The secret to successful design? A great team

Placing runner-up at my first Design-a-thon, here’s how we did it.

Over the weekend, me and a group of three more designers participated in UCSC’s Just Design Designathon, placing 2nd for Best UI Design with our app Bloom!

Just Design’s Closing ceremony Zoom meeting.

What is Bloom?

Basically, Bloom hands the user back responsibility for climate change. Instead of treating it like an invisible, distant, and perhaps even blameless problem, we wanted Bloom to inform the user how their behaviors directly affect the environment.

Bloom sends users actionable, sustainable daily tasks, to grow and care for their own virtual tree! This way users can really visualize their impact. Forget to complete your tasks, and you tree might die!

Bloom promo image by Chintan Jani.

Building a great team —

Enough about what the app does, though, you can view our app here.

What I’m really writing about today is the wonderful team behind Bloom, and how lucky I am to have found them. Honestly, they are 100% the reason why we placed runner-ups. Here’s the five main reasons why I think our team was so successful.

1. Setting expectations from the very beginning.

First thing we did after meeting was understanding each other’s expectations, this meant sharing

• our strengths
• our goals
• our time commitments

Our team hyping up hours before the prompt was released.

Julie couldn’t have said it better, our team felt perfectly balanced from the very beginning. She and Chintan were better at hands-on design, while Arina and I loved delving into the need-finding and research of the process. We decided that rather than spending useful energy trying to remain equally involved in all parts of the process, we could make a long weekend shorter by relaying roles to whomever could do the job best. This brings us to the second point.

2. Nobody likes feeling like deadweight, allow each member to do what they do best.

Designathons are fast paced. This one was 42 hours to be exact, but there was no need for us to be involved (or awake) during every part of the design. In fact, it was Julie’s point, well said again, that she did not want to feel like deadweight during research, and that she would be the most useful when prototyping came.

Arina and I took the first night to delve into some hardcore user researching.

It’s important as a team member to recognize your strengths, and it is also important to allow others to perform where they feel most useful. When you take someone out of their ideal set of skills, you can’t expect them to do well, or even enjoy the experience.

I would say our greatest asset as a team was definitely being perceptive to each other’s strong points.

3. Respect each person’s need to take a break. In other words, recognize and appreciate their hard work.

Constantly looking at a screen, researching, and prototyping for hours is tiring. In fact, anything can get tiring when done for too long (and on few hours of sleep).

We made sure to tell each other when it was getting late, or when it was too early. We set our time availabilities from very early in the weekend so that we knew when we’d be working on the project, and we made sure to remind everyone how important they’d been to the process.

As you can see, we were up until pretty late, or up really early.

I don’t think I ever went to sleep without my team members letting me know that it was well deserved. In a fast-paced environment where everyone is trying to get something done, this can be a very relieving thing to hear.

4. Be perceptive to feedback and be willing to learn when learning is due.

Like I said before, I wasn’t the most comfortable with high-fidelity prototyping. Of course, this didn’t mean I wanted to 100% step away from this part of the process. If anything, I was thankful to have two team members who felt most confident at exactly this. I saw it as a great opportunity to improve my skills and receive immediate feedback.

Chintan being a GREAT and super helpful teammate.

I allowed myself to design some of the screens for our app, reaching out to my teammates when I got stuck trying to do something. I am happy to say I now feel much more willing to get involved in prototyping. But most importantly, I feel comfortable being wrong and needing help. Having a team that gives you room to grow and work on your weaknesses is better than being in a team that only uses you for your strengths.

5. Lastly, remember to have fun!

I honestly had so much fun with these three people. From hour-long midnight conversations with Arina, discussing the issues that mattered the most to us, to 3 am check-in calls with the rest of my teammates, there was not a single time when I felt stressed, or even considered giving up.

I think that has to be hands-down what I’m most thankful for from this experience. Every now and then during the weekend, I would think to myself “how weird is it that I just met these three people, and we’re talking every three hours, helping each other, working so well together, and designing something so beautiful?”

Celebrating our victory 2 hours before the deadline!

I really just felt very lucky and grateful. And that’s why I’m writing this post. Because I am learning again and again that having a great team is absolutely essential for success.

I am happy to call these three people my friends. We might be scattered all around the US, we might not really “see” each other ever other than through Zoom, but we created something beautiful this weekend, and I’m happy for it.

Thanks for reading if you made it this far!Connect with me on linkedin to view more of my work!