Pulling the breaks: fostering transparency, communication, and collaboration in design teams
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Teams who see it as part of their mission to drive engagement, and to promote ownership within their own ranks, who push for transparency and the sharing of ideas are more effective, and successful than others. We've all heard cliché phrases such as "One team, one fight," "all for one and one for all," or "we're only as strong as our weakest link," the one thing they share is that at their core they all hold true. Ed Catmull, of Pixar, notes that W. Edwards Deming, a statistician, brought about this sense of ownership and responsibility - which essentially became part of the assembly line process - to Japanese companies, turning them into successful businesses, whose method was later adopted as the must-have for many companies. Collaborating with others can ultimately help save time, save money, and can even save lives (seriously). It also helps ensure there isn't a single point of success or failure, but rather a group mentality of ownership. This is a talk on change, on disruption, and on accepting blame and defeat. It's not easy, but it all starts somewhere, and with someone; let that someone be you. "If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude." - Maya Angelou
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Pulling the breaks: fostering transparency, communication, and collaboration in design teams
- 1. Pulling the breaks: fostering transparency, communication, and collaboration in design teams Eduardo F. Ortiz | @eduardoortizGIANT Conf
- 2. 10 What is designing in the open? It is the practice of sharing our work or process with others – usually the public
- 3. 11 Why does it matter? Well… let me tell you a story…
- 4. 13 Once upon a time…
- 5. 14 Once upon a time…
- 6. 15 “oh… you guys don’t cut the finger tips off of your gloves?”
- 7. 16 Why does it matter? When you keep things to yourself, others are left in the dark, and this is at the expense of others and the overall good.
- 8. 18 How can one pull the metaphorical brakes?
- 10. 20
- 11. 19 Share bits and pieces
- 12. 21
- 13. 19 Share stories
- 14. 22
- 15. 19 Share alphas
- 16. 23
- 17. 19 Share tools
- 18. 24
- 19. 25 Ways to design in the open Sharing artifacts Sharing bits and pieces Sharing stories Sharing alphas Sharing tools …and many more
- 20. 27 Towards designing in the open Empathy Collaboration Transparency
- 24. 31 Towards designing in the open Empathy Collaboration Transparency Team Community Users
- 26. ‹#›
- 27. 33 Owning a Home: designing in the open how-to 1. We all got on the same page, about what designing in the open meant, and how we could practice it 2. We started aligning our goals with the ones the developers sold the Bureau on long ago 3. We got our product owner on board, and convinced her to become an advocate for designing in the open 4. We wrote a proposal and documented all risks and advantages of taking this approach 5. We had a plan to execute and began publishing/working in the open as soon as we received approval
- 28. 38 Thank you.
Editor's Notes
- Hi – I’m Eduardo, Over 3 years ago, I was overseas with the Marines, and I part of my job required me to create these reports to turn in to our command being my usual self I over-promised and came close to not delivering at all. I thought “oh, this is going to be easy – this should take me a few hours to wrap up;” I went off to look at the reports and documents that the unit we replaced provided us and found out that the report I needed to write was merely a PDF of a scanned document… Following manuals which were last updated in the 90s, I recreated the template that I needed and wrote the report. Some time before we were replaced I started gathering all necessary documents, files, and templates, in order to turn it over to the next unit. The unit we turned over to was ecstatic that they didn’t need to recreate the template, apparently it is just a thing - no one had ever created these and shared them so as to allow others to be more effective. Lesson learned, I stopped assuming why things happened and started looking into how to improve this. Once I came home, to Brooklyn, I learned that what I had been talking about, what I wanted to do, what I took a stab at has been documented, though not as well as it’s counterpart – open source development, was Open Source Design / Designing in the open. This talk relies heavily on research that has been done and shared, true to the open source ethos. And this I was extremely lucky to develop and work on at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - a government agency tasked with protecting consumers from financial crisis and preventing another financial markets meltdown. While at the CFPB almost all of the work that we did was in the open, using Git to publish all of our work as it was being created — it was risky, it took buy in from the agency, and it has been an amazing success; a government agency who is transparent; what an amazing concept. Image: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2010/01/19/nyregion/19brake_inline/popup.jpg
- Designing in the open, as the title implies, is the practice of sharing, open sourcing, and/or making available to the public the design work that one is currently doing. Granted, this is far from ground breaking. The open source development community has been well established for years, and continues to mature and push the envelope of what it means to share and collaborate in the open, so it’s of no wonder that following in their footsteps – forking their model, if you will – makes sense for us in the design community. United we stand, divided we fall. We’re only as strong as our weakest link. One for all, and all for one. You get the point – it’s about empowerment and communication. Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/auto-clasico-mallorca/17155601385/in/pool-autoassemblylines/
