Take a moment to remember the last time you collaborated in a code review. Did your team overcome feedback resistance and manage time expectations? Fostering a healthy mindset is the key to build trust and sharing knowledge with your colleagues.
Read more…
The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. Today, Vitaly Friedman talks to Brad Frost, author of the book Atomic Design that introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems.
Read more…
Involving other people early on — especially people from other disciplines — can feel scary. By taking inspiration from code reviews, we can improve collaboration both within our own fields as well as across disciplines, be it design, UX, content or development. No one is really promoting waterfall processes anymore. So how can you involve people early on so that you’re avoiding the waterfall, but also making sure that you’re not setting yourself up for design by committee? Ida Aalen found her answer when learning about code reviews.
Read more…
Design’s role in companies is becoming less about visual appeal and more about hitting business goals and creating value for users. Therefore, the need to build teams with diverse perspectives is becoming imperative. This article is for people who are part of a design team (or any team) that makes crucial business decisions with stakeholders and how they might go about building a diverse team through the use of the Competing Values Framework evaluation.
Read more…
Creating a team who can work well together across different disciplines can be hard. Given the wide range of skills held by the line-up at the upcoming SmashingConf Toronto, Rachel Andrew solicits some suggestions from the speakers. She’s wrapped those up with her own experience of 20 years working alongside designers and other developers.
Read more…
What does it take to be a great UX leader? Well, not only do you need to provide clear guidance, but also empower different individuals in your team. A UX leader needs to encompass a wide range of skills. In his final article in this series on user experience design, Christopher Murphy will explore the different characteristics of an effective UX leader, and provide some practical advice about growing into a leadership role.
Read more…
As the spotlight has focused on the potential of design to transform businesses, we’ve seen a growing need for designers across a wider range of specializations. The number and types of roles have increased and, as UX continues to become a sought-after business differentiator, these roles will continue to diversify. What do you look out for when hiring team members? In this article, Christopher Murphy outlines how to go about building a UX team, which attributes to look out for when hiring, and he will suggest some avenues you can explore to find team members.
Read more…
There are a good number of benefits and reasons why you should consider integrating design workouts into your team. In this article, Arturas Leonovas shares some exercises which are worth trying out with your design team and get you all to train before the big game — together. Doing this at least once a month is a fun way for everyone to polish skills that they use every day. Not only that, the added benefit of team-building and knowledge-sharing will help everyone become the best versions of themselves.
Read more…
Retrospectives and reflections allow you to codify what you’ve learned from experience, to document mistakes and avoid future ones, and to increase your potential to grow in the future. In this article, Victor Yocco will show you a few approaches that you and your team can immediately incorporate into your practice. He’ll walk through post-project retrospectives in this first article, and in a second article, Victor will present some lessons learned and researched-backed techniques that those who wish to engage in reflection can attempt to include in their routine.
Read more…
How do you make sure the team gets up to date with everything that’s being released? As a team leader, Alecsandru Grigoriu was faced with a new challenge: making sure there’s enough recurrence in his team’s communication to facilitate the team’s development. Enter the weekly design meetings. Having a structure and a template to work with is not enough. They’ve settled on a few ground rules in order for the meetings to unfold properly. Looking back at the first 10 meetings, they went through over 100 resources and tackled 2 main design challenges.
Read more…
