The distributed team structure is known to offer many benefits for a company and its employees; however, this sort of work model also comes with its own unique set of obstacles. In 2018, Owl Labs found that 56% of the participating companies in their study adopted or allowed for some form of remote arrangement for its employees. While this organizational approach has revolutionized the way we perform our job functions, it’s also paved the way for new patterns to emerge in the way we interact with each other across the distance. In this article, Randy Tolentino will review how “remote soft-skills” can help with the challenge of building authentic connections with your distributed co-workers.
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While building a strong customer culture takes a multi-prong approach, workshops are fun and easy — perfect for jumpstarting a sluggish culture and giving participants the thinking tools necessary to filter decisions through the customer lens. In this article, Claire Mason has documented the process around four types of workshops that you can use to drive customer-centricity in your own companies. The workshops are divided into two categories: “general” and “project-specific”. General refers to workshops that are designed for anyone to participate. Project-specific workshops are best run with a particular, actionable outcome in mind.
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Developers are known to usually be the last ones who leave their fingerprints before a website or any sort of web product gets shipped. Obviously, a lot of responsibility is involved and the quality of their work can either make a project excel or go down the drain. In this article, Stefan Kaltenegger gives suggestions about what frontend developers can do on their end to better bridge the gap between designers and developers.
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Brainstorming seems to be just a fancy name for a usual discussion, but when organized right, it becomes a source of innovation. In this article, Slava Shestopalov brings you a step-by-step guide with tips and tricks, examples of slides, and preparation checklists. Brainstorming has a bright side: It’s a civilized process of generating ideas together. At least this is how it appears in the books on creativity. So, can we make it real? After reaching the end of this article, we hope that you’ll be able to organize brainstorming sessions with your colleagues and clients, and co-create something valuable.
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People who read Smashing Magazine, come to our conferences, and sign up as members. Given that we don’t ever get to meet or interact with the majority of folks who visit the site, this can make it quite difficult for us to better understand our readers and subscribers. Today, Rachel Andrew brings you a Smashing Survey. We want to find out about you, our readers, so that we can better bring you the tutorials, articles and resources that you need.
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When you prepare for your next presentation, use these tips on how to tweak your slides and your talk so that everyone gets the most out of it. In this article, Allison Ravenhall brings you tips that will make a big difference to your whole audience. Your slide content, design, and how you present can all affect how well the crowd gets your message, if at all. This is particularly true for those with physical and cognitive conditions. Making subtle changes to what you show and your script will help all attendees to get the most out of your hard work.
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As the spotlight has focused on the potential of design to transform businesses, we’ve seen a growing need for designers across a wider range of specializations. The number and types of roles have increased and, as UX continues to become a sought-after business differentiator, these roles will continue to diversify. What do you look out for when hiring team members? In this article, Christopher Murphy outlines how to go about building a UX team, which attributes to look out for when hiring, and he will suggest some avenues you can explore to find team members.
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Personal reflection enables us to process and make meaning of all of the great (and not so great) learning and working experiences we’ve had. Everyone stands to gain from engaging in some type of reflection. We can also encourage others to grow through personal reflection. In this article, Victor Yocco will cover some of the benefits of personal reflection, as well as methods of reflecting that you can incorporate into your routine.
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Retrospectives and reflections allow you to codify what you’ve learned from experience, to document mistakes and avoid future ones, and to increase your potential to grow in the future. In this article, Victor Yocco will show you a few approaches that you and your team can immediately incorporate into your practice. He’ll walk through post-project retrospectives in this first article, and in a second article, Victor will present some lessons learned and researched-backed techniques that those who wish to engage in reflection can attempt to include in their routine.
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How do you make sure the team gets up to date with everything that’s being released? As a team leader, Alecsandru Grigoriu was faced with a new challenge: making sure there’s enough recurrence in his team’s communication to facilitate the team’s development. Enter the weekly design meetings. Having a structure and a template to work with is not enough. They’ve settled on a few ground rules in order for the meetings to unfold properly. Looking back at the first 10 meetings, they went through over 100 resources and tackled 2 main design challenges.
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