As a designer, I’m always trying to improve my design process.

Design openly

As a designer, I’m always trying to improve my design process. Having worked with both big and small companies in the past, I was never satisfied with my workflow in the past mainly because it was part of the waterfall model.

Waterfall model is inefficient and not fun

There are countless arguments on the web against the waterfall model. To me, the waterfall approach is an inefficient process because it discourages team(s) to collaborate in a synchronized fashion. As the result, the design process takes longer and creativity will be limited because people can’t work together well within this workflow.

Although a lot of companies claim to work in an agile approach (agile development, scrum), the design workflow tend to remain in this waterfall approach because the the designers are usually left alone to figure out the design related tasks until it’s finished and expected to present to the rest of the team and obtain feedback for further adjustments. Therefore the design process is usually closed off from the rest of the team and this is the case especially for a company with only one designer.

Breaking the waterfall design workflow

Over the past year, I realized that breaking the waterfall workflow takes one simple rule:

Remain in constant communication with as many project stakeholders as possible during all stages of design process from brainstorming,prototyping to the final deliverables.

Regardless of whether you are working with a team of designers or by yourself, maintaining a good feedback loop with key stakeholders should result the following:

• More likely to interpret the project spec correctly early on and therefore avoid any critical design errors.
• Able to collect design feedback from a variety of people (marketing, dev..etc) early on and throughout the design process.
• The final design will more than likely to be approved by all stakeholders because everyone should be a part of this design process

When I joined Science Exchange as their UX Designer, I decided to test out this open design process theory and so far it’s been going surprising well. Before I joined, the company uses Asana, a project management tool to keep track of day to day tasks. Asana has a lot of great features (follow, notification, tags, screenshot upload/preview…etc) and is designed to handle nested tasks (task within a task within a task). It was an easy decision to adopt Asana as the primary tool to stay connected with the rest of the team and test whether my assumption about breaking the waterfall process is true.

My approach to keep the design process open

On Asana, I create and assign myself a new project whenever I start working on a design project. The project is then shared with other members of the team (add them as followers) therefore they’ll receive email/Asana notifications for all activities within this project (new tasks, changes to task…etc). Depending on the scope of the project, sometimes I only share the project with a few people who are part of the project. That being said, everyone on the team will be able to view the project if they search for it and they won’t be bombarded with all the notifications.

As I go through my design process, I try to document my notes and share them on Asana in the form of tasks. For instance, there is a task for inspirations (contains screenshots of similar designs) and there is a task for specifications (contains a list of project requirements). Within each project, I create the same set of tasks (inspiration, specs, questions…etc) so that it’s consistent across all projects and I use them to group relevant design notes together for other people to digest. Note that the project is public within your organization on Asana and anyone can contribute to project/task. Therefore, when my design project is completed, it’s Asana counterpart should contain all the notes, mockups as well as discussions between me and my team members organized by task items within the project page. From this point on, the project will be assigned to a main engineer responsible for the implementation and he/she will be contributing to this project during the front-end/backend development process while the rest of the team members oversee the project until it’s deployed on production.

What’s working well so far

Since I introduced the open design process at work, I noticed several things that worked well:

• The team gets to discuss each project on a detailed level. (using Asana comments).
• Collecting requirements and feedback became more efficient. (Asana pings everyone whenever I post something).
• The length of the design process became shorter but the quality of the design increased. (Again with the efficient feedback collection with the ability to brainstorm with everyone throughout the project).
• Everyone is happy with the final design when is finished. (Everyone was part of the design process).

What’s next?

I’m generally satisfied with this new design workflow, but I’ll of course be optimizing the workflow as I apply the process to more projects. While it can be hassle to document your design process and for a designer to share your unfinished designs, I do believe that this is an efficient workflow to achieve a better design in a shorter amount of time. If you are a designer, I highly encourage you to try and design in the open using any tools that are available to you (not limited to a project management tool like Asana). The goal is create a system for efficient collaboration and constant feedback loop during your design process.

I am seeing a rise of interest in the open design movement lately and I encourage you to learn more, some examples are the a list apart connect UX article and the open source design project.

As a somewhat related experiment, I’m also making my daily work-related activities open on my portfolio utilizing my twitter account, I wrote a post about the design behind my portfolio here.