Converting your team to Sketch
by Dan Nicoletto, Lead UI Designer at Sportsbet
It’s not you, it’s me
Choosing to switch off a tried and tested tool is always a nervous time. We were heavily invested in Photoshop with years of work having a .psd extension. Personally, Photoshop and I had a great history. It was there from the start, we grew up together, we had so many good times, but we now had become codependent. We had fuelled each other’s bad habits for too long. It was time for a chat…
We had lots of questions:
- Was it risky to leave all that behind?
- What happened if this foray into Sketch failed, would we need to redo that work again?
- How long would it take to convert our current templates, styles? Would it slow us down to a stop, and would the business be ok with that?
- If the grass wasn’t greener would Photoshop take us back?
I have to admit I’m not proud of what we did but it had to be done. It started innocently enough, downloading a trial version but soon it was something more, yup we were cheaters.
How the love affair started
Earmark a pilot.
We chose a project that wasn’t the core of what we did. We chose a new product/project as it allowed us to start from scratch and regardless of success or failure it wouldn’t impede our other core work.
Once we had the right project we then used the designer (Leigh Nelkin) on that project to be our early adopter, our Guinea pig if you will. It’s important that person has a passion for improvement and energy to persist with a new tool. Work was lost. Tears were shed. Early teething problems were found and ironed out. Importantly those experiences were shared with the wider team as a way to prime them for the conversion.
Establish success criteria.
It’s also important to set some criteria for success and ultimately the decision to switch. For us we had 3:
- Improved workflow
- Faster to use/design
- More reusable
Convert your GUI or Patterns first.
For us this way a key moment in the conversion process. As the team lead I took it upon myself to get this moving, converting our core elements into sketch, from there the team was able to reuse and build out rapidly. Now was the time to really commit.
The week of Sketch
We were presented with a opportunity when a few projects were coming to an end and workloads were lighter than normal. We jumped on that and had a week dedicated to Sketch. We essentially ripped the bandaid off. The ‘week of sketch’ was us committing to using the tool for an entire week. We all went through that initial learning curve together: found short cuts, read/shared articles and by the end of the week committed to a new way of working.
Sure it wasn’t perfect. But the heavy lifting was done. We then spent the following weeks/months ironing out more issues, finding better plugins etc. 6 months on I can’t remember the world before it. Sorry Photoshop, but we’ve grown apart, it’s not you, its me.
Sketch had opened our eyes and shown that our life could be better and so much easier. More than that Sketch was up for anything, even a threesome.
Enter Zeplin. The saucy minx.
This is when things got really interesting and we realised there was no going back. Soz Adobe.
This little app really punches above its weight. It’s what we always wanted, a deeper sense of connection. Now, with a simple ⌘+E, we were giving Dev’s what they wanted in a way they wanted it.
When you know it’s the one. Put a ring on it.
- We work faster
- We work less
- We integrate better
- We prototype way more
- We maintain standards easier
Well that’s our story, I’d love to hear other teams stories and experiences. Here’s some links to articles that helped us along:
