One year after shut down, how has our design team adapted?
Happy birthday, COVID
I thought it’d be appropriate to write an article on the year anniversary after our design team left the comfort of our physical office to work from their homes due to COVID-19.
I wanted to share how we’ve changed the way we work for better or worse, what we’ve added to our processes and what hasn’t translated very well to remote working.
Fika
Swedish for “coffee break”, this is a weekly meeting where the design team starts the week off by talking about literally anything over a cup of coffee. …
And why your team should get your own
How it started
I was the 6th employee and the first designer at 7shifts. Working as a solo designer on a product you start collecting your own principles that guide you through the design process. I remember my first unofficial principle was “Consistency over innovation”.
As the team grows, inevitably each designer starts collecting their own principles. Your personal principles may get challenged. Maybe sometimes its OK to break convention (consistency) if it means we’re providing a better experience (innovation). Disagreements are inevitable. Your growing design team is now forming their own set of unofficial principles!
Questions start arising like “How do we…
Wait, nomem-what?
Nomenclature is a system of naming within a discipline or specific field. Simply put, it’s the names we give things within a system. The result of good nomenclature is a shared language understood by everyone.
First things first
Design can’t operate in a vacuum. Good design relies on designers collaborating with others outside of their department. Who do they mainly collaborate with? Engineers.
Designers often speak a different language than engineers. For example, let’s imagine a designer wants to change the colour of a button on an interface. The company’s brand colour happens to be teal.
The engineer implements the change, it’s not…
Dustin Weeres
Senior Product Designer, Design Operations Leader @ 7shifts. Passionate about design, operations, illustrating and of course my family.