- Last year, in the stage just next door, I shared one of the most personal stories of my time in uniform. It was the most therapeutic experience, and I guess it’s time for a second-go at it! Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisrsouthland/15741048330/in/photolist-pYYZg1-mPozZw-emu4yS-smHwQs-91Gtuw-cfK995-4FSbWc-b6KGYg-dsbs7K-4biuMa-pi2249-ggy8Ut-3W5RZG-nsES45-9He6b6-jM54FE-9Mogym-abd4g7-6mCgZu-d1qXLA-9mTiyu-jvxt2b-gJn7JF-8xoEuq-pj3mTa-azHRum-7RqLnd-gmUn3H-ga2TYi-4CF3hk-5zfSZ1-7TekKe-q3JCw2-2WVBgp-j2S2ur-d9qaWw-7ycYgm-6wVDEU-rbtmv7-8cwLzG-7JeXHv-qUwBWh-ngVXte-g4f4LW-fDkvoZ-7gzgx-dyf5bs-57fAq6-5CeBKp-5Db44D
- The Marine Corps has to be one of the strictest outfits I’ve worked with/for. By the time I deployed in 2011 apparent there had been a high number of incidents where people got burnt because they weren’t wearing proper protective gear, and an order was issued that all personnel must wear full regulation gear, or be subject to punishment under the Uniformed Code of Military Justice. The proper gear included flack jacket (bullet proof vest on steroids), helmet, ballistic goggles, ballistic groin protector, elbow and knee pads, and kevlar/leather tipped gloves. In one of the last convoys that I was to be part of, I was made the vehicle commander – the guy in charge of controlling the computer (blue force tracker) that allows us to see where everyone is in our area and get alerts about different stuff happening around us. Usually, there’s little need to interact with the BFT – and a good number of times, to use it – it was necessary to disconnect the unit and blow/spit into the socket to get it to work… But we didn’t use it much because for the most part our job had nothing to do with combat, it was more logistics related, so I didn’t really use it. Well, this convoy was different – as we moved from one road to another, and created dispersion (about 500 yards between vehicles), I received an alert in the BFT from one of the vehicles in front of me – it was marked urgent, it was a system generated message when someone marked a “danger area”, to see it I needed to tap it to open it – I tried tapping on the “touch” screen multiple times to no avail – and then it hit me, that my gloves probably weren’t helping, so I tried to take them off, but it was a bit too late.
- If you’re asking yourself “why didn’t you use the radio?”, the answer is “it stopped working – to get it working again we would’ve had to stop and disconnect our signal jammer in order to get the radio back up and running.
- A few weeks after that, we got a call from the unit that was fixing our truck up, to go pick it up. When I get there with two other Marines, they start to inspect the vehicle and I start signing the vehicle out, so we can bring it back to our lot. As we were about to leave, one of the guys asked us how we managed to mess the truck up, since it was one of the newest ones in country – we tell him our story and he innocently asked… So, what to do, how to help others solve problems? I think there are two ways: Let them fail and learn: You keep everything to yourself, you sit back and you watch others – literally – get blown up in the process of learning the lessons that you’ve learned. 2. Show them and let them build upon what you share: You share what you’ve learned, you pass on to others those things that are important for them to know and those things you believe are worthless, and you then allow them to build upon them. Obviously, there are specific situations in which one works better over the other – it’s up to us to determine the situation you’re in and which works best.
- Reality is, that it’s easier to stay the course and keep doing what we do today. Sharing our work requires us to change the way we think, the way we approach problems, and how it forces us to become detached from it in order to be able to accept the criticism that will come our way by the sheer nature of sharing what we’re working on. Sure, you can say “well I work in finance – who cares about what I’m working on?”, I believe a lot of people do, a lot of the problems that we solve within our unique fields of expertise are translatable to other fields. Ed Catmull, who cofounded Pixar along with Steve Jobs, in his book “Creativity, Inc” quotes W. Edward Deming, an engineer, statistician, professor, lecturer, and management consultant - who revolutionized how industries created products by challenging management to listen to everyone, not just their managers. While Deming’s ideas were too futuristic for the car industry in America, it was taken to heart in Japan, where the car industry applied his theory and ideas and the concept of assembly line processing was first created; where anyone - regardless of their position – was given the opportunity to pull the brakes on the assembly line at any point, they were empowered to speak up and to never let anything go through their line just because someone else made it, it challenged them to take ownership and it worked!
- So all of that, really comes down to this, how can one practice design in the open? IT DEPENDS
- There's no right or wrong way to design in the open, and there's no perfect solution or framework to follow.
