Rebuilding our UX team collaboration in a remote world
When covid hit, our UX team went from fully in-person to fully remote. The shock of the transition wiped out our natural team interactions and our work suffered for it. As the senior member of the group I saw the fallout of the team not having input from their peers and so I took on the task of making that happen again.
Background
Before covid, our team worked in a large building designed like most tech companies — we had an open floor plan, large social areas for meals, lounges and spontaneous meeting areas. The benefit of all that physical space was that our designers were in constant contact with each other, keeping up with each other’s work, getting impromptu feedback and more.
When covid hit, all that went away. What was originally happening without effort now had to be intentionally reconstructed.
Starting a weekly team meeting
To reestablish interactions between our designers I went to our manager and got permission to implement a weekly team meeting. This meeting was scheduled every Monday for an hour and a half on Zoom. Having the meeting on Monday was important because it helped set everyone up for the rest of the week.
The meeting agenda
- See each other on camera
- Report to each other what you did last week and what you’re working on this week during “last week, this week”
- Give each other critique and feedback
Seeing each other on camera
The first goal of the weekly team meeting was for everyone to simply see each other on camera and remember that they were part of a design team. The consequence of going fully remote the way we did was that the designers only had meetings with their product teams and not with each other. The weekly team meeting made sure everyone saw each other, reminding them that they were in fact on a design team, what their design teammates looked like and that there was value in interacting with each other.
Our designers needed to be seen and accepted by their peers to help them stay motivated and productive. Being seen by the team helped drive away feelings of insecurity and isolation that came from working remotely. The weekly team meeting provided a constant and reliable way for everyone to be seen by the rest of the team, to remember that they weren’t alone and to remember that their work played an important role in a bigger picture.
“Last week, this week”
The end goal for the weekly team meeting was to have the designers give each other feedback, but before they could give good feedback they needed to know what everyone else was working on. To keep everyone aware of what everyone else was working on we would go round-robin and have each person report on what they did last week and what they were working on this week.
This was our adaptation of the engineering daily stand up where the engineers would tell their teammates what they worked on yesterday and what they are working on today. After a while we shortened the name of this part of our meeting from “what you did last week and what you’re doing this week” to “last week, this week.”
Additional benefits of “last week, this week”
The primary purpose of “last week, this week” was to let everyone know what everyone else was working on so that later on they could give each other good feedback. But having everyone report to their peers also had the following additional benefits:
1 — Shared accountability
By verbally accounting for what you did and what you’ll be doing, you set everyone’s expectations about what you’re working on. They’ll remember what you said week to week, they’ll ask you follow up questions and they’ll remind you of things you said that you might have forgotten.
It’s easy to get lost in the weeds as a designer and leaning on the team to hold you accountable is a great way to relieve some of the pressure of keeping yourself in check and on task.
2 — Prioritization assistance
When everyone on the team knows what everyone else is working on, the collective group can then help you prioritize your work. The team collectively knows what is most important to the company, the team and the user so the team can point out where your tasks might rank in relationship to everything else going on.
3 — Cross-pollination
Our team had nine designers working on five different products and the weekly team meeting gave the team a chance to see all the other products besides their own. Our different products shared many concepts and patterns even though they had different use cases and users. When the designers heard the work going on for other products they would often think of solutions they hadn’t considered for their own product.
4— Preparation and planning
In order to report to their teammates what they were working on, the designers had to spend a little bit of time thinking about what they had done and what they were going to do. This small preparation work meant that everyone was making consistent time every week to review their work from the previous week and plan their work for the following week. This small effort helped make the habit of planning a more consistent activity for everyone.
Critique and feedback session
The critique and feedback session was the end goal of our weekly team meeting. Seeing each other on camera and reporting to each other during “last week, this week” helped prepare the designers to now give each other critique and feedback.
Critique and feedback is one of the most effective ways to to improve everyone’s design work and to help a team of designers break out of their echo chambers. During critique and feedback each designer would show their work to the other designers and the other designers would tell them what they had done well and what could be improved.
Recognition, celebration and validation
It was important for our designers to not just to be seen but also to be seen for their success. Recognizing when each other did great work was important because it helped the designers actually know when they had done a good job. When the designers earned praise from their peers it helped provide fulfillment and motivate them to do even more great work.
