What walls are for

A few weeks ago I did a talk at the Mind the Product conference in San Francisco about research, and I gave some examples from the Jira team.

In my presentation, I showed a photograph of a team gathered around a wall covered with index cards. No one in the meeting had their laptops out.

Afterwards, this was the main topic that people wanted to talk about. Could it be true that I, spokesperson (one of many) for Jira, would possibly want to see stuff on the wall? Surely it should all just be in Jira, right?

People told me they messaged photos of the slide back to their teams to show them — “Look, the Atlassian person says it’s ok to put things on the walls!”

OMG yes. I love walls with Post-its and index cards stuck on it, and sketches on whiteboards. I like walls for planning, for thinking, for communicating, and for analysing. And then you capture it all in a tool, like Jira.

This is why.

1. Walls make it easier to iterate

Digital things can look “finished” too soon. When something is a work in progress on a wall, it looks unfinished, so you keep working on it. Moving things around, reshaping things, connecting things, erasing things, and making them again. Walls make it easier to iterate.

Iteration, in my opinion, is massively correlated with quality.

This is why walls are good for sketching out design ideas and processes, and why they’re amazing for research analysis.

And don’t worry about what anyone says, Post-it notes are still the best tool for research analysis for exactly this reason. No one ever does three (or more) rounds of synthesis using a digital tool.

2. Walls make it easier to collaborate (in a single location)

There’s something about a group of people standing in front of a wall full of sketches or index cards or Post-it notes. It’s a different kind of collaboration than you get around a table or in a digital tool. You’re usually standing up, so you’re paying attention and you’re focussed. People physically pick up the card they’re talking about and that seems to encourage focus even more.

Doing a stand-up at a physical wall and moving the cards across to done has always felt like the physical act of crossing something off the to-do list — so much more satisfying than updating a status on an issue. The messiness of a room full of Post-it notes when you’re doing analysis almost compels you to finish making that sweep through the data, finding the best place, for now, for every sticky note of data.

There’s something about the physicality and the embodiment of the work that I’ve always felt binds teams together more and drives us to do better and more complete thinking about the work we’re doing. There’s no science to this, just many years of experience.

Walls just work better for me, when I’m lucky enough to work in the same location as my team.

Because, it’s true, walls kinda suck for remote and distributed teams.

3. Walls make it easier to communicate

Sometimes the walls are not for you but for other people. Sometimes walls are to send a message. They can say — “Look how many things people want us to do, this is insane and someone needs to prioritise this,” they can say “Look how much we’ve done this sprint, yay!” or “Look how much we have left to do, uh oh!” They can say “These things are really important to our team, this is what we believe it,” or they can say “Here’s what we’re working on at the moment.”

I’ve been in, and observed, many teams who use walls to communicate either the most important messages to the team in a kind of omnipresent way: this is what we believe, or this is what we are focussing on right now, or these are our values, or here is our goal.

Sometimes they’re designed to communicate to bosses and stakeholders, and those walls might say “We’d get the things we’ve promised done if you didn’t always sneak in all this unplanned work.” (I’ve seen a few of those.)

Some people I’ve known have had jobs that include keeping the digital tool up to date with the wall, or the other way around. It’s not inefficiency, the wall is doing different things for the team.

And that’s another great thing about walls, it doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game.

If you’re using Jira, using a wall makes perfect sense to me. I don’t know why you’d do without.

Originally posted at Disambiguity.

Did you enjoy this post? Want more of the same? Consider following Designing Atlassian or follow Leisa on Twitter.