- Sharing artifacts – such as patents - in the case of Elon Musk of Tesla who recognized that patents frequently hold back and limit innovation, especially around core infrastructure. He thinks “that sharing these ideas helps speed along innovation, creating greater and greater opportunities, which you can realize by executing well. Musk is confident in Tesla's ability to execute and recognizes that sharing the patents actually helps Tesla by getting more electric vehicles on the market, meaning more overall infrastructure that makes Tesla cars more valuable,” just over a year ago today, Tesla released over 1,400 patents into the public domain; today they are being used by companies making little drones for film making to GM, the auto-maker. Image: http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2015/03/30/elon-musk-boots-tesla-stock-with-major-new-product-tweet-tease/
- There's no right or wrong way to design in the open, and there's no perfect solution or framework to follow.
- Sharing bits and pieces – this encompasses sharing bits and pieces, to sharing patterns and new functionality / ideas Source: https://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/
- There's no right or wrong way to design in the open, and there's no perfect solution or framework to follow.
- Medium’s design / ux repository with stories and writing by anyone who calls themselves a designer
- There's no right or wrong way to design in the open, and there's no perfect solution or framework to follow.
- Sharing alphas – Some projects provide an open link to the project at its most current state. What happened to the old Seamless site? And what happened to Labs? We have been working on our new site over the past few months and getting your feedback through our Labs platform. What you see here is the result - so Labs is no more. Thank you for helping us with your valuable feedback and cheers to the food future!
- There's no right or wrong way to design in the open, and there's no perfect solution or framework to follow.
- Sharing tools – Some projects and companies (like Super Friendly's "How to build an app", The Guardian and NY Times will share their code and toolkits on Github. CFPB’S DOCTER – A project by Adam Scott and other folks at the CFPB to help teams document projects easily
- Given that there’s no right or wrong way to do design in the open, it means that there are multiple ways in which we could do design in the open. Any one of these or a combination of two or more leads us to doing design in the open – it allows us to share and show others what we’ve learned and help them build upon the work we’ve done and ideally take it all one step further, to make one positive change down the line. This presentation itself, is merely one step down the line – as I relied heavily on work previously done by Brad Frost [http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/designing-in-the-open/]
- Regardless of what the goals that your clients or your company aims to achieve by designing in the open, the framework remains the same. As I’ve been exploring this issue I started playing with determining the things that we must do and who it all affects, almost like concentric circles, and who is involved, and this is what I came up with, to me these are the components and who they engage Transparency // Team Collaboration // Users Empathy // Community
- Transparency leads to an engaged team, where everyone understand the problem and tackles it together.
- Engage your users, reach out to them – hearing from your users in more ways than just usability testing is a great way to push the envelope and understand the problems you’re facing better
- Lastly, sharing our work with the public allows others to engage with the work we’ve done, it allows others to provide feedback – whether you want it or not – and to question the decisions that have been made, and it pushes us to be humble about our work and more importantly it helps others not start all the way from scratch when trying to solve a problem
- Regardless of what the goals that your clients or your company aims to achieve by designing in the open, the framework remains the same. As I’ve been exploring this issue I started playing with determining the things that we must do and who it all affects, almost like concentric circles, and who is involved, and this is what I came up with, to me these are the components and who they engage Transparency // Team Collaboration // Users Empathy // Community
- Obviously, this is not an easy undertaking and everyone has different goals and missions in the work that they do, and changing the way we do things is difficult and at times completely disrupting to our way of life. So, what if it’s hard? What if there’s not enough time? What if I have no buy in? Reality is that we can ask a thousand “what ifs” and never be able to answer them and what-if ourselves into a corner, but I’m here to tell you that this can be done – regardless of how hard it is, of lack of time, or lack of buy in.
- Jonathan Shariat shared a story last year of “how UX killed Jenny,” it’s a story about how three very experienced nurses missed cues in the software about specific needs that this young girl, Jenny, needed, definitely not because of lack of experience, but because of lack of understanding of the software — simply put, the software is/was too complex. Read the story: https://medium.com/tragic-design/how-bad-ux-killed-jenny-ef915419879e
- Source: https://github.com/cfpb/owning-a-home
- Obviously, this is not an easy undertaking and everyone has different goals and missions in the work that they do, and changing the way we do things is difficult and at times completely disrupting to our way of life. So, what if it’s hard? What if there’s not enough time? What if I have no buy in? Reality is that we can ask a thousand “what ifs” and never be able to answer them and what-if ourselves into a corner, but I’m here to tell you that this can be done – regardless of how hard it is, of lack of time, or lack of buy in.