Solo vs. Trio designers
As usual, I finished my work on my home-office, that I prepared for quarantine, and went to my living room to check the mid-night letters I got after Sarah’s Email.
Tonight's email is from Salma, sharing her midnight thoughts about being a “Solo” designer.
Dear Tremoloo,
I am 3 years’ experience and I was working in multiple companies. Most of them I was working alone due to lack of resources, budget, and high turn over.
To help you imagine the whole picture, working alone as a solo designer in a certain product or project is a nightmare. Mistakes can be caught easily, you’re not just the captain of the ship — you’re the entire crew as well.
You are always in fear that you miss an important detail or things go sideways and we are human and we do mistakes. I wished that I had another eye to collaborate and spot these mistakes.
I heard about your “Trio”, working as a node of 3 designers, and I would like to know how things went with you till now.
Regards,
Salma
Dear Salma,
Long time since we talked! I wish that things are safe there with you and your family.
Let me walk through some problems I faced in the past when I worked in a team as— a solo designer— (no matter how junior or senior you are).
1. Lack of design feedback: receiving feedback from other designers is essential to your growth. You want someone more experienced to be able to lean on, not to feel that you are in the sea struggling.
2. It is harder to push quality designs due to a lack of time and resources. Having another eye on your designs will make quality multiply.
3. The percentage between designers and engineers is large, 1 designer is serving 5–20 engineers make it hard to adopt all thoughts and hopes.
Yes, this is what I reached. When we mature, we need more challenges and be part of a team to overcome the challenges we face daily, also another eye that confirms or even invalidate our assumptions!
Working with limited personal skillset all the time makes it a bit difficult and boring for every designer also acquiring new skill might take some time to figure out when and how to use it. So, our motto is it will never be learned as you jump in and ideas will evolve with time.
So we introduced Design TRIO
The trio is a set or group of three qualified UX and UI designers who have different skills and could consist a node that could be responsible for a single product or feature. Actually, Trio concept was inspired by —The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell.
Trio will always have one responsible and 2 reviewers along the design thinking process. With Trio, you can wear different hats based on available skillsets and your role in each project. Trio (2 UX designers and 1 UI Designer) is the perfect tested constitution of the Trio till now.
The Trio is consisted of:
1. Communicator: each product owner/client needs single-point-of-contact to give periodical feedback and be totally aware and quickly understand him then (s)he will communicate back to all team members. The Trio will attend all meetings. We recommend that the UI designer is the communicator because his role will start late in the process. If there is a lack of communication skills, one of the 2 UX designers could take over his place.
2. Executor: need to spend most of their time executing UX techniques till wireframes and not to be Interrupted by other tasks. The communicator will review the executer's work to make sure that he is aligned with all details of the business.
3. Producer: we need someone to focus on that we are not gold plating, adding scope creep, and working properly on schedule/budget shared with the client. Also, the Producer is the responsible person about taking notes and generating all MOMs to make sure that everything is documented and being reviewed by another eye.
We have tested it and each project we evolve and iterate to modify and ensure that things are getting mature and going towards the right track.
Here’s one of the feedback we got from Yasmin, one of designers working in Trios..
In my opinion, Trio helped me to improve a lot of things. From how to get better by thinking about solving the story underlying problem, And how to express and explain an opinion when negotiating it. To obtain more than one source of information to study or obtain certificates.
Finally, I was very happy with this experience. I gained a lot from it—Yasmin Saeed
At the end, All team are designers so, they can brainstorm, share different perspectives and solutions together then came up with team quality work rather than one unicorn person with a huge load doing all of this efforts.
In order to eliminate the creative block, the hats are shuffled between different projects and all designers. In this project, you are a communicator, but you are an executor in another.
So by end of doing a set of projects, you gained all of the practical experience watching others and doing it with the support of your peers.
Best regards,
Hussein Gaber
If you have some midnight thoughts and questions about UX design career and life, email us at midnight@tremoloo.com. We -really- would love to hear and share midnight-hour anxieties together :).
