The benefits and challenges of working globally
Having a geographically dispersed team can be challenging. Especially when you’re collaborating, and especially when you’re in different timezones. Slack, for example, is fantastic for collaborating with folks that are at work at the same time, but for team members in other parts of the world, catching up on conversations, and the decisions that come from them, can be hard. Collaboration is not just about ease of communication, it’s about ensuring that decisions and outcomes are accurately tracked and that everyone is on the same page.
Imagine now, you’re a UX Agency collaborating with a client (or multiple clients!) from other parts of the world. You could be building a website in three different languages, for three different global offices, and none of them are online at the same time. This is when collaboration becomes really difficult. In a situation like this, face to face meetings (over skype or in person), phone calls or Slack chats are unlikely to be an effective way to work.
When people aren’t able to get together at a particular time, at least getting them to collaborate in a single place is a good alternative. This is why BugHerd is so useful for remote teams. It doesn’t really matter what country someone is in, what language they speak, or what time of day it is, feedback placed on a website will be there when you get to it and in a way that makes sense to everyone. It provides the right context, with the right information, with the very least amount of effort from the user. Perfect!
Using BugHerd to collaborate with remote teams
Some of the best examples of this we’ve seen at BugHerd have been large digital agencies producing multi-lingual websites across often 3 or more languages and time zones. An agency can produce work, submit it to review to the various stakeholders, come back tomorrow and see the feedback. Instead of getting a spreadsheet from 3 different offices that need to be consolidated, all the feedback is in one place. When there’s a spelling mistake on a site, you don’t need to scour the site looking for it, you can see exactly which sentence they mean. This is especially valuable when dealing with languages which aren’t familiar to you, when translation is involved or when the site in question has hundreds of pages.
It’s easy to underestimate the value of having everyone “on the same page”, but when there’s a 24 hour turnaround when working with someone on the other side of the planet, getting all the details the first time can literally save you days of work. Instead of getting a bunch of feedback and needing to ask “which browser were you using?” or “which page was that?”, you already have it all. When projects have tight budgets and tight deadlines, getting timely feedback is often the difference between a profitable project and a failure.
