UX Brunch N Learns
How to help everyone drive design at your company
Like most small companies with a handful of designers, driving widespread adoption of design principles and improving UX knowledge is hard. Developers are never fond of “pixel pushing”, product managers and other stakeholders aren’t motivated to push a font change or improve a user flow without lots of data and overhead beforehand. And there’s never enough time! Plus, it’s your job! Why would you expect your coworkers to know what it means when you throw “heuristic analysis” in a sentence when you want them to just tweak the nav one little bit?!
Well, it’s because you do want them to make that change when you ask. It’s your job as the domain expert (in this case, UX design) to make an informed decision and empower your coworkers to act on it because you know your stuff….but, it helps when your coworkers know what YOU know, and they know a little about it too! Imagine a world where design to developer handoff is a breeze because you can both look at a component and realize it’s missing an error state because you are both well informed on accessibility design.
This is one of the reasons at Tailwind we introduced monthly Brunch ‘n Learns. We imagined a world where the entire team is involved in the design process and it’s one of our 4 design principles. (Read about those here!)
Everyone Drives Design
Balance Obvious, Easy, and Possible
What’s Vital for Some is Valuable for Everyone
Data Driven Design Over Assumptions
Um, but what the heck is a Brunch ‘n Learn? Well, it is the Tailwind design team’s iteration on a Lunch and Learn. They are bite-sized 30-minute monthly sessions hosted by a design team member, usually teaching on a subject relevant to a current product or feature coming up on the roadmap. The entire company is invited to attend and participate in discussions to learn a little bit about design and how it impacts everything about their own job.
At Tailwind, we’ve covered a little bit about a lot of design. We’ve done sessions on mental models, best practices around mobile design and tooltips, and even gotten into the psychology driving design decisions.
We’ve even done some fun, team-driven ones, such as a lookback on our product glow up over the past year — complete with trivia about the team. We realized quickly that in order to keep the sessions fun and engaging for everyone, we had to iterate and improve them. We’ve experimented with interactive sessions, such as watching the Instagram episode of Netflix’s Abstract documentary series, and asking non-designers to submit mobile app screenshots to lead a group teardown. This was particularly fun because it helped educate people on how to articulate what they loved about different apps from a design perspective.
As a design team, we’re constantly learning new things and implementing new processes into our work. We created a backlog of potential teaching topics to make sure we have a pool of ideas to dip into each month. Plus, it gives all 4 of us the opportunity to pick a particular topic we’re excited about teaching and share our personal experiences with the team. This ensures that the design team is presenting on topics they want to talk about, not just fulfilling an obligation. We track attendance to gauge how interesting and/or relevant our topics are and we consistently see 30–50% attendance across the whole company!
Now, you may be entirely onboard with all of the above, but stuck on how to get your non-designer coworkers to attend. Well, here at Tailwind, we’re not above a little bribery. We get the entire team breakfast. We also ask for feedback at the end of every session and ask for ideas! Our whole team knows that if there’s something they personally want to learn about design, we’re happy to teach them.
Other ways to make sure your team is onboard and excited to attend: Schedule them early and often. Every presentation we do includes a callout to the previous session and a preview of what’s coming up next month. We schedule them a month in advance and pick days that aren’t as meeting heavy as others so more people can attend. The day or week before, we let the whole team know on slack what they can expect to learn (and yes, we use all the party parrots for this). Switching up team members is also important, but if you’re a team of one, don’t worry about this too much; you could open leading these sessions up to your more design savvy peers, run open design crits, let people ask you questions about anything design related, or even bring in external speakers to help you evangelize design.
Our final piece of advice for setting yourself up for success in BnL’s is making sure you are practicing what you’re teaching.
- Don’t go into your handoff or scoping meetings armed without the knowledge you so confidently just shared with your team!
- Bring up the design topics you’ve shared often and in unexpected ways.
- Share a slide from an old talk on slack once a week.
- Point out the why and reasoning behind a design choice when your developer or product manager asks for more clarity.
- Ask them what design principles or best practices they think are happening in your design.
- Don’t patronize; guide your non-design peers to start applying design thinking in their everyday lives.
TLDR: anyone involved in the process of making, whether building, creating, planning, or promoting is a designer. Everyone who affects the things we build can affect the UX positively or negatively, and it’s our job as designers to give them the knowledge and tools to affect it positively. At Tailwind, we make sure we are helping our coworkers realize the design impact they make everyday by helping them align holistically on good design decisions and see how they can change the outcome.
Design isn’t magic only a few can do. It’s in all the decisions you make everyday (but of course you know this). Your team might not. Help them out. And give them some breakfast while you’re at it.
