Designers Offsite: three days for collaboration and awareness.

Published in

SmartRecruiters Design

8 min readMay 30, 2022

My name is Yanina, I am a new product designer at SmartRecruiters and this is where I am meant to be. SmartRecruiters is a cloud-based recruiting software suite designed to ensure hiring success. As part of our company’s mission to create the optimum culture for ALL Smartians, we enjoyed a three-day Designer offsite in our Berliner office last week. This event has the purpose to grow connections among our members and helping the team be focused and aligned. With the support of generous leaders, the team worked both as individuals and in groups to codify the way we collaborate. The goal is visual and written documentation to be more effective, learn and improve our work ecosystem. We do this by showing respect, listening when someone is talking, joining conversations, being humble, and assuming our challenges.

At our design offsite event, we were twelve designers from different products within our company with common touchpoints. As we belong to a remote-first environment, some of us only knew each other virtually. This article might help workshop facilitators to plan activities as described here.

🟢 Day 1

We started the first day sharing breakfast time.

Activity 1. Same, Same But Different

🧮 Skills practised: Listening, speaking, and vocabulary

🎯 Goals:

Start a conversation for groups.
Enable people to think about orienting things in space by using language and drawing a representation.
Allow talking about each other’s culture and describing relationships.

✏️ Description: In our team, we were six pairs. Each pair is seated, looking in opposite directions. Yasmina Haryono (our facilitator) sends an image to describe to one member of each pair (in our case, through the company’s slack channel). One person must describe the image to their partner, and their partner must draw it in as much detail as possible. We set the time to five minutes. After the pairs have completed their drawings, you show them to the team.

⭐️ Takeaways: The game is a perfect icebreaker. We were impressed by how well some of the drawings related to the images, and we laughed about some others that turned out to be funny. After this game, we were already comfortable talking loud about our thoughts and capabilities.

Activity 2. SCQA

🧮 Skills practised: communicate a message in a clear, attractive, and narrative way.

🎯 Goals:

Open conversations about workflow blockers.
Gather ideas to solve these situations.
Learn about others’ mindsets and personal work methods.

✏️ Description: the four essential elements of an SCQA are Situation, Complication, Question, and Answer. By connecting these elements, you create a logical story flow. The method is a framework for structuring information. First, our facilitator Shefali Netke explains the starting point, then the complication phase, and the audience pays extra attention to the problem. Finally, the question makes the participants curious and opens the space for the next step.

Situation: recognisable fact and agreed points. There is no disagreement.
Complication: the reason for taking action. Spells opportunities and needs to be overcome.
Question: what can we do? Recommendations for next steps.
Answer: list of options and ideas on how to overcome the problem.

⭐️ Takes aways: is an effective method to capture the participant’s attention by making the story more appealing. The structure of this activity will improve the process of making a story leading to better results.

We paused at midday to have a wonderful lunch together at a nearby restaurant and enjoyed non-work-related conversations. Before we went back to the office, our facilitator started the third team activity.

Activity 3. Constellation Games

🧮 Skills practised: Learning about each other, growing curiosity for follow-up conversations.

🎯 Goals: know each other better. After this activity, you might find out that you have a language in common with someone you did not know, except for English. Then, start to follow up conversations about your experience living or visiting other countries, the brands you like, or even arrange pet walks together.

✏️ Description: The whole team is standing in an ample space. People form “constellations” with our locations/bodies through our answers. Our facilitator Yasmina Haryono asks a question, for example:

How many languages do you speak?
How many siblings do you have?
In how many countries have you lived?
How many countries have you visited?
How many pairs of sneakers do you own?
How many pets do you have?

The team ordered themselves starting from 0 to 5+. We took photos, and everyone showed with their fingers their answer.

⭐️ Takeaways: This is a fast and efficient way of getting to know your team better. After this game, you save information about a person you might not remember otherwise because you visually see a scale. As everyone knows, we designers have a visual memory.

Activity 4. UX Research workshop

Part 1: we are doing good, but we can be even better

🧮 Skills practised: Listening, problem-solving, and sharing experiences.

🎯 Goals:

Improve the current solutions for making and managing resources to simplify the assignment process, templates, and reports quicker.
Get feedback on our user testing tool.

✏️ Description:

1a. Our facilitator Gabriel Lins Lira initiates the conversation by asking these questions:

Have you worked on an entire research process before?
How was your best user testing experience?
How was your worst user testing experience?

