Building a Team
The Story of Design x Us: Part III
Design x Us is a project that seeks to discover and share the stories behind the humans that power the design industry. We interview inspirational designers and publish key highlights from the interview in hopes to inspire designers to be proud of their unique perspectives, diversity, and purpose.
If you haven’t read Part I yet, you can read it here.
If you haven’t read Part II yet, you can read it here.
The Pause
It was February, and Stephen and I were feeling good about our vision and process. The momentum behind Design x Us started to pick up. We started conducting interviews with our designer friends on a weekly cadence; we started documenting our interviews; we started strategizing for our first release.
Then, COVID-19 happened.
We were mandated to Shelter-in-Place, and our focus needed to shift. We were in a scramble to reformat our own personal and professional lives — physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Design x Us needed to be put on pause.
Feeling discouraged, lacking motivation — uninspired
A couple of months of transitioning to remote work, I could hear and see the anxieties of the uncertain future from everyone around me. As an instructor at General Assembly’s UXDI (User Experience Design Immersive) program, I instantly thought of my graduate students. Our 12–week program teaches aspiring UX Designers the foundations of UX Design with lecture, activity, and project-based learning. Once graduated, they are onto the job search.
What an emotional toll my graduates must be going through. Post-graduation life is hard enough, from job hunting to loss of class structure to trying to stay creatively engaged. Slap on a worldwide pandemic, hiring freezes, lay-offs? My heart felt deeply for them.
So, I messaged my graduate students to check in with them to see how they’re doing. My concern was validated. They seemed discouraged by the job market and lacked motivation. The once alive spark and thrill for the field of UX seemed lost. I wanted them to be inspired again. Inspired by and reminded of how dope the design industry is.
I remembered in that moment of how inspired I was when I heard the designers’ stories and journeys in our Design x Us project. It got me thinking — What if we could share this inspirational, content creation experience beyond us two? We could expand our team and provide these opportunities for inspiration to others.
I shared this idea with Stephen, and he loved it! But how should we plan for this expansion?
Finding answers to a lot of questions
Before opening up this opportunity for others to join, we had to strategize on what scaling our team beyond us, two would mean. We had several questions that we, together, needed to find some answers to —
Q: Do we have the infrastructure to support additional team members? Technologically? Operationally?
A: By leveraging these two platforms, Notion and Slack, we can create structure and access to information and communication for operational support. We can use Notion to document the process, communicate the status of our interviews, etc., as our source of truth. Slack can be used for quick messaging, announcements, and community building. We can start with the basic plans for both, Slack and Notion, and as we grow and try it out, we’ll evaluate if we need to upgrade.
Q: How do we ensure consistency in the interview and production?
A: If we create a step-by-step guide of the interview process accessible to all members of the team and clearly communicate process check-points, we can ensure best practices are followed and create points for review. Additionally, knowing that we’ll be reaching out to trained UX designers, we feel very comfortable with their already existing interviewing skills and techniques.
Q: But, if our content creators need to follow a step-by-step guide, how do we provide autonomy for our content creators?
A: We will give the content creator the autonomy to choose who they want to interview based on their own personal interest. Although we have a baseline template for the interview script and outbound communications, they will have the autonomy to edit and craft their own interview questions and messaging according to their research on the interviewee and how they want to guide the interview.
We also need to provide autonomy in the production of the interviews. Design x Us should be a flexible platform that allows our creators to come in and out as their availability changes. There should be certain timeliness once an interview is conducted, but we won’t have an expectation of an individual to produce multiple interviews at a certain rate (eg. x interviews/month).
Q: How do we create a supportive community for our team?
A: Our team is really the most important part of Design x Us. Not only do we want to create support and opportunities to connect our team with designers in the industry, but we also want to promote connection amongst each other.
Having Slack as a means of communication is a way to promote everyday engagement and chatter amongst the team. But, also hosting bi-weekly meetings would allow for team members to have face time to get familiar with each other, share status updates for accountability, and open discussions for support and advice.
The first outreach for content creators + an illustrator
After taking action to questions we answered, such as the process documentation and technology set-up, we did our first outreach for content creators for our initial release. I posted in my students’ alumni channels with my fingers crossed, unsure of what the interest would be.
Interest trickled in, and we set up a call to introduce the project, process, and commitment. And, we confirmed five excited, new content creators. With an eye towards our targeted release date, they got the ball rolling.
While interviews were being conducted, Stephen and I were planning our website development to house these interviews, and we were faced with a bit of a block. We realized we needed some guidance in forming our brand and design direction. How can we showcase and represent each designer as an individual, but also cohesively as a single brand?
So, we sought advice from our dear friend, Bonnie Kate Wolf. After discussing our project and help, she expressed an affinity for our mission. She generously offered her expertise in illustrations to help shape and define our brand.
Thus, our initial team was born
2 founders, 1 illustrator, 5 content creators.
As this team of eight was building and working towards our first release on July 13, 2020, Stephen and I fell in love with what we saw was happening.
Our team’s experience is really what makes Design x Us.
Seeing this in action, we vowed that our team’s experience will always be our priority. Design x Us should always provide value to each team member— in the connections they want to make, the skills they want to develop, the support they want to receive, the growth they want to have. Our mission has always been to empower designers to embrace their story and their unique perspective, this includes our team of designers.
It is so important for them to continue to grow in inspiration, confidence, and skill, especially as they embark in their early years in the design industry. We hope to continue to provide and shape these experiences with and for our team as we grow.
“You’re all extremely generous with your time and mentorship, and I am grateful to have met you and to be able to participate. The organization and process structure makes this a real learning experience and amplifies legitimacy.”
— Anonymous Team Member
Meet the people that power creative industries. Discover their stories, and draw inspiration from their unique perspectives here.
Do you think you or someone you know should be interviewed by Design x Us? Let us know at hello@designxus.org.
