Design — A year in review
Hi, I’m Bruno, one of the members of Ubiwhere’s best and most dynamic team, the Design Team! Am I even allowed to say this publically?
2021 is coming and it’s the right time to look back and assess how this year has been for our team in a multitude of fields, from our projects and goals to our tool stack and team experience. We are going to share all that with you and we would also like to receive your feedback and thoughts on your ”year in review” as well.
A little background
At the beginning of 2020, we all sat down to talk about our expectations for the upcoming year, as persons, as designers, and as a team (back then we all could be in the same room without masks, this sounds really far away now). 2019 ended with our team being a little fragile, distant, and missing common goals. Some members had just left and we needed to find a way to turn things around, embrace all that happened and get back on track.
We attended a full-day workshop on DesignOps where we learned some methodologies and best practices, discussed our own practices, and defined a plan — made for our team size and for our needs. We left recharged and full of ideas, even a side project — a meetup (more on this later)!
Our goals were defined and then made public to all the company through a public presentation (yes, Ubiwhere is kinda cool, we have free breakfast and public presentations on the first Monday morning of every month!).
Our roadmap was settled and we had a full year ahead of us to make great things happen!
The elephant in the room
First things first, I have a confession to make! This was a strange year, not only for me but for everyone, I mean globally, worldwide, a really peculiar year with the pandemic and all.
We started the year together in a beautiful shared workspace and then the pandemic struck us. We started working from home just a few days before the lockdown. Time passed by and then we were given the choice to stay at home or get back to the office with a lot of rules and awareness. The pandemic became worse once again with the arrival of autumn and as of now we are once again working from home.
The team
2020 was probably the most stable year Ubiwhere’s design team has ever had. All the members are still with us one year later and we are also expanding our team, with a new member joining us in just a few days. By the way, don’t forget to visit our careers page and check our open positions!
All of us have different strengths and a core field and then some extra interests that we try to share between us. We truly follow a “t-shaped skills” approach.
During this year, most of our team had the chance to learn more about and try a new extra area. For some of them, it was UI/UX Design and for others, it was motion and video.
None of us was used to work remotely for long periods of time. We struggled at first, for real, it wasn’t as easy as some people made it seem. Sure, there are good things about it, but it takes time and discipline. Eventually, every single one of us figured it out and we found our own pace and way of working from home, maintaining our creativity and healthy lifestyle.
To minimize the consequences of this physical distance between us, we put into practice some recurrent “ceremonies” that made us close, maybe even more than before. Inspired by the Agile methodology, we started having short daily meetings at the end of each day and design reviews/critiques every Friday morning.
The dailies allow us to keep in close contact, to know what the others are working on and will work on the next day, and check if there’s any problem or concern that needs to be addressed.
The design reviews were truly a means to grow up as designers and as a team, to work on our presentation skills and improve our feedback — learn how to give it but mostly how to receive it. Each week one of us presents a project, a feature, or a deliverable that he has been working on and the others provide feedback.
These reviews started being so popular at Ubiwhere that others wanted to be part of them
These reviews started being so popular at Ubiwhere that others wanted to be part of them. We started to have guests from other areas, from frontend developers to quality assurance engineers and even human resources! It has been a successful experience for everyone. We made this into a way of showing our process, our work, and making Ubiwhere a more design-friendly company.
I also want to thank Ana Rodrigues, our manager, for wearing so many hats and being our friend, ambassador, lawyer, and most of all for pushing us to our limits and helping us overcome them.
Our projects
At Ubiwhere, we are always working on emergent and fairly new technologies, on edge products and 2020 wasn’t different. We are working on Portuguese and international projects of all shapes and sizes, in the private and public sectors.
Our core projects are still related to emergent technologies like 5G or smart cities, just to name a few. But the truth is that we still manage to be part of client projects that have nothing to do with these fields, from tourism portals to electrical vehicle charging services.
Tools
2020 made a personal wish of mine finally true. We now have a standard and widespread task management tool — Proofhub — almost like a Trello with superpowers!
Yes, I’m absolutely happy and excited with a tool that is not design related. For years I’ve felt that we needed something like this and as the company grew, this problem became even worse. We tried a lot of tools, each project manager used their own tool of preference for their projects, and we, designers, would need to use different tools for different projects, from Asana or Trello to Jira or even a plain and simple Google Sheet. I still have nightmares about those days. 😅
Design tools
Moving on to our design tool stack, the truth is that in 2020 it just got bigger and bigger! We are now working with different tools for different projects, as it all depends on the project size, team, and our client’s needs and goals.
My global opinion is that right now we are on a peek of design tools
Let’s start with Adobe Creative Cloud. We use almost every tool, mostly Photoshop and Illustrator. We are also doing some experiments with Adobe Aero, how cool is that?
