Creating The Wine & Design
How we nurture a culture of feedback by designing in the open
If your experience in the design industry started anything like mine, you probably had some typography professor or drawing instructor force you to stick your ideas on the wall and encourage the rest of the class to tear apart your soul. The first time feels like your entire theory of being an artist has been completely disintegrated in front of your eyes. Your ideas that were an extension of yourself are now a pile of ashes on the ground; as though you just witnessed your own cremation.
That went dark—fast. Although it is a bit morbid, I can almost sense your blank stare and nod in agreement on the other end of this screen.
Fast forward ten years later and I’m in that same leadership seat encouraging designers to stick their soul to the wall. The process of critiquing each others work not only makes our work better, but cultivates our ability to give and receive critical feedback. I realized it was never my professor’s intention to damage my inner being, but rather to make my class of up-and-coming designers great critical thinkers. While there are several attributes that make designers great, a key component of great designers is giving and receiving feedback with tact.
Culture of feedback
The main goal of a Wine & Design (W&D) is to get your design in front of as many different stakeholders and partners within the organization. We need to eliminate the “grand reveal” which limits the involvement and insight from other team members throughout the process. Designers are great at putting all the pieces together from their research, but they are also just one person. More people means more context to the situation that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.
Design in the open is one of our design principles at 7shifts. Running a W&D is one way that we act on that principle. We encourage designers to gather internal feedback regularly so that they don’t design in a silo. This means we have several other practices like critiques, visual status, and regular sync ups with their manager to review their work. Regular feedback has become so natural that designers are regularly putting their ideas in front of developers, PMs, CS, other designers, and of course customers.
We are proud that we have this level of collaboration in our team, however it wasn’t always this autonomous. Here’s how we started to cultivate more confidence in requesting feedback.
The inception of Wine & Design
After I got over my fear of feedback in school I learned to love the format of sticking ideas on the wall to gather feedback. There is something so vulnerable about the process and it became ingrained in my understanding of design. The thought that you could do design without getting continuous feedback from colleagues seemed so wrong.
We didn’t always have the process or capacity to request feedback regularly. For example, one designer on our team was working on a project that spanned multiple stakeholders from various departments. There was some communication breakdown and the designer was scrambling to align on the direction we needed to go. Stakeholders were busy and wouldn’t always respond to messages sent for feedback on a solution, leaving the designer more frustrated and handicapped to progress. Things couldn’t move forward without alignment and critical feedback.
Enter the art school critique format.
Round 1 — humble beginnings
After some initial hesitation to put half-baked ideas out in the open, the designer threw a handful of papers on the wall printed with different screens from the workflow. They told stakeholders they needed feedback to move forward and invited them to review the items on the wall.
Then everyone came from miles around to ooh and ah at the innovative ideas!
or not…
We had one or two stakeholders look at the options and give minor feedback about the use of UI elements and form fields. Not what we were looking for, but we were able to move forward with it. If anything, it started raising curiosity about the work we were doing.
We learnt that a culture of feedback doesn’t happen so easily and that we needed to do some education around the type of feedback we were looking for.
Takeaway: Getting over the hump of showing work in progress is important for a designer’s growth and maturity.
Round 2 — enter Wine & Design
While we may not have seen a huge amount of engagement from the first round, we decided to do it again and open it up to anyone with context to the project. As you can see from the images below, there was much more interest when people knew a bit more about the project and there was a set time to gather around the concepts.
The following three images show how quickly we started executing on these sessions within a week. We realized at this point it would be hard to keep up this kind of cadence without disrupting everyone else’s work.
Takeaway: Attendees appreciate project context and a set time to give their feedback. Also, more ideas are generated from other attendees!
Round 3—mo’ people, mo’ collaboration
You can imagine having several of these sessions within a week of time would get a bit overwhelming. It also raised potential risk of losing the investment from other team members if it was too frequent. For this reason we started thinking about it as a group showcase where all designers could put something on the wall that needed feedback.
Not only was there a larger variety of items, we invited the entire company to an hour long come-and-go event. This encouraged different departments to peruse the ideas side by side, giving valuable feedback and breaking into discussions which may have never happened prior.
