Building Design Team Awareness — Part 1: Creating the Platform + Content
Tales from The Design Union trenches: How we tackled giving our Product, Visual and Experiential Designers a unique voice in a crowded landscape.
For a while, I’ve admired the excellent job teams at Facebook Design and Salesforce UX are doing curating rich design team blogs that give their designers a platform to share learnings and insights back with the broader community. Even SAS design companies that cater to this audience (like InVision who is absolutely crushing it) are curating highly-relevant, useful content while building credibility and industry goodwill.
It’s not enough for designers to feel content creating beautiful work in the dark anymore — disembodied voices churning out mocks and prototypes. Today’s designers demand to be part of the broader community, connected in dialogue with their peers. And now that designers have largely won a hard-fought seat at the broader product strategy table, they’re asking, “How can I drive the conversation?” and “How do I become a part of something bigger?”
As design team leaders, if we don’t give them that outlet, a chilling new reality exists: they will leave us for a team that does.
Bottom line: creating and curating a dynamic team presence online — with the content to back it up — is no longer optional. It’s essential.
And when designers are evaluating an offer to join a design team, they shouldn’t have to dig and scour to learn more about their potential collaborators in some canned “Culture” tab lurking in depths of the company’s global footer. The design team shouldn’t be hiding from the world. They should be out, proud and visible, or why else would the candidate want to join up?
To that end, the Groupon Design Union recently launched our inaugural set of content on Medium. We also launched a companion design team site. The two are close siblings, cross-linked platforms that work to tell a cohesive story, each with a defined role to play.
It’s a first step. We’re learning. We know we have a ways to go. But we wanted to share the story of how we got here in the hope it might help others, and teach us some tricks too as we begin a more transparent, open relationship with the broader design community.
So how did this all begin?
The Charge
Rewind to our annual design team offsite outside Seattle four months ago where the following question was raised: “What can we do to increase awareness and visibility of our team?”
We took stock of our situation: a dusty Dribbble account, zero presence on Medium, no freestanding design team site that explained our reach, or our value prop (innovative design our team is doing to reshape Groupon and contribute to the evolution of great ecommerce experiences). In short, we were starting from ground zero.
Phase 1: Two-Part Solution
Of the huge list of ideas and possible directions, we settled on the following two-part solution for phase 1 of our visibility effort: a blog and a team site. We strove to give each a clear focal point and set of responsibilities that mapped to our broader goals:
- The Design Team Blog. Focus: Stories, case studies, UX research and case studies, hands-on tips and tricks. Update frequency: every other week.
- The Design Team Site. Focus: Explain our special value prop (broad geographic coverage with members in Palo Alto, Seattle, Baltimore and Dublin; broad project exposure as we cover Product Design, User Research, Visual/Brand Design and Experiential Design work; products the reach millions of shoppers around the globe; deep penetration in the local space; our experimental yet research-centered process). Update frequency: only as-needed.
In discussing the pain of portfolio maintenance, we decided to not have any project-level work on our team site. All project-related examples and conversations would happen on the blog so we didn’t have to constantly pull things down when they got “old”. By their nature, blogs sort old content out of view, so we took that innate quality into account as we planned.
Lesson: work with the fundamental, unique nature of the platform.
The Blog
We chose to use Medium as the platform for the blogging component because of reach, popularity in the design community, and ease-of-use. There is a built-in audience with Medium, and the quality of the web and mobile-based tools for commenting/sharing drafts, scheduling, working with images far surpasses those of the Webflow tool we were going to use for the design team site. We wanted the community to reach us organically and be able to converse with them on a turf they’re already on.
By having copious and consistent links to the design team site (ie. via a standard footer at the base of every single article), we would enable cross-flow between the two platforms.
Types of Articles
After doing a competitive analysis, we netted out a matrix of possible article types. This was shared and socialized with the team through presentations that I gave at our standing cross-team weekly meeting.