1b. Write in post sticks following these four questions about our personal experience concerning the research team and the user testing workflow:

What’s working well today?
What challenges have you experienced?
What kind of participants have you encountered?
What do you need/What would you like to learn?

1c. These four questions were written separately in columns on a whiteboard. We added the post sticks to the corresponding question and pitched our acknowledgments and pain points.

⭐️ Takeaways: the emphasis on effective team building would help avoid blockers and stay the course for long-term efficient research.

Activity 5. Design Principles workshop

🧮 Skills practised: recognising hierarchies, understanding concepts, sharing values.

Part 1: Our relationship with Design Principles

🎯 Goals:

Revisit and re-think our design principles.
Create alignment,
Speed up decision making
Increase the quality of the team’s output.

✏️ Description: design principles are a valuable tool for any team and a trivial task.

Our facilitator Victor Montalvao initiated the conversation by asking these questions:

What are Design Principles?
…and what are they for?
Do you know our Design Principles?
Do you remember at least one of them?

Next, the facilitator showed our Design Principles.

Are they clear for you?
Do you use them daily?
Yes? What for?
No, why not?

The facilitator described what Design Principles are NOT:

and what Design Principles ARE:
The bases of any good product.
A set of value statements that describe the most important goals of that product.
A set of value statements that frame design user-centered decisions.
Specific to the product or service.
A set of standards that help measure the quality of a team’s work.

⭐️ Takeaways: There were mixed opinions on how we practice our design principles. Some feel that they represent us as a team or correctly represent our vision. Some are accurate and align with our values. The conclusion is that iterations will come in the future.

Part 2: Design Principles Affinity mapping

🧮 Skills practised: Acceptance, prioritisation, team collaboration.

🎯 Goals:

Learn how we can write and describe design principles.
Understand new ideas and options.
Discuss our design principles in comparison with others and the importance of these.

✏️ Description: we worked in pairs. Each pair received a list of other famous companies’ design principles.

Write in post sticks about the pros and cons of those design principles.
Stick all post sticks on a whiteboard and group them as we thought they made sense.
Give a name to each group based on affinity, similarity, dependence, or proximity.

The group labels that came out from this activity were (the first 4 were the most voted ones):

Affordance
Adaptability
Usability
Accessibility
Localisation
Delightful
Consistency
Innovation

⭐️ Takes away: There are many ways of describing and writing design principles; agreeing on them as a team is much more challenging. The facilitator needs to pay close attention to group dynamics and ensure everyone feels comfortable talking about these subjects.

🍻 After all this hard work, we went to drink a very deserved beer at a beer garden nearby. It was a wonderful day, full of enriching debates. We found our voices and educated ourselves within togetherness.

🟣 Day 2

Activity 1. Design System workshop

🧮 Skills practised: Usage of our Figma asset library: paint points, blockers, and opportunities.

🎯 Goals:

Show our design system’s functionalities to new colleagues who have not had the chance to interact with it and to colleagues who did not have the time to do so.
Building a design system should be a priority to which we all need to contribute.
Avoid a Frankenstein product experience.

✏️ Description: the design system is the pillar of every product. It is a powerful tool that enables teams to move at an agile pace and creates the foundation for long-term success.

Our facilitator showed our design system Figma file and its documentation, as well as some of the design guidelines: regions, panel layouts, columns, spacings, text alignment, component behaviors, and templates.
We practice using our assets library by completing a Figma task reproducing one desktop screen.

⭐️ Takeaways: there is a need for clear communication and strategy guidelines on requesting to add or modify components in our design system. Everyone seemed highly committed to this subject, so it is the right time to motivate the team forward on collaboration.

Activity 2. UX Research workshop

Part 2: Moderating tips

🧮 Skills practised: Listening and note-taking, elaborating, and sharing.

🎯 Goals:

Learn how the tone and voice of the interviewer can make a difference in the user’s behavior, for example, by starting the conversation and making the user feel comfortable.
How to let the user struggle without interfering.
Gather tips and tricks about how to write a script.

✏️ Description: Our facilitator Gabriel Lins Lira simulates a 1:1 usability testing interview. The participants listened and took notes about what they found interesting about the interviewer approach method.

⭐️ Takeaways: this session was critical. We have learned powerful moderating tips with open questions, reverting questions, and showing the participant the importance of their feedback.

The second day ended with a beautiful dinner together at a restaurant where we enjoyed each other’s company.

☀️ Day 3

Our last activity was a wonderful trip by boat through the river. We enjoyed listening to music playlists and Brazilian barbecue specialties grilled by our colleagues. It was windy initially, but the sun was shining most of our journey.