It's challenging enough to design a website even when the entire team is co-located. How about designing a website when the team is distributed? To add a twist to the story: How about designing a website when the team is distributed AND everyone in the team is a volunteer for a charity project?!
This is the situation I faced since January. We, team of seven volunteers, have been doing a project for Taproot Foundation since January. One of our biggest challenges was to collaborate on the design of the website. If everybody is co-located, we could have completed the design in less than a week. However, the team was not only distributed but also working only part-time. We all have demanding full-time jobs. We work in late evenings and weekends for this good-cause project.
I have used Asana to manage the project, it worked well to some extent. Thanks to people behind freeconferencecall.com, we were able to do weekly conference call on Thursdays to check the pulse of the project. We found that none of these tools replaced face-to-face communication required especially when it comes to design of the website or product. I just came across this article in nextweb. Author outlined excellent ideas for proper collaboration of design ideas. You will find it useful if your team is co-located. When I manage another non-profit project next time, I will probably ask the volunteers to gather in Mount Shasta for a weekend to finalize the design. It may not be a bad idea to go to kickstarter to fund the weekend brainstorming :-)
If you are involved in design of a product, you may find Stanford D School methods very useful, apart from the nextweb article mentioned above.
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