UX BOOM: Jan 15th
What’s this “💥” meeting in my calendar?
How we keep our design team charged and ready for anything.
The designers at Ayogo all have a shared experience. As fresh-out-of-school designers, we all spent an *embarrassing* amount of time using trial-and-error to make designs work.
Moving pixels around on a screen for hours on end until something clicks can be an essential part of learning. Unfortunately, it isn’t an ideal way to work at a company — especially if you’re salaried.
Process > hotkeys
We think that working more efficiently is more a function of a designer’s process, than a function of their skill with any particular design software.
Being quick with Sketch is great — but quality design is independent of tools.
Knowing how to find the right reference material, developing a gut sense for what will work (and what won’t), and knowing the optimal time to sanity-check a design with a teammate is going to have a greater effect on a designer’s efficiency than just learning keyboard shortcuts.
To this end, at Ayogo; we have two recurring “BOOM” meetings (aka “💥”) a week. These half-hour chunks of time provide a standing opportunity to bring chewy design problems to the attention of the group. Anyone can bring a design to Boom, and the goal as a team is to push it from a good design into a great one. We find that Boom meetings help our design team bust through blockers, prevent designers on solo projects from feeling siloed, and let us keep our collective team energy high.
Why “Boom”?
Boom meetings were named by Dan Loach, a designer that worked for us on some significant projects back in 2016. Whenever he’d find a solution that he liked, he’d say “Boom!” out loud.
Our office is an open one, and Dan was a great designer, so we heard it “BOOM!” a lot.
These outbursts didn’t happen out of nowhere, though. Dan was often checking in with his desk-mates and suggesting walk-and-talks or coffee breaks. Boom moments always followed these check-ins. Originally the “💥” calendar holds were an attempt to make sure that these more informal check-ins didn’t get superseded by other calendar items.
In 2019, you’ll see some of our designers blogging about their challenges and successes, sharing with the world what we talk about in our Boom meetings.
Reflecting and sharing our processes helps us work better. We hope it helps you too!
