This document discusses collaborating on design problems through lightweight artifacts and interdisciplinary methods. It shares discoveries from interviews with 25 people about their experiences collaborating with teams. While co-located teams may fully explore design spaces using these techniques, distributed teams often have difficulty doing so. However, not all co-located teams collaborate this way, and tools like sketching, storyboarding and charrettes can help distributed teams also explore design spaces thoroughly when combined with video conferencing and documentation sharing platforms.

1. Fully Explore the Design Space
@mblongii
Patterns and Tools for Whole Team Design Collaboration

2. mingle
@mblongii

3. “design space” = all the reasonable solutions.
@mblongii

4. Think like a dandelion
The way to get from a local maxima to the
global maxima is to explore a lot of minima
along the way.
@mblongii

5. We asked 25 people
“Can you tell me about the last time you collaborated with your team
on a challenging design problem?”
@mblongii

6. Hypothesis (verbose)
Visual storytelling frames design opportunities in such a way that it
promotes collaboration through lightweight artifacts and
interdisciplinary methods.
@mblongii

7. Hypothesis (terse)
Visual storytelling is the most effective approach to iterative and
incremental product design.
@mblongii

8. Assumption 1
Co-located teams fully explore the design space through lightweight
artifacts and interdisciplinary methods.
@mblongii

9. Assumption 2
Distributed teams have difficulty collaborating through lightweight
artifacts and interdisciplinary methods.
@mblongii

10. Assumption 3
Distributed teams are unlikely to fully explore the design space.
@mblongii

11. Does this team fully explore the design space through lightweight
artifacts and interdisciplinary methods?
10 out of 25 do
10 out of 25 do not
5 out of 25 desire to do so
@mblongii

12. Discovery 1
The person’s role has no significant impact on whether they
collaborate with their team through lightweight artifacts or
interdisciplinary methods.
@mblongii

13. Discovery 2
Co-located vs. distributed has a significant impact on whether the
team collaborates through lightweight artifacts or interdisciplinary
methods.
@mblongii

14. Discovery 3
Co-located teams do not inherently collaborate through lightweight
artifacts or practice interdisciplinary methods.
@mblongii

15. Discovery 4
Some co-located teams track the progress of their work against the
“user journey” rather than focusing on work item status alone.
@mblongii

16. Story
#1339
Story
#1336
Story
#1328
@mblongii
Story
#1334

17. @mblongii

18. Earth-shattering discovery
Teams with a sketching cadence often go directly from collaborative
sketching to collaborative coding.
@mblongii

19. Charrettes are an interdisciplinary method for knowledge transfer and
idea generation.
@mblongii

20. Charrette / “Design Studio”
•
•
•
Interdisciplinary knowledge transfer
Generate many options
Build upon ideas
@mblongii

21. Storyboard / “User Journey”
•
•
•
Catalyzing artifact
Visual storytelling
Natural and familiar
@mblongii

22. Sketchboard / “Affinity Map”
1. Capture sketches
2. Look for related
3. Sort into groups
@mblongii

23. Close-at-hand communication tools
people avoid for distributed design exploration
Email
@mblongii
Phone /
Voice
Pivotal
Tracker
Jira
“Rapid”
Prototyping
Tools

24. Close-at-hand communication tools
people try for distributed design exploration
Paper /
Whiteboard
1
Smartphone
Camera
2
Google
Docs
Trello
3
Basecamp
@mblongii
Hip Chat

25. Close-at-hand communication tools
people prefer for distributed design exploration
Google
Hangouts
Webex
Webcam +
Microphone +
Screen Sharing
Skype
@mblongii
GoTo
Meeting

26. Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication tools
Google
Hangouts
Google
Docs
Webex
Trello
Basecamp
HipChat
?
Skype
@mblongii
GoTo
Meeting

27. Remote storyboarding experiment
Melissa
@mblongii
Emily
Suzanne

28. Hypotheses about what people expect
•
See other people's actions to remain engaged
•
A continuum between explorations
•
An ounce of nonsense and fun to stay engaged
@mblongii

29. Hypotheses about what people expect
•
Immediate and timely feedback on their ideas
•
Input about the problem context
•
Act on the ideas in a meaningful way
@mblongii

30. @mblongii

31. @mblongii

32. @mblongii

33. Discoveries
•
Brief initial discussion about problem context
•
Visibility into other people’s actions increases engagement, learning
•
Desire to work independently on storyboard sequence, then to present and
give feedback
@mblongii

34. Discoveries
•
Some people use storyboard as a sketchboard
•
Immediate system feedback expected while adding images
•
Improvisation in methods for adding images to the storyboards
@mblongii

35. Earth-shattering discovery
People blend their multiple devices to share their ideas whether colocated or distributed simultaneously and over time.
@mblongii

36. Worth reading
@mblongii

37. Thank you, Balanced Team! 😘
“The strength of the team is each individual
member. The strength of each member is the
team.”―Phil Jackson
@mblongii