Pair Design at Frontify: Remote Enablement
How we’ve started to involve different disciplines in the Product Design process at Frontify and what other teams can learn from it.
This article is a good read for:
Designers, Developers, Product Managers, and others that deal with products.
2020 might be the year of remote learnings influencing new work techniques, collaboration platforms, and communication skills. The evolution and acceleration of tools designed to help the greater product world tackle daily business and problem-solving over the last several years, has only accelerated in the past 6+ months. At Frontify we’ve also experimented with innovative techniques and pushed ourselves to find better ways to enable everyone to contribute and collaborate, in an independent way regardless of time, location, and presence.
I’d like to share our learnings in Pair Designing and how this approach, coming from the time of presence collaboration, helps us to improve communication, speeds up decision making, and aligns everyone involved, so that solutions are confidently met together.
Wait, What’s Pair Designing?
The term is inspired by the popular working model of two developers in Pair Programming. It’s about addressing the same issue simultaneously and working with the same code. Doing Pair Programming at the same table means working with one screen, two keyboards, and two mice. In this setup one developer is going to be the Driver, writing the code and thinking aloud, and one is going to be the Navigator, observing the work and challenging it.
Pair Programming is part of many agile teams working with code to improve its quality and decrease the possibility of bugs and other defects. Some people would argue that this method is increasing the people resources that are needed, but in the long-term, the higher quality of the solution benefits several teams that interact with the product.
Translating this method to the design process we can adopt several key actions to benefit from the same advantages. Pair Designing, then, equates to two people working on the same design task at any stage. This could be for discovery, research, visual design, review, or other aspects of design. We can open this to people at large, as it doesn't always need to be limited to a duo of designers.
Pair Designing is different from Pair Programming because of the nature of its profession. It’s difficult to compare logical processes and decisions made in coding to exploration tasks and subjective discussions in designing, but there are still many benefits resulting from working together on the same topic in the same space.
Two People Working Together as One.
There are many articles that describe the process of Pair Designing pretty nicely, and because I want to share some learnings here and not the whole manual on how to do it, I’d suggest you check out this great description from Mariya Yao:
Three Models of Pair Design
So, let’s get down to Pair Design in a remote setup. Is it always about design?
Opening the Door to Remote Pair Designing
After some research and several readings, we wanted to test Pair Designing. It’s already a well-known method for working in the same space on the same topic. But we asked ourselves: how can we make this work virtually?
It has something to do with your tool stack — of course! — and we can be thankful to live in a time where design tools are often running in a browser, independent from computational power or operating systems. Hosting a Pair Designing session is easily enabled with tools like:
- Miro
- Figma, Framer
- Pitch
- Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom
- and so many more…
So, having the tools and an online conference link makes Pair Designing possible?
Yes and no. It’s not quite as easy as you might expect. The tricky thing about working in this mode is knowing the method well, along with the possibilities and limitations; these can be trickier to follow virtually. Let’s have a look at them.
Committing to Pair Designing and its Rules or Recommendations
Like any new method or process you want to try out, it is important that you feel confident about it and have participants with a positive base attitude.
Collaboration is about participation and listening. Without both, the experiment will fail. So, rules we know from other virtual events – like being available and concentrated, and actively involved and carefully listening – will help to make the time worth it. Here are some tips:
- Meeting etiquette
- Be aware of the session’s goal, time, and tools
- Assign roles of Driver & Navigator clearly (and timebox if needed) —
and keep them. Otherwise, you lose the benefits if both people hop straight into designing - Start with the most complex topic/issue first
- “Build — don’t Block!” — it’s important to go forward and not to discuss something until it’s dead (think about Pareto or other principles 😉)
- Communicate directly with speech
- Express your feelings and be conscious of the workload (take breaks!) and provide feedback on your experience after the session
Following these rules and recommendations will help you to focus on the content and to set this method up for positive results in a remote setup. You can decide on which of the different models of Pair Designing would work best for your team, and work on a topic as a duo.
What We Tried & What We Learned
We’re still learning a lot about the method of Pair Designing, especially its benefits and weaknesses. Largely due to the great first outcomes and the positive opinion of the participants, we thought it could be helpful to share our first learnings. Here goes!
- Better Participation & Concentration
Doing Pair Designing sessions helps people to contribute to one topic because they don’t want to waste the time of their counterpart, and they’ll happily take attention away from the notification jungles like Slack or Emails – putting focus where it counts. - Real-Time Evaluation & Collaboration
Decisions can be discussed, challenged, and improved immediately, and the creators are not losing time with feedback processes or asynchronous documentation to onboard people to the topic. - Team Benefits: Knowledge, Cohesion, and Sharing
While working on the same topic together, the values of Pair Designing sessions also affect the team building. Knowledge is shared and silos are eliminated; the feeling for team cohesion increases by a common success and capacities are shared, helping people to tackle bigger tasks. - Quality & Security
Four eyes see more than two, in every circumstance of life. The higher demand for people resources is going to be helpful for better quality and more secure solutions. A Pair Session is a natural solution, helping the teams and people executing specific tasks to join together around the topic. - Acceptance & Involvement
Sharing the process of designing a specific instance can help to increase the acceptance of a solution dramatically. Cross-functional teams are especially benefitting from a better understanding of the solution creation, and everyone involved is able to feel they’ve been a part of the result.
Of course, there are also some problems or conflicts that can occur by working in pairs simultaneously.
As mentioned before, capacity takes a downturn. When Pair Designing Sessions are in progress, you could lose power in some of the downstream services. To succeed with this method, you also need to speak a “common language”, so working on the same topic requires an understanding of the issue and the environment of design. It doesn’t help if you’re referring to the Header while your counterpart is talking about the top part of the software’s interface.
Especially in the beginning, working in this pairing mode, with the expression of your actions and thoughts actively and loud, it could feel uncomfortable for some people. Don’t get discouraged if this isn’t second nature; you need to try and fail, learn it, and get used to it before you can succeed.
Side Learning: Try It In Other Teams, Too!
Besides the range of learnings gained for design tasks, we discovered that the foundation of this method and its rules is something that you can also roll out to other departments.
Pair Marketing, Pair Writing, Pair Selling – you get the idea – are great possibilities to tackle bigger initiatives and to enable people to reach new goals. Whether this is for a junior employee trying to achieve more or, a seasoned pro that needs knowledge from a different team to understand the task — there are no limits!
Of course, this isn’t a call to transform every working setup into a pair session, but in many other ways of collaboration, working simultaneously on the same topic could bring new perspectives and improve processes in a rusty environment. Especially if you invite people outside of the common roles to work on these kinds of issues regularly.
There are endless methods out there, attempting to unite big groups (Design Sprints, Hackathons…) to solve one issue, but there are proven advantages to sticking with a duo, where one is executing as Driver and one is challenging as Navigator — bringing the dream of teamwork to reality, without holding the capacity of tons of people hostage.
Give it a try and figure out what people around you feel about this kind of collaboration. I’d love to hear about your experiences!
Innovation is a value that we also live in our day to day work at Frontify. I‘m Patrick Hummel, Product Designer at Frontify, and we tried out what Pair Designing could mean for the Product Team (and beyond).
Do you also want to be a part of our Product Design Team?
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