Teamleaders, here’s what you miss by not implementing transparent design process
Managing a gang of designers is a challenge. They’re creative but control is required even there. The most of the problems are coming when the vision of designer and customer are not aligned. Indeed, it’s not easy to communicate creative task to other people even if you’re doing that on everyday basis.
From the other hand, just believe me, creative work requires enormous tension from people and when it appears that you did completely wrong thing it’s a great disappointment for both sides of the process. I’ve tried to find a solution for this problem a lot of times. I know that you, probably, in the same shoes.
What we tried
(spoiler: didn’t work)
As a manager I always knew the earlier you see the first version of a design the better final result will be and less time you will need to get things done. As well I’m an engineer and technologist, I truly believe in the great force of tools. So I tried to find right tool for our designers untold number of times. We’ve tried to use Skype, Slack, BitBucket, GitHub, GoogleDrive, DropBox, InVision etc. But there’s no silver bullet that may meet the following pretty simple requirements:
- Visual enough for creative people. Collaboration tools, like GitHib, for software developers is a complete disaster for creative guys.
- Have manageable/searchable assets list. In this case collaboration tools like Slack is a bummer, in a while I couldn’t find anything in a messages river.
- Visual comments that allow to exactly specify point of interest. Special tools like InVision has this but by fact appeared just a tool for prototyping or other narrow task and couldn’t handle general purpose design activity.
- Real time updates about changes happened. Broad purpose storage systems like GoogleDrive are still not good here.
And then one interesting thing happened…
Our designers started using DAM system we develop…
So, yeah, we’re developing digital asset management platform that allows to manage millions of general purpose files, including PSD, AI, PDF and other files. At some point our designer started using our product to collect his source assets and as a place to store his final work. As well, it appeared a neat tool for sharing the work-in-progress with the team.
How we use Pics.io to collaborate on design
We’ve built a system where designers may put all their assets like source stock photos, illustrations, audio and even video files. Then start combining those into a mockup. The system allows to start collaborating over design right from the very first version.
Any file or version might be discussed by the team in comments accompanied with visual marks which help to point out exact place of interest. The collaboration is streamlined by integration with Slack that allows to instantly get notifications about changes or comments. All that makes design process absolutely transparent, clear and manageable within any number of designers.
And yes, one more thing, this week we’re releasing our diff tool for visual assets that allows to easily understand what is the difference between two versions. You asked — we built.
