Guidelines for remote interactions
Posted by Mathieu Triay on , last updated
The pandemic highlighted how much we need to feel connected to others. The tools we had at the time, such as video calls, seemed to provide a fix, but they soon showed their own issues. Three areas, in particular, seem to suffer when it came to virtual group interactions: togetherness, social connection and engagement.
We found that these tools often addressed only one or two of these three needs at the same time. Video calls can make you feel together, but keeping everyone engaged is challenging. Group text chats can provide social connection but often fail to create togetherness or even engagement. Lastly, engaging activities such as watching TV can sometimes feel isolating or socially restricted (and Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Together is trying to address that in some ways). Multi-player video games are perhaps the only activity providing engaging content that also promotes some togetherness and a kind of social link.
In the physical world, however, we have plenty of activities that bring people together, build a social connection and keep people engaged. A popular example might be team sports such as football. Whether you're playing or spectating in person, togetherness, social connection, and engagement are present. In fact, most activities we do as a group, in the physical world, often have these qualities. So we set out to study these types of activities to propose new patterns that can make our digital interactions more suited to a remote-first world.
For our first exploration, we chose to look at board games. They have several interesting properties that caught our attention, but two things stood out: they have rules, and there is a board. Current collaboration software can distort or destroy many social cues that help define the flow of our in-person interactions. Rules come as a natural replacement to restore that flow: you know when and how you can interact at all times. The board is a shared space between all the players, everything happens on it or through it, and everyone is usually represented on it. This kind of space is found in some of our digital tools, such as Google Docs or Figma, but board games provide you with a global view where you can see everyone at all times, which helps with the feelings of presence and togetherness. And, of course, board games are supposed to be engaging by nature.
We want to learn how to design and create online experiences which promote togetherness, social connection and engagement, whether those experiences are TV viewing, keeping up with the news or just hanging out with friends. From our exploration of board games, we built a which we tested to extract the most successful patterns.
We're now publishing a white paper and a detailing our process, learnings and our .
In a future where distributed teams are the norm and people are scattered but yearning for closeness, we hope these recommendations can help bridge the remote gap. We're looking forward to seeing these guidelines used to design experiences that will create a stronger social connection between people.
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