Designing as a Team at mySugr
By: Israel Mesquita
Tags: Company Culture, Design Process, User Experience Design, Product Design, UX Design

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”

— African proverb

credits: Norbert Spot

It’s been 1 year since I moved to Vienna and joined mySugr as a UX/UI Designer. Time really flies when you’re having fun.

There’s so much to say about the changes in my life, moving from Portugal to Austria. For example;

How Vienna has been ranked the most liveable city in the world for the 10th year in a row, which means a more than perfect infrastructure;

How I felt way more connected to the international community here;

How my English fluency evolved in this 1 year, since just a small amount of people speak Portuguese (but yeah, like any other place in the world, Vienna is full of Brazilians);

How I finally felt independent, living in an apartment alone, like an adult, or something like that.

I didn’t even know this kind of life was possible and I’m very happy and grateful for it.

But that’s not the reason I’m writing today!

When I joined mySugr, my biggest surprise (believe me, I had and I'm still having tons of amazing surprises in this company) was how the Design Team was organised. We have the opportunity to work in different teams, while at the same time, improving the design culture of the company together.

Today I’ll talk a little bit about how we’re organised.

First of all, there are more than 10 designers working in the company. We have UX/UI Designers and Communication Designers, but only one Design Team… so what does that mean?

It means that Communication Designers can get involved with UX/UI projects and vice versa.

Throughout feedback rounds and approval processes (also known as Concept Reviews), every designer is allowed to participate and evaluate.

Each designer knows what all the other designers are doing as a result of our Jour Fixes and Show & Tells.

Let's dive into our team now.

Each designer works in a multidisciplinary team (or more than one at the same time) and has their own projects and responsibilities. We have different meetings and resources to improve our communications/collaborations:

Design Jour Fixes (weekly):

The goal of this meeting is to raise awareness. We talk about how are we feeling that day, if we have any special topic to discuss, what we achieved since the last meeting, our goals for the week and whether we have any blockers. Sometimes, we have something interesting to present, sometimes we just talk a bit and finish the meeting. It's simple and usually takes 40–60min.

Design Show & Tell (monthly):

The goal is to present what we did in the last 2 months (the meeting is monthly, but divided in 2 different groups, so the same designer only needs to present every 2 months). We have a bit more time to prepare and make it more visual and organised. It's fascinating to see how many different projects we’re working on and how each designer presents in a different way.

Forum:

A Forum is an open window. The designer stays in their homebase (or in a video meet in these crazy times) and waits for someone to come and look at their work. It can basically be held in every phase of the design thinking process, whenever a designer needs feedback from all the other designers and wants to openly discuss what they've been doing so far. It's a nice way to make everyone feel included. A forum is used to gather feedback in order to make decisions and go forward with the design (not intended for detailed discussions).

Concept Review:

During the ideation phase, each designer presents his concept to two other designers (who are not directly involved in the topic) and a user researcher. For medical features, it is necessary to involve a medical advisor and a human factor engineer in the review process, to consider medical perspectives. Overall, the purpose of the concept review is to get feedback on the concept itself and the compatibility of the feature in a product environment. It's our way of approving the idea before starting on visuals and moving on to the next steps.

Design Department Board:

A visual way to keep every designer updated about various projects. It's a simple board with different kanbans, one for each designer. There we put the "To dos", "In Progress", "Pending", "Done" tasks. It’s quite simple and every designer has accountability.

Design System:

We’re constantly developing and improving our Design System through documentation, like best practices, a collection of methodologies and deliverables that may be useful for different types of projects. Also, we’re constantly building and developing tools to help us design faster and more efficiently, like components, wireframe kits and templates on Figma.

In this way, we keep checking on each other, improving our productivity and providing support.

Besides all that, it’s amazing to see how every designer is open to talk, give and receive feedback. We’re always talking about our challenges and asking opinions on Slack channels or face-to-face drinking coffee / playing table tennis (before corona, of course).

As a person and UX Designer, I’m learning every single day. I feel that I have all the resources I need to keep developing as fast as possible with the mySugr team. It’s not always perfect, just like life (learning German, for example, is challenging and frustrating all the time), but still, life at mySugr is way better than I ever imagined.

Thank you Vienna, Design Team and mySugr for this amazing year (even with corona)!