Best Practices for Running Design Thinking Activities Virtually

Running Design Thinking activities online can feel messy—even for seasoned facilitators. Teams lose momentum due to scattered tools, unclear instructions, or visuals that don’t translate well over Zoom. Participants multitask, collaboration slows, and what should be an energizing creative session ends up feeling flat.

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of trying to spark creativity through a screen, you’re not alone. Virtual settings create real barriers in communication, alignment, and shared imagination. But the good news? With the right practices—and the right platform—you can transform virtual sessions into dynamic, high-impact experiences that rival in-person workshops.

Effective virtual Design Thinking follows the same principles as in-person workshops, but with amplified emphasis on clarity, structure, and shared visual context. To keep teams aligned and energized, you need:

• A unified space for brainstorming, prototyping, and decision-making

• Visual tools that reduce cognitive load and support divergent + convergent thinking

• Clear facilitation techniques that guide participants through each phase

• Smooth collaboration features that eliminate friction, not add to it

This is why so many teams lean on Moodboard Studio, the creative collaboration platform inside Ideate Workspace. It's specifically designed to bring visual thinking, rapid exploration, and team alignment into a single intuitive space—perfect for virtual Design Thinking activities.

1. Start With Visual Alignment—Fast

Before diving into problem-solving, create a shared visual foundation.
In virtual settings, this matters even more than in person.

Best Practice:
Use Moodboard Studio to quickly assemble reference imagery, user insights, emotional cues, and inspiration themes. This creates immediate context and taps into the visual part of the brain—critical for meaningful ideation.

Why It Works:
Visuals eliminate ambiguity and set a collaborative tone from minute one.

2. Structure Your Activities for Screen-Friendly Flow

A great virtual workshop is scrollable, scannable, and segmented. Avoid walls of text or overly complex templates.

Try this structure:

• Discovery: Affinity mapping, moodboards, “How Might We” prompts

• Ideation: Sketching spaces, digital sticky notes, rapid-round boards

• Decision-Making: Dot voting, clustering, prioritization grids

• Prototyping: Low-fidelity mockups, storyboard spaces

• Reflection: Debrief prompts and next-step assignments

In Moodboard Studio, each of these stages can be built as a clean, visual canvas that feels intuitive for participants—even those who aren’t "designers."

3. Keep Everything Visual—Show, Don’t Tell

Long explanations kill momentum in virtual spaces.

Use:

• Images

• Sketches

• Micro-videos

• Annotated screenshots

Moodboard Studio supports drag-and-drop visuals, making it easy to demonstrate ideas instead of describing them.

4. Use Timed Activities to Maintain Posture and Energy

Virtual attention spans average 53 seconds before drifting. (Yes—53!)

That means your Design Thinking activities must be:

• Short

• Focused

• Time-boxed

Pro Tip:
Incorporate visible timers and run 5–7 minute creative bursts. Facilitators report higher engagement and better idea diversity when sessions use rapid-fire cycles.

5. Document Continuously for Better Outcomes

One of the big wins of virtual collaboration? Instant documentation.

With Moodboard Studio, every sticky note, sketch, moodboard, and markup becomes part of a living workshop record.
No more:

• Taking photos of whiteboards

• Re-typing handwritten notes

• Reconstructing insights after the fact

Your entire session becomes a searchable, shareable knowledge asset.

6. Encourage Async Participation

One of the most overlooked best practices: letting participants contribute before and after live sessions.

Async work enables:

• More thoughtful ideas

• Diverse perspectives (especially for introverts)

• Global teams to collaborate across time zones

Moodboard Studio supports async input naturally, making it an ideal companion before, during, and after your virtual Design Thinking activity.

Whether you’re running sprints, ideation workshops, or customer-journey mapping sessions, your success depends on your ability to create structure, alignment, and visual clarity for your team.

Moodboard Studio was built for exactly this:

• Visual ideation that sparks creativity

• Flexible canvases ideal for Design Thinking workflows

• Seamless collaboration for live and async teams

• An intuitive interface your participants will actually enjoy using
  
  

👉 Try Moodboard Studio today inside Ideate Workspace and elevate your virtual Design Thinking sessions from “good enough” to truly transformative.