December 17, 2024 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #487
This newsletter issue was sent out to 192,646 subscribers on Tuesday, December 17, 2024.
Editorial
Design workflow is always tricky to get right. Despite all the incredible tooling and UX methodologies, finding the right way to do good work is always challenging. It’s challenging because it involves the way people collaborate, communicate, make decisions, and navigate difficult conversations, among many things.
In this newsletter, we’ll explore best practices for productive teamwork, how to experiment with collaboration, and how to run better conversations. We hope it will help you discover a better workflow for you and for your team.
On our end, we have also officially announced two SmashingConfs coming up next year in the lovely city of Freiburg and in the Big Apple! Jump to all speakers and topics: SmashingConf Freiburg 2025 🇩🇪 and New York 2025 🇺🇸.
Bring your friends, colleagues, neighbors, and total strangers — what a remarkable experience it will be! 🎉
Also, we warmheartedly welcome you to our upcoming online workshops on design and front-end — with new workshops on Advanced Design Systems with Brad Frost, Accessibility Testing with Manuel Matuzović, and a Figma Workflow Masterclass with Christine Vallaure.
1. Handbook Of Me
Every team is different. Some see jumping on a quick call as a normal communication method, while others consider it disrespectful to their time. Some love to gather after work to socialize; for others, it’s an annoying activity that prolongs the working day. But what works for your team?
To help design leads get to know their team members’ collaboration preferences and establish a trustful relationship, Slava Shestopalov created the “Handbook of Me.” You can use the FigJam template to run a workshop with your team in which everyone gets the chance to share how they work best and what they like and what they don’t like, in a fun and structured way. (cm)
2. New Ways Of Working Playbook
How can we work better? How can we make our meetings more purposeful? How can we improve how we share feedback, make decisions, and solve conflicts? In short, how can we create a workplace where everyone in the team thrives?
The New Ways Of Working Playbook is a wonderful resource for teams to explore and experiment with collaboration patterns found in progressive organizations. Covering all aspects of working together, the playbook features carefully curated resources for both theory and practice that help you implement New Ways Of Working patterns in your work.
As Mark Eddleston, the creator of the Playbook, points out, there’s no “right” place to start, so when using the Playbook, begin with a pattern that feels most needed by your team. (cm)
3. Facilitation For All
