely to share ideas. One of the teammates shares her screen (rather than her camera) and captures the team’s ideas in a collaborative document.

Benefits of Synchronous Ideation

  • Fast exchange of ideas: Synchronous communication facilitates speedy back-and-forth discussions, as well as swiftly building on each other’s contributions.
  • Focused attention: Because there is a set time limit — the length of the agreed-upon meeting — team members will be focused on the task, so synchronous sessions can get results in a short amount of time.
  • Team building: Direct communication among coworkers (whether on the phone or through a video-communication tool) builds camaraderie and thus facilitates the exchange of ideas in a remote team.

Drawbacks of Synchronous Ideation

  • Scheduling: Finding a common time when all team members are available to meet can be difficult when the team is spread across different time zones or when members have a range of workloads.
  • Remote-meeting awkwardness: Remote synchronous meetings are plagued with awkward instances of multiple people inadvertently starting to speak at the same time (followed by a long silence, then several prompts to “go ahead”) and uneven communication caused by group-dynamics issues.
  • Difficulty selecting the right tool: Tools that go beyond sharing one person’s screen or streaming participants’ webcams, and that support sharing multiple idea sketches at the same time can be hard to find. Of course, remote sharing tools continue to evolve, so hopefully this issue will lose relevance in the near future.

Asynchronous Ideation

Sending an email or text message is the simplest form of asynchronous communication, as you don’t necessarily know when the recipient will view or respond to your message. Remote asynchronous ideation may occur through a message thread (e.g. a Slack channel), a collaborative document (e.g. a Google Doc), or another ideation tool.

Illustration showing an example message thread of ideas between team members.
Asynchronous communication means that people can contribute to a shared message thread or digital document whenever their schedule allows, regardless of time zones or the availability of the rest of the team. In this illustration, team members contribute ideas to a message thread over a period of several days.

Of course, asynchronous ideation could also be conducted using a physical channel — for example, ideas can be posted to a bulletin board or a white board in a shared location such as a meeting room or hallway, and team members view and contribute to this space according to their own schedules. But in practice, such physical channels for asynchronous communication are less common than the digital ones.

Benefits of Asynchronous Ideation

  • Freedom to contribute when convenient: Asynchronous ideation avoids the tricky scheduling issues that synchronous sessions suffer from. People can share their ideas whenever they have time. That means each teammate can work around their own scheduling conflicts and deadlines, while still being able to contribute. Asynchronous ideation can be particularly useful if your company has only a few UX people, who are overloaded and support multiple teams. For the same reason, asynchronous ideation might also work better for fast-paced Agile schedules.
  • Time for ideas to incubate: Asynchronous ideation gives people time and space to think through ideas on their own and frees them from the pressure to be a genius on demand. Often, people need to “mull over” a design problem before they can generate potential solutions. If you have some confident and talkative teammates who tend to dominate synchronous sessions, asynchronous ideation will allow the quieter teammates time to formulate their ideas and contribute without getting talked over.

Drawbacks of Asynchronous Ideation

  • Fewer team-building opportunities: People won’t get a chance to directly interact to each other and connections may take longer to form.
  • Less attention and focus: People can easily lose interest over days or weeks, especially as new work projects continue to arise. They might forget to revisit the shared digital space or continue contributing more ideas.
  • More time spent catching up: Teammates will need to spend time getting back up-to-speed each time they revisit the shared space, reading through anything that has been contributed since the last time they looked. Depending on how many people are involved and how many ideas are generated, this process may end up taking quite some time.

Conclusion

Both synchronous and asynchronous remote ideation have their place in your ideation practice; neither method is inherently better than the other.

Synchronous sessions work best when you need to generate and choose an idea quickly, in order to move forward in the design process. They also work well when the situation is complex and requires back-and-forth discussion, as well as the ability to talk through potential solutions together.

Asynchronous ideation is great when there isn’t a fast-approaching deadline, giving you the luxury of a longer timeline to contribute ideas. Gathering ideas asynchronously can be a life saver when everyone’s schedule is packed or when the team is spread across multiple time zones.

You can always blend the two methods! You could conduct a synchronous ideation kickoff meeting to talk through the issue at hand and perhaps capture some of the team’s initial ideas, then open up a shared document or thread for people to contribute additional ideas asynchronously for a designated period of time after that meeting. Conversely, you could gather the team’s ideas asynchronously for a few days, then follow up with a shared, synchronous, ideation session.

Try out a few different formats and tools for remote ideation to find what works best for your team. You’ll likely find that each ideation situation calls for a different solution.

Learn more about ideation techniques in our full-day training course on Effective Ideation Techniques for UX Design.