Design rituals for a stronger design community

It’s Thursday morning that means it’s time for our Design Guild! Today’s agenda: Britt will tell us about the way of working from her previous work experience, Rowan will share his vision on Lean UX and Jan shares his experience with InVision Studio to create stunning animations.

Ready? Let’s go!

Earlier I wrote articles about how Design Principles and our Design System help our designers to align on interaction and visual design work. In this article, I’d like to share what rituals we have to foster a healthy, fun and productive design community.

Organisational context

Let me first describe how our organisation works so you understand where our designers live and breath.

In short: each designer is part of a development team that focuses on a part of the customer journey. This makes us a ‘decentralised design team’.

One of the advantages of this setup is that designers can closely collaborate with testers and developers that focus on the same customer goals.

The downside of our setup is that we have to put extra effort in aligning all designers to work on a shared consistent experience. That’s why we invest in our design rituals.

Our rituals

For this article, I’d like to focus on the rituals that we run on a regular base. That’ll be: 1. Intervision, 2. Guild, 3. Critiques and 4. Retrospective

Intervision

This is a weekly meeting of 1 hour where we discuss ongoing design work and provide each other with feedback and suggestions to improve the designer skills and products. It’s like a peer code-review but for designers.

We used to have this meeting with all designers together in one room but now we grew to a group of 10+ designers and don’t have enough time to cover all topics on the agenda. So we split the group. That makes it possible to dive into the details without rushing things.

Guild

Our Design Guild is a bi-weekly meeting of 2 hours where we discuss hot topics that happen in the design world. We try to bring the outside design world inside.

There’s a shared agenda where designers can add topics that they want to talk about. The designer that puts a topic on the agenda is also responsible for preparing the talk or workshop.

Critiques

This is a self-initiated meeting by the designer to get feedback from a diverse set of stakeholders. The goal of the meeting is similar to the Design Intervision but this session is hosted with a more diverse set of stakeholders that are relevant to the topic. We use critiques for topics that impact multiple teams and stakeholders. Read more about design critiques here.

Retrospective

Every 2 months we run a ‘Big fat retrospective’ that takes 2 hours. The focus is on celebrating what we’ve achieved together and to mention where we can improve our daily work. The input for these improvements become topics in our Design Guild to investigate further.

What’s next?

We like to be flexible and adapt our rituals based on the needs of the design team and the organisation. The above rituals aren’t set in stone but they work for us at the stage we’re currently in. However, we still have a few ideas on our backlog to explore in the future:

• Share personal career development plans in our Intervision meeting so we can coach each other in achieving our personal goals
• Plan Field Trips to other companies, museums or festivals for new inspiration about what’s happing outside of Jumbo
• Invite more external or internal speakers to share inspirational stories in our Guild

If you work in software development I’m very curious what your rituals look like. What works for you and what doesn’t? Feel free to send me a message or comment below.