We are and we have been for years Sketch supporters. We actually upgraded to the “Sketch for Teams” plan and it has been working really great for us and we are super excited to try out the upcoming collaborative features!
We tried Figma and we ended up using it for some projects, mainly the collaborative ones with multiple designers working simultaneously at a fast pace or for projects that have designers from the client’s team that are on Windows, for instance. It’s also a great tool with some nice features and a nice prototyping experience. We are also using Adobe XD for one project and it also works just fine.
My global opinion is that right now we are on a peek of design tools and all of them are great to work with and their core features are all the same. Each will have their own special features, advantages, and disadvantages, but my advice is: spend a day or two trying out whatever tool you have available (download a demo/trial version) and build something with it. You might find something cheaper or that works better for your workflow and your needs. Believe me, it’s time well spent!
Prototyping, feedback & handoff
At Ubiwhere, we prototype every project and product and the right tool for the job depends on the fidelity we need. Most projects are prototyped using Invision, our main prototyping tool. With Invision Craft it’s really easy to keep our design files and prototypes in sync and this kind of prototype works great to validate the overall design and user workflows, and it’s really easy to share a link with the rest of the team and clients to obtain their feedback.
Notes:
- We are trying Sketch Cloud as a prototyping, feedback, and handoff tool, a complete replacement for Invision.
- For Figma and Adobe XD projects, we use their native prototyping features and both of them have the bonus of already supporting “auto-animate” transitions!
We use Protopie for animated and more realistic looking prototypes. This is “the tool” for projects where we really want to present and get feedback on animations and transitions. Protopie enables us to import screens from Sketch or Figma and simulate the real application behaviour, whether it is a web portal or a mobile app. Simple prototypes are quick and easy to create but some features and complex transitions or animations can take a little bit longer to be made.
Like I said earlier, we have tested a long list of tools before committing to Protopie. From Invision Studio and Principle to Framer, we tested them all!
Other tools
We also use some other tools for some design related tasks. Some of them might be well known and some others are hidden gems that I’m about to share:
- Invision Freehand and Miro as our main digital whiteboarding and collaborative tools. They are great for ideation, collaborative work and we also use them for our design reviews. They became super popular, especially now that everyone is working remotely. Pick a template or start with an empty canvas, invite your team and start collaborating!
- Eagle is a personal favourite of mine, my “inspiration chest” where I save every piece of content that brings me joy to look at. It supports a wide range of file formats and allows us to collect, search, and organize our inspiration with some smart features like smart folders and auto-tagging.
- SkyFonts for our Google fonts management and Adobe fonts of course!
- MacDown for all my Markdown writing.
- Jumpshare, a nice screenshot, and media sharing tool
- ImageOptim to optimize our images for the web
Goals
We set a few goals and expectations way back in the beginning of 2020. We let our creativity and wishes run wild and we committed ourselves to hard-to-reach goals, some of them in areas that were new to us and without knowing that 2020 would bring us Covid-19 and even more difficulties. We wanted to create and host meetups, to spread design across our company, and to attend Adobe Max.
We spread design in our “virtual breakfasts” over and over again
It was a tough year, we pivoted our goals and we still managed to achieve them. We created a meetup — Designers & Co. — and hosted 2 virtual events with great guests, instead of physical meetups. We spread design in our “virtual breakfasts” over and over again with interesting keynotes like “Mobile photography 101” and we attended Adobe Max virtually (I even got a free t-shirt, thank’s Adobe!).
To sum things up, 2020 was a great year in the “goals” department. It’s great to look back and see that we have met our goals and expectations. All the struggle and discomfort paid off and we all grew as designers and most importantly, as people!
tl;dr
I totally get it, don’t be shy! It’s a long post and I understand why you haven’t read it all. Here’s a short and compact version of it, and yes I love lists:
- 2020 was a hard and different year, for us and for everyone across the globe.
- The pandemic created a great opportunity for us to stop for a moment, breath, think, and try something new. It was a great time for our creativity to strive and to find new solutions for old problems.
- The physical distancing also forced us to find new ways of working and keeping in touch with our colleagues. We got closer without being physically together.
- Our team is stronger than ever and is really looking forward to a new year full of challenges. I’m truly grateful to be part of this team and surrounded by fun, smart and talented people.
- We worked on products/projects of all shapes and sizes, nationally and internationally. We keep working on emergent and fairly new technologies like 5G and smart cities and at the same time collaborate on more traditional sectors like tourism.
- Our tool stack got bigger, we like to try new things and share our thoughts. I just hope that 2021 keeps bringing new features and new tools at the same pace as 2020!
- We pivoted and achieved our goals as a team. We made things happen!
That’s it for me! Once again sorry for the long post. I just figured out how fun it was to write this. Embrace new challenges, learn new things, and find new interests! Then, repeat and repeat once again!
