Getting Started with Wake
How to adopt an open and transparent design process
Wake is a design collaboration app built exclusively for teams. It was designed to fit seamlessly into a designer’s workflow to encourage fast and frequent sharing throughout the entire design process.
With Wake, designers are able to share their work and ask for feedback without ever leaving their design tools. Their work is then shared to a secure place where everyone on their team can follow along and leave feedback.
“I’ve noticed that the more feedback designers give to each other, the better they get at giving feedback, which in turn makes them better at critiquing their own work.” — Emmet Connolly, Director of Product Design at Intercom
Invite the right people
Wake was designed for teams so it’s crucial you use it with other people. Start by inviting all the designers you work with. Then, once you’ve loaded it up with work, invite the engineers and project managers you work closely with. The more diverse your Wake team, the more perspectives you’ll have to help push ideas further than they’d normally go.
Send out a group invite
When you create your team, you can allow teammates to join using their company email. This makes it easy to invite everyone simultaneously via email or Slack. Just say something like:
Hey everyone! We’re going to try using Wake to share early design work. Join our team and share something you’re working on! https://yourcompany.wake.io/join
Encourage everyone to share
As designers we tend to be very protective of our work, only sharing when we feel it’s “ready”. At first it may be difficult to convince your team to break this habit but there are a few things you can do:
Share your own work first
One of the best ways to get other people to share is to lead by example. Try uploading some of your own work before everyone’s had a chance to join. That way they’ll have an idea of what to share and be less self-conscious.
Ideas for what to share:
- Whatever you’re working on right now, regardless of how finished it is
- Explorations for a past project
- Photos of sticky note or whiteboard sketches
- Animated gifs or videos of prototypes
- Designs you need feedback on
Use Wake for design critiques
Another way to integrate Wake into your team’s process is to use it as a tool for design critiques. Ask everyone to share something once per week and then have a critique session with Wake up on a big screen. After just a few weeks Wake will become an invaluable archive of design iterations that would normally be buried within Dropbox folders.
Get the Mac and iPhone App
Our Mac menubar app allows you to quickly share from Sketch, Photoshop and Illustrator with just a simple keyboard shortcut. You can then ask for feedback, @mention team members, or #tag your post. All without ever leaving your design tools.
Our iOS app will keep you connected even when you’re away from your computer, and it makes it easy to snap and share pictures of your sketchbook and whiteboard notes. We highly recommend everyone gets both apps.
Put everyone’s work on display
Getting your work out of your design tools and in front of your team is the first step. The next thing we recommend is opening up Wake to the rest of the company. A great way to do this is by putting it on a display where people outside the design org can catch a glimpse of what design is up to. This will spark a lot of great conversations and help demystify the design process throughout the organization.
“For our team it’s about letting as many people see our work in progress as possible. We set up a second computer and project our Wake feed on a blank wall” —Tim Belonax, Design Lead at Airbnb
Start using Wake today
The benefits of documenting your design process and allowing your team to passively follow along are immense. Developers and PM’s will be better equipped to do their jobs when they know what’s going on. New teammates can quickly get up to speed without having to dig through PSD’s and design folders. And the overall design continuity across your company will improve.
We’re excited for you to start using Wake! If you have any questions or feedback please don’t hesitate to email or tweet at us.
Ready to change the way you work forever? Sign up now!
