Designing through COVID
One year after shut down, how has our design team adapted?
Happy birthday, COVID
I thought it’d be appropriate to write an article on the year anniversary after our design team left the comfort of our physical office to work from their homes due to COVID-19.
I wanted to share how we’ve changed the way we work for better or worse, what we’ve added to our processes and what hasn’t translated very well to remote working.
Fika
Swedish for “coffee break”, this is a weekly meeting where the design team starts the week off by talking about literally anything over a cup of coffee. There are no rules and its only outcome is bonding with the team.
Fika is one more touch-point with the team and it‘s our attempt at replacing that in-office Monday morning visit before we got to work for the day.
Visual Status
We’ve always done this meeting remotely. Even when we were all in the office, once a week we all found little cubbies to “practice” working with each other remotely by sharing our designs over Hangouts to solicit feedback from each other. Little did we know that “practice” would pay off sooner than we thought!
This meeting hasn’t really evolved since COVID but it has become more important than ever to foster collaboration, align the team and get full visibility of in-flight projects.
“Wine and Design”
Prior to shutdown, a “Wine and Design” would involve the design team showing off upcoming work to the organization in an art gallery format. In exchange for their feedback, we’d treat participants to wine and food (hence the name!). We had a lot of fun with this one; sometimes we’d go all out and dress up and serve fancy wine and charcuterie and other times we’d dress it way down with Baby Duck and Cheetos.
This meeting has changed a lot since COVID. What was once a physical art gallery-style event is now done virtually through Figma. Each designer posts their work on Figma, the link is sent out to the organization and people comment directly within Figma. Because we can’t replicate the excitement from being in-office–and let’s face it, we can’t entice people with wine and food anymore–engagement isn’t as much as it used to be.
Instant Sharing
When you’re sitting in a pod with your PM and the lead engineer for your team, it’s so easy to run an idea by them for a quick viability or feasibility check. You either turn your screen or throw some ideas quickly on a whiteboard. When you’re remote, that may require booking time in a calendar. Yuck. Honestly, if I can dodge a meeting, I’ll do it. What I do instead is send out a quick Loom to get my thoughts across. Loom allows you to easily record your screen or a specific app, with or without your camera. Instead of a 30 minute meeting, I send a Loom, post it on Slack and my teammates can either respond quick in Slack with a comment or can follow up with a quick call if need be.
Workshops
The transition of in-person to remote workshops is made easy with tools like Miro and Figma. Both tools have made real-time collaboration so seamless that I couldn’t see our team functioning without them. A word of caution though: assigning someone to facilitate the workshop is even more paramount when done remotely. Don’t skip this. Here’s a really good article on running remote workshops.
Design hangout
Lastly, a typical week ends with more social time with the gang! This final hour at the end of the Friday is the time to fully relax, drink a couple beers and bond some more with the team. There’s no agenda and boy do we dig into some interesting topics.
While we’ve adapted, and a lot of our new strategies are working well for us, I still miss being in the office with my team. Nothing can replace the serendipitous moments you get when you’re together with your team. Team alignment and ideas flowed easily…and it’s a lot easier to feel closer when you’re well…closer.
What are some of the ways your team has adapted to working remotely through COVID? I’m always on the lookout for new ways to work remotely!
