Miskeeto

Designers do it in groups

A miskeeto byte from Robert Hoekman, Jr. Posted on June 10th, 2009

I recently began working with a client whose staff doesn’t design together. When they walk into the office in the morning, they plug in their headphones and stare at their screens, hardly speak to each other, and forge product plans by way of short, infrequent conversations about what needs to be implemented next and when. The conference room has only a table and a projector. The front room is filled with broken-down boxes, presumably leftover from setting up shop in a new place, but the company has been in the space for months.

The people on this team are smart and engaged, but they’re nowhere near doing their best work. They’re not taking advantage of each other’s ideas and passions. They’re not having any fun.

During the kickoff meeting, I told them to cover several of the walls with whiteboards. Get flip pads and markers. Use sticky notes to organize ideas. Get up from their desks, head to the conference room, and brainstorm. Appoint a design lead and a devil’s advocate for each meeting, and start throwing out ideas. It would be a lot more fun, I said, and would lead to great ideas that got everyone excited and motivated and would work wonders for their users.

During the trip, I ran one such brainstorming meeting to show them how it’s done. By the end, we had overhauled two core application task flows and had a design in the works that would help the company meet its goals and would provide a vastly superior user experience than the current design. And we had a blast. One person said he could “do this all day”.

Before I left the office, I put sticky notes up on the conference room walls. Several went on a large empty wall. They said, “Whiteboard”. Others said, “Butcher paper”, “Shelves for supplies”, and “Flip pad”. I cleared some boxes out of the way in the front room and on a mirrored wall wrote, “Use this space for brainstorming.” I even stuck a note on one developer’s monitor that said, “Don’t think at your computer. Grab a team and head to the conference room.”

Design is a group activity. The small team beats the lone genius every time. No one individual will have all the best answers. The best answers come from groups. The best ideas are the result of collaboration.

Got an uninspiring office? Buy some supplies and start having fun.