We were starting to get somewhere, and the rest of the company loved being involved in the process! We did it this way a couple of times before we started the next round of adjustments.
Takeaway: Showcasing a variety of projects expanded the scope of feedback we received within a single hour; reducing the time needed for attendees to participate.
Round 4—Look to the horizon
It was never clear what kind of project raised the need for a W&D. Arguably we could do it for any project but that would mean we’d have these every 1–2 weeks and not every project demands this much company wide feedback.
We had to think broader, further, and bigger. We needed a way to showcase the vision of our product while also keeping alignment to what we are hearing from our users. This meant we needed designers to start building their own projects.
We call them horizons. These are not shoot from the hip ideas—these are roadmap aligned, company vision inspired, user friendly driven, data backed, user validated, sweet baby Jesus sunrise horizons. It’s amazing.
Each designer does the research and ideation to develop their horizon over three months (to keep their normal work on-track) and we showcase all of them at our quarterly W&D. We’ve been able to inform the upcoming roadmap with unmet needs as well as highlight opportunities to tackle nasty design debt.
Takeaway: Horizons offered a way for designers to think strategically and partner with other disciplines across the company.
Round 5—COVID-19
We were on such a good track and everyone was a week away from completing their prototypes for the Q1 2020 W&D.
And then—quarantine.
There is nothing humorous about the current situation surrounding coronavirus, especially for our customers in the restaurant industry. With everyone at 7shifts on a mandatory work from home policy, we were forced to go remote. I’m very proud of the entire design team for rising to the challenge and modifying the plans, switching the entire W&D to work remotely.
We were absolutely blown away at how much engagement we received on the Figma file that was shared. By the end, we had over 80 comments scattered throughout the Figma file! Some feedback was shared that they actually liked it more than in-person. I think we‘ll pocket that feedback and make sure we keep this remote version alive for those working in other offices, but the extravert in me says, “bring back the humans and dot stickers!”
We also learned from previous W&D that it would be helpful to give more context to the research. Feedback would be more informed if we showed the data (quantitative and qualitative) that directed each horizon down the set path. This was extremely helpful for the remote version as designers were not there to discuss their findings. Designer’s also made themselves available for video calls if anyone wanted to discuss further.
Takeaway: With the right tools and culture, remote collaboration can work
Over the last year we have experimented and iterated on this event in a true agile way. With each W&D we learn something new and adapt the framework. By doing this we are designing a culture of feedback which not only strengthens the soft skills for each designer, but also the design maturity of the entire organization.
We’re curious to see what other ways you have encouraged designing in the open at your company or suggestions you have to make W&D better!
Running your own Wine & Design
I wanted to share a bit of the origin story before outlining how you could run your very own W&D. Here’s a very simplified list of things to do.
- Determine what kind of projects you want to showcase at W&D. This could be a current project designers are working on or something that is in the near future. My suggestion is to make it something that you wouldn’t usually ship in a single iteration. This keeps it broad and would benefit from more feedback.
- Provide context for the project with data and research findings so that there is more weight to your idea. We do this by having an introduction page to outline the problem, hypothesis, and any data we have gathered.
- Invite anyone that might have context to the project. Send an invite with a time and place for attendees to come-and-go as they please. Attendees might be a development team or the entire company depending on the scope of the project.
- Give each attendee some sticky notes and 5–10 dot vote stickers for them to highlight areas of interest and leave their feedback. For remote, we used Figma and shared a file where anyone could comment on the prototypes. Try to give an outline of what kind of feedback you are looking for so that you remove bias and keep it directed to the problem being solved rather than the UI or layout of the page (unless that’s what you’re looking for).
- Encourage designers to ask attendees questions and start conversations. Don’t think that the sticky notes eliminate the need for a verbal communication.
- Have some wine and non-alcoholic options for everyone to enjoy while they peruse the concepts. We’ve also added charcuterie and music to make the atmosphere even more inviting.
We love these events and they are always a highlight for other people in the company. Designers get a chance to show their work while attendees get an opportunity to provide insight. Through this we have showcased ground breaking ideas and watched a culture of feedback begin to flourish.
If you start doing these, please connect with me and let me know how it goes! I love meeting new people and hearing all about your rituals to make great products.
