What I have learned from working on one design project with 9 group members
Keywords: communicate, communicate, communicate!
Last quarter, I was working on a design project with 8 other team members. It was the biggest team I have ever been in. The project was to design a mobile OS which is driven by voice assistant and AI. The project scope was pretty huge: we needed to create our own design language and UI templates, and we also needed to design at least 11 default apps.
The biggest challenge for this group design project was not the huge scope and workload, but actually the communication inside a large team. It was hard to schedule face-to-face meeting since everyone had different schedules, which caused the difficulty to keep the design consistency.
Things I learned from this project:
- Select the right design tool. We started from creating the design language. After researching on current tools, we selected Figma instead of the common tool Sketch. Figma facilitates real-time online collaboration among project members. Therefore, everyone can view each other’s edit and access the latest design language.
- Select the right communication tool. We used slack for communication, which was efficient for large groups. We created separate channels for small groups inside our large group. We pinned the latest version of important design documents. We connected Google drive and Figma with Slack.
- Be cautious about version management. We made annotations of changes on design documents. We added version number and editing time in file names, and we kept past versions in separate files inside Google drive.
It was a challenging but unique experience to work in such a large group. Communication is always the key skill for designers.
Thanks for reading!