Boost team collaboration

In February 2021, I was given charge of leading an internal side project on how to boost collaboration among the designers in our team. The need to collaborate and connect with others had become more prominent during the Pandemic, to the point that some members of our design team (me included) flagged the necessity to have a “work buddy“ to interact with on a daily basis and that would mitigate the feeling of working in silos. As I felt really close to this challenge, I asked my team leader to be the advocate of improving how we collaborate as a team. I was also able to choose a few people that would help me throughout the process.

The ask: Explore new ways to connect/collaborate with and learn from other Designers.

My role: I was leading the project, being both the facilitator and a contributor.

Stakeholders I worked with: Design Team Lead and a few fellow Designers.

The impact: Come up with some ideas that would help designers could connect, collaborate and learn from each other. This idea would then be trialled within our team.

Project kickstart

The first time me and the team (we were a total of four designers) gathered to start this project, we all shared the idea that having a “work buddy“ would be beneficial in order to bounce ideas off each other and feel less isolated. We all knew that this was a complex topic and that there were many questions to be answered and many assumptions to be challenged.

This is why the outcomes of our first session were to share our thoughts and come up with some hypotheses we could later test. I organised a workshop to define our main assumptions and generate hypotheses together. My goal was not only to have some outcomes at the end of it but also to set the tone of future discussions so that everyone’s opinion would have the same weigh in conversations and the same amount of work to do.

The first activity was to define the problem statement:

As a Designer working remotely, I want to connect with other designers in order to collaborate and learn from them.

Once that was done, we discussed what our main questions and assumptions were. This helped creating our initial hypotheses to test with the designers in our wider Experience Design Team.

The UserZoom test

The sessions that followed revolved around the creation of a UserZoom to test the hypotheses that came out from the first session. We wanted as many designers as possible to take part and share their experience, thoughts and ideas with us.

As a start, we made a list of all the questions we had in mind. We then realised those questions could be grouped in three main areas, our colleagues working habits, what would they want from a work buddy and what are their ideas/opinions/recommendations in case a work buddy scheme was implemented.

It was now time to build the UserZoom study. When it came to assign the work each of us would do, I thought about what were the things that needed to be done and how I could split them in a way that everyone would have had a similar amount of work and the “same level on importance”. I ended up proposing that three of us would write the questions for the three parts identified during the session, while the other person would build the study on UserZoom. I let them decide which area they wanted to work on and I was assigned to what was left. Any of us would then review the final questions and leave comments in case they felt something should be tweaked. Once everyone was happy with the questions, we launched the test to all the Experience Design team members. We were able to recruit 21 people. These are the main results:

Although we learnt a lot from the test, we realised that there were still some questions that needed answers. The main insight we learnt is that rather than forcing a work buddy or a group of buddies on someone it would have been a better approach to simply create a space where designers could create connections and receive feedback organically. We came up with new questions, How Might We statements and one hypothesis:

Workshop time!

After all this work, it was time to involve more designers into the conversation and see if we could come up with some initiatives to get to know more people together as a group. The workshop took place during a recurring session we have every fortnight with the wider Experience Design team and it was split into four activities:

1. Relationship with other designers: Think about a past/current project that involved collaborating with other designers and tell us “What was holding you back“ and “What moved you forward“.

2. Receiving and giving feedback: Think about a past/current project that involved receiving or giving feedback to/from others and tell us “What was holding you back“ and “What moved you forward“.

3. Learning from others: Think about a past/current project were you learn from others and “Were there any blockers?“ and “What you've taken away“.

4. Ideation: Come up with ideas about “Improve relationship with other designers“, “Receive and give feedback“ and “Learn from others“.

The workshop was a success! We learnt a lot of useful insights and people were very engaged throughout each activity. The ideas that came out of it were prioritised by our small team the day after and discussed with the Design Lead to see how we could trial them with his help.

Where we are now

We have trialled a couple of ideas that came out of the ideation session for a few months and both were very well received and became popular within our team:

1. Show & Tell: It was decided with the Design Lead to tweak the main activity on an existing recurring session that we have within our Customer 1 Team. Before the change, the session was a Design share where volunteers would share a project they’re working on and get feedback from the other designers. After a few months, the engagement became really low because not everyone liked the idea of receiving feedback from so many people at once. We took this as an opportunity to introduce a new format where three people (we created a rota, three different people every week) would simply showcase a project their working on so that the other designers are aware of what projects are being worked on in the team. Everyone decides if they want to get feedback and how (they can ask for feedback after the showcase or by sharing a link where people can comment directly on the designs). This has been a success.

2. Feedback channel: We created a new group chat where anyone can ask for feedback about any topic (UserZoom, UI/UX design, accessibility, etc.). When posting the request, the only ask is to be specific about what they want feedback on and how (by replying to the post, by jumping on a quick call, by leaving comments directly on the design file, etc.). The core idea is to give the choice on how to get those feedback, depending on how everyone feels more comfortable with. There have been some ups and downs with the engagement but overall people engage with it and find it really useful, mostly because other designers are wiling to help.