Here’s a taste:
Lesson: Mixing hands-on articles with thought leadership-type pieces creates a nice mix of variety and ups the appeal ante.
Cadence and Assigning Topics
It’s easy to start strong and fade fast — but good blogs succeed by pacing themselves and delivering a steady, reliable stream of stories. Knowing that we would not have the dedicated resources of a project team to tackle this — this is something we were all volunteering to add to our workload — made it paramount the plan be pragmatic and not burden the team. We also knew that based on the size of our team, if just each team member blogged just once, we’d have a year of content.
So we settled on a realistic goal (fingers-crossed, stay tuned for part 2 to see if we were right) of new content every other week:
Involving Legal
After forming our strategy and firming up a plan internally, we reached out to legal and PR let them know our plans. They were receptive and provided us with helpful dos/donts based on experiences overseeing the Engineering Team’s blog. Having the blessing of the PR team also gave us added winds of encouragement, and we agreed on a list of folks to run content through going forward.
Lesson: Make legal your friend. Involve them early.
Sleeves Up vs. The Mental Hump
Then we were off: our first wave of writers started working on their pieces.
Medium is easy to use and intuitive when it comes to writing, but I scheduled a quick training anyway for the first wave writers in case they wanted a guided demo. The writers had no trouble working with the UI of the Medium editor. That was the easy part.
Not as obvious or intuitive for the team were some of the vagaries of blogging in general:
- When does a post go live?
- What is the difference between using the Share Draft function vs. just sending the article URL link?
- How does commenting work? Who sees the comments?
- How do I link my article to the Publication?
These lingering questions or confusions can contribute some trepidation or fear among the writers. Especially since most are being asked to do something outside their daily comfort zone of Sketch, Pixate, Zeplin, or Keynote.
Lesson: For Product Designers new to writing, there’s sometimes a confidence hump. Going from storytelling in a conference room (ie. talking over visual-driven presentations) to reframing those stories into words, paragraphs and static graphics that can stand on their own is intimidating.
Over emails, one-on-ones and a sharing session, we were able to overcome this and develop our POV and style approach, but a definite learning emerged: work through the process of creating a post with a single writer, document the questions that arise, and let that drive a short curricula or FAQ that you can share out with your writers. (I think this will take the form of a style guide but stay tuned for Part 2 to see how that pans out.)
The Team Site
With the blog doing the heavy lifting and being the center of the most frequent updates, for the design team site, we wanted to make something that required few updates but still served our key goals outlined up top.
Backstory: Work on the design team site actually began prior to the offsite as a side project — but stalled as the folks working on it couldn’t get enough cooperation to keep the portfolio content up-to-date. By stripping that content out and moving it to the blog, where updating is easier, and the nature of old vs. new work makes more contextual sense, we were able to unblock the site.
We stripped out the quagmire Portfolio section and replaced it with multiple promos linking over to our blog content:
We worked vetted the list of designers, their titles, and reached out to designers for fresh headshots:
Factoids that would have required constant updating and drained the lifeblood of the team were stripped out and replaced with evergreen infographics, such as key office locations:
Stay Tuned
In a future installment, we’ll explore questions lingering and new: How does our process become formalized? What’s performing? What product design stories lend themselves to different treatments/formats? What strategies work for sharing? What other platforms do we need to expand into (is Dribbble really still a thing?)
What About You?
What’s working for your teams? What platforms are trending vs. falling by the wayside? What creative ways have you found to build your audience? Let us know in the comments below.
Special thanks to our first wave writers matvanorden, Charles Logan Miller and Anosha Shokrpour; to Raza Durrani for his masterful Webflow and icon work; to Gerardo Diaz for the Google Analytics jockeying; to David Gómez-Rosado for having the guts and vision to kick off the DU site in the first place; and to all the fearless writers/designers waiting in the wings.
David Hildebrand is a consumer design leader at Groupon in Palo Alto. Before that, he worked for Sony and Westfield. He currently lives in Noe Valley, and perversely enjoys his long commute (ie. Podcast time).
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