Member-only story
Part 1
Study*(Designers+Engineers)= ❤️
About a year ago we started a small study group with engineers and designers to understand each other better. It was an insightful and fun experience. Fun enough to run 2 different projects summarized over 2 different stories. Here is the first one, sharing both designer and engineer points of views.
At buzzvil we can freely start a study group, lunch being supported for the occasion. It was enough reason for us 5 to start questioning our workflow, 3 product designers and 2 engineers (client & devOps) on a weekly basis.
Here was our initial statement:
The study is a collaborative group between Designers and Engineers aiming to learn how to work better together and find keys to ease cooperation..
Another important fact is that we started this study at the same time our company moved to a matrix type of organization. In short we now have a function team such as Design team, as well as a mission team specific to a project or product, gathering people from different functions. A good time to for us to generate communication and see how we can embrace this new setup.
So we started.
For the first few sessions, the 5 of us gathered in our auditorium and we introduced our design workflow and the design system that connects the dots behind. Engineers did the same, explaining how they work, how Android Studio works and how GitHub and other tools are being used at buzzvil. After a few minutes going through the first session, we could identify flaws in our respective work processes, things we do at Design level that aren’t being consistent with how things work in dev side and vice-versa. So we started pointing out the pain points and identified problems on our weekly meeting note, part of the Definition phase of the design thinking process.
We then experienced for a bit, created some repositories on GitHub and went through a “simple” demo project to understand by doing.
After finishing our exploration phase and defining our problems, we’ve started ideating, targeting a few specific problems and tried to find solutions together. This is the fun part and from a design perspective it highlights something very important:
