Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Alana Brajdic

We dedicated every Friday to our UX team in order to share knowledge, communicate and become better designers.

Every Friday we’ll book out a collaborative space within the office and work together. Since introducing this dedicated day to UX over a year ago, we’ve strengthened so much as a team. We’ve shared knowledge, become better communicators and refined our team processes. I wholeheartedly encourage other teams to try this out.

So why did we dedicate a day to UX?

About two years ago, we made the switch from sitting together as a whole UX team to working in the agile tribe model, similar to the Spotify set up.

There wasn’t as many of us in the company at the time, so each tribe could only have one designer each. Subsequently this physical separation took a toll on our ability to collaborate on solutions and communicate design changes. The twice weekly stand ups just weren’t enough.

We identified these problems during a UX retrospective and committed to find a solution to fix it. Sitting together as a team permanently was not an option, so we decided to trial sitting together once a week. This has since developed into what is known as UX Friday.

Here’s some of the things we get up to.

1. Official team snacks

Always have snacks, but try to stick to something healthy. I don’t know about you, but if we have too much sugar first thing in the morning we’ll get hyper active and crash by midday.

2. “Airing of grievances” and “feats of strength”

To kick off our morning we always start with Festivus. A holiday famously invented by Seinfeld. Each person in the team shares two things about their week. Something that went well and something that didn’t. It could anything from how you conquered a project to how much you bench pressed at the gym. It doesn’t need to be work related.

3. General housekeeping

Similar to our twice weekly stand ups, we’ll start off with any news or team updates. Followed by setting the agenda for the day.

4. Form an agenda for the day

UX Fridays work best with a bit of structure. The agenda is shaped throughout the week by everyone in the team. We’ll submit topics that we want to discuss or designs that we’d like to workshop with the team.

5. Design workshopping

The minds of ten UX Designers together is always better than one. These sessions involve time boxed, pen to paper rapid sketching. This must be a “tools down’’ time, no laptops or phones. Afterwards we’ll put all our designs on the wall and vote on the top design directions to further iterate on.

Benefits

This will give your team context about the project you’re working on. Making it easier to give and receive design feedback further down the track.
Allows you to tackle a problem as a team if someone is stuck or wanting a fresh perspective.
You can alert your teammate to any issues that might come up within the context of a different tribe or platform.

Clustering similar solutions and voting on what we want to take forward.

6. Team lunch break

If we’ve all brought our own lunch we’ll go for a group picnic in the park, or if we’re feeling brave we’ll head to a $7 Thai Food Restaurant (we’ve had no casualties yet).

7. Give presentations to each other about things you’ve learnt or specialise in.

A team is only as strong as it’s weakest link. The benefit of this comes back to the idea of knowledge sharing. We also take this opportunity to get more comfortable with presenting back to an audience, even if its just casually among teammates.

Some examples we’ve done are:

Learning about different methods of testing from our UX Researcher.
Presenting back our notes from a conference someone attended recently.
Teaching the team what we learnt in our educations courses. For example, cartoon drawing tips, accessibility and designing for virtual reality 101.
Testing UX frameworks, such as the google 5 day sprint.
Presenting work from our side projects such as IDEO Design Thinking Course.
New prototyping tools, tips and tricks we’ve learn’t.

8. Have guest speakers from different departments.

This is one of my favourite segments of the day. We’ve reached out to members from legal, data analytics, the social media team and book makers to learn more about who they are and what they do.

Benefits

It allows us to ‘break the ice’ in a comfortable and casual setting, thus making communication in the future easier. Whether it be in formalised meetings or over email exchanges.
It’s about making them feel comfortable to approach us about anything, and for us to be able to approach them.
It creates more visibility throughout the company around what the UX team does. It’s much easier to implement change when other departments are on your side and understand what you do.
Innovative ideas and insights can come from our fellow workmates.

9. Group design critiques

At any stage of the design process, we can put our work forward to the group for a design critique. These are constructive sessions. There’s no place for judgment, personal criticism or bringing people down. I found The Art of Giving Feedback is quite a good supplement article for this.

10. Watch documentaries/videos together.

If we’re all quite busy or have a bit of free time, we’ll usually pop on a video to watch while we work.

Here are some things we’ve been watching:

Youtube channel High Resolution’s interviews with design figure heads.
Nexflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design Series
We’re obsessed with documentaries about the Simulated Universe Theory.
It’s also not uncommon that we get side tracked and watch videos of Scottish country dancing.

11. Refine your team processes & practises

We’ve used this time together to run workshops to define our goals, values and processes. Look at what’s working well or anything that you think you could improve on.

12. Have lots of banter & laughs

UX Friday’s make a regular Friday even better. I’m always ending the week in roaring fits of laughter. A structure for the day is good, but remember to keep it light and have fun. Work hard, play hard.

Question time

Is there anything you might try to bake into your team routine?
Does your workplace do something similar?
Are there anything topics or things that you think we should try out?

Doing this once a week may be impossible for some teams. However, I encourage you trial at least one day like this and see how your team responds to it. I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments below. As always, thanks for reading!

Further Reading

22 Things New UX Designers Should know Before Entering the Workplace

The Process of How I Design and Make Leather Bags

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Things You Can Do to Strengthen Your Design Team. was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Things You Can Do to Strengthen Your Design Team.

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