The workshop was held on at the end of June, 2019. The purpose is to improve the communication between the central design team and all the design teams all over the world. It is also a remote collaboration problem between designers.

Though I was just a participant, I learnt a lot from the workshop. That is why I would like to record it in my portfolio. I would say the most important thing in the work is people, if they really want to work together.

Issues

• Designers just focused on their own project, didn’t have communications with each other. But there are a lot of common points for the projects that all the designers are doing. And it didn’t mean we didn’t want to communicate. We would like to know the projects as well as each other. The reality is that we are across the world. I am based in Shanghai, China. Some are based in Burlington, US. Some are based in Bangalore, India. And most of the designers are in the Netherlands, but also different cities. Further, we have to face different design problems and communicate with our stakeholders every day. So how can we still have the time to know what others are doing, communicate with each other, and learn from each other? It was always with lower priority, not to mention the time zone difference.
• Before the workshop, we solved the problem by doing “Show and tell” meeting. Each team, depending on your location, shared several topics that they were working on monthly. There could be 2 rounds for each designers in a year. It was nice and helpful. But the problem was that first, designers have to spend time to prepare the slides and the presentation. Second, not all the people can attend. We could almost never do it together because of the work or the time zone difference. Shanghai and Burlington has 12 hours time difference. We both have to sacrifice a little every time we’d like to discuss something with each other. Even we recorded every meeting, it was always a bit hard to spend time on viewing them. Every one has work or something else to do every day except you push yourself to add it in your schedule. As a result, the problem became how can we discuss a common problem or know what others are doing efficiently and in a way that everyone is comfortable?
• All the designers submit the review request after they’ve done something new to the central design team. So the central team can look at all the projects in a holistic view and control the quality. But the review process was always super painful for both sides. It was always lagging. It usually takes 2 weeks for the review, not to mention the back and forth communication and modification afterwards. And we, as the designers working on the projects, usually can’t reserve that much time for the review before we send the design to the development team, even we do plan the review time in each sprint, planning session.
• Still the topic on the design review, we could receive dozens of mails from the collaboration tool InVision every day during the review period. It was really stressful, actually for both sides. This was also one of the points I learnt from the workshop. It usually took me almost a day to check all the mails and reply them. And there could be a lot of reviews coming together at the same time for the central team. They have to understand the software in a very limited time, make comments quickly and receive so many communication mails, just as I did.
• Because we don’t know each other as a person. We just do the comments on InVision. Sometimes I even felt not only painful but also depressed, frustrated and unfriendly. It could also influence other aspects. For example, I hesitated to report the problems of the component library that the central team created. But I am the only visual designer based in Shanghai. I would like to know how other visual designers are thinking about the proposals I create some time. I was willing to discuss with the designers in the central team. But I was unsure if I could do it at that time. They might be busy. I shouldn’t bother them, etc.
• Other issues include the problems about the style guides, components and the scarcity of examples, etc.

Hence, how can we improve it and know the people first and better? There comes the workshop, using the tool called “As-is-journey” to improve the process.

Wenlan’s journey

Before the workshop, I had done the homework in Shanghai. Below is my thinking, pain points and the journey. As a visual designer, I listed all the steps in my daily work, the detailed tasks, what I thought and how I felt in each step. As mentioned in the issues part, the review process is the most painful point for me.

The workshop

Pains – brainstorming

Pains – sorting & clustering

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Pains – voting

Design review is picked as the biggest pain point for all the designers on both sides!!

Actions – brainstorming

Actions – sorting

Actions were sorted in 2 dimensions, effort and impact. We selected the actions with high impact and low effort as what we would like to do next with top priorities.

Actions selected & their detailed steps

Adding relations to the channels & stakeholders

The follow-ups

I have to highlight the group on Microsoft teams called “What we are doing.” It works very well. We share what every one does weekly instead of the “Show and tell” meeting. Just several sentences and a screenshot, it is done! And we can also discuss the common problems as the follow-ups for the “what we are doing” group. We discuss several topics with the designers in the US after we saw the screenshots from each other. It was nice, helpful and efficient.

And as mentioned in the beginning, we also understood each other from the workshop. They were nice people indeed. I would never hesitate to contact them any more.