Whether you’re in a small squat or huge design team, the chances are you’ve come across this problem before. Communicating with each other is hard.

This is something I’ve had my fair share of and have been struggling with ever since I started collaborating with other designers. I wanted to share some insights and ways to potentially solve this.

Because a design team is a cross-functional team working with diverse tribes to create products, we often find ourselves working in isolation. We’re unaware of what our fellow designers are working on and crave for more designer oriented feedback.

Make It Part Of Your Design Process

The design process can often be a creative black box of highs and lows filled with the occasional caffeine jolts. But bringing some form of structure can help ease that process.

In the same way we include research, wireframing and prototyping in our process, we can also add dedicated times where we sit together and discuss ongoing projects. Making communicating part of your design process is a surefire way to finding creative solutions and building great products.

Mo’ Meetings, Less Problems

Let’s face it, no one loves more meetings. But there is a lot of value in talking face-to-face. Especially since we’re communicating more and more virtually using tools like Slack. In fact, MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory found that 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for simply by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members.

Looking at the problem you’re trying to solve together, means getting unstuck faster and coming up with more ideas, which eventually result in more creative solutions. That’s why at least once a week our design team sits together and shares their designs in a sort of show and tell. This is a safe space for the team to show things even if they aren’t fully polished up yet.

“Looking at the problem you’re trying to solve together, means getting unstuck faster and coming up with more ideas”

It has resulted in a better understanding in what each member is working on, improved our designs and our relationship with each other as we also discuss the latest geeky design news and cool finds of the week. Like this.

Learning the Language Better

This might seem like something Captain Obvious would say but as a non-native English speaker, I’ve had moments where I just couldn’t find the right words. This forms as an issue when trying to communicate ideas and trying to explain abstract concepts.

I picked up writing to improve my communication skills and getting a better understanding of the english vocabulary. I also got to know more business terms and learned to speak the language executives speak. Which involves more about the business goals and roadmap, and less about complementary colors and font weights.

Presenting Your Ideas

Presenting your design in front of an audience means communicating your ideas. We hold a Design Critique every week, in which the designer explains their idea or solution to the engineers and other product people involved.

The structure we tend to follow is:

Define what stage your work is in.

State the problem and why it’s a problem.

Present your solution and what the focus of the feedback should be.

This is a great way to not only explain your ideas to non-designers, but also to include everyone in the design process early and often.

Collaborating with each other helps you find new possibilities. It’s only when you see all the possibilities, that you can find the right solution.

Summary

Despite implementing these techniques, it’s not yet bulletproof. There have been moments where communication fell between the cracks of the process and led to misunderstandings. We’ve definitely seen a huge improvement and like any good design process, It’s an ongoing one.