Being recognized for design work is especially hard because good design work is typically invisible to the people using it. That means there aren’t many people trained to be able to see how a designer does their work. The best way to recognize a designer’s work is through other designers. The weekly team meeting gave everyone a chance to show their work to other designers who had the training to recognize what they had accomplished.
Inspiration and creativity
When the designers see another designer doing interesting and creative work it also inspires them to do interesting and creative work. When the designers also see work that is different from their own work that exposure triggers a cascade of ideas that might not happen otherwise. Our weekly team meeting helped expose each of the designers to interesting and creative ideas every week.
Asking for volunteers stopped working
For the first few months of our critique and feedback sessions we just asked if anyone had something they wanted to show and people would volunteer. That worked fine for a while, but then the designers stopped volunteering and I had to figure out why.
I discovered a handful of reasons why the designers stopped volunteering:
1 — The designers were early in their careers so they just didn’t have a lot of experience with critiques and didn’t understand the full value of it yet.
2 — They felt like they had just shown their projects only a week ago — so what more could possibly be said only a week later?
3 — Sometimes they were too attached to their work or they didn’t want to deal with potential changes so close to their deadlines.
4 — Sometimes there were only one or two designers in the meeting and they thought they knew what everyone else would say so why bother.
5 — It was still difficult for many of them to hear someone criticize their work.
6 — They just got tired and bored of the critiques.
It was important for the designers to continue improving their work through the feedback of other designers, so I had to do something to keep them engaged and to keep the critiques from fizzling out.
I became facilitator and curator
I had been through enough critiques in my career that I understood how to guide the critiques in a variety of interesting and different directions to keep the designers engaged and learning, but conducting a successful critique and feedback session required some preparation.
How I prepared to facilitate the critique and feedback session
1 — Detailed notes
The first thing I did as facilitator was I took detailed notes during the “last week, this week” portion of the team meeting. Those notes provided me a record of what everyone was working on so that I could refer to it later. Our team didn’t have any other way to know what each other was working on so this was the only way I could keep track of what everyone was doing.
Eventually I also created a visual kanban board in Figma to keep track of what everyone was working on. This visual kanban board was an even better way to help me remember what everyone was doing.
2 — Preparation the night before
The next thing I did to prepare for facilitating was to do a lot of preparation work the night before the team meeting. Our weekly team meeting was on Mondays and a I had my own projects to work on during the week, so on Sunday nights I would do my preparation work. It was important to do the preparation work the day before our meeting so the work was still fresh in my mind the next day.
3 — Looked through their design files
On Sunday night I would also browse through everyone’s design files based on what they said their were currently working on. As I went through everyone’s design work I would have ideas and questions about their work that I would then write down. Those ideas and questions would become a backlog of talking points to bring up during the critique and feedback session the next day.
When I was done with my preparation I would then prioritize my list of things to talk about. I prioritized the list based on what I thought might be the coolest, most impactful or the most important items for the team to talk about. As time went by I also got to know each of the designers in more detail and that helped me prioritize my list even further.
How I facilitated the critiques
At the beginning of the critique and feedback session I would still ask for volunteers. Asking for volunteers before I started on my curated agenda gave everyone a chance to still bring up topics that were important to them. If no one volunteered, which was often the case, I would then bring up the items in my prepared list.
I would start by sharing my screen and then I would open something specific from someone’s design files. With their work on the screen I would then explain what I found and why I thought it was worth sharing. My tone and my emotional sensitivity were really important at this point because the designers often didn’t know that I would be showing or talking about their work.
When I shared their design work I would first focus on the positives of their work and then I would pose questions to the group about their work rather than directly critique the work myself. This way the team would be the ones to bring up the strengths and weaknesses of the design rather than just me. This was important because that meant the feedback came from the group rather than just one individual.
The team became accustomed to this approach and they started to look forward to the critiques. Over time they got more comfortable asking questions and pointing out areas for improvement.
Signs of success
As the months went by I noticed that people always showed up for the weekly team meeting, when they weren’t on vacation, and people rarely dropped out early from the meeting. During the critique and feedback session everyone was engaged and important topics were discussed and considered.
I took all that as a win and a sign that our weekly team meeting was on the right track. Over time I believed we had found a good balance between constantly challenging the designers, covering important and difficult topics as well as keeping everyone engaged. The team was no longer stagnating and now they were helping each other grow again.
Read more about my coaching and mentoring experience in my case study Unlocking creativity: a deep dive into our two-day UX workshop on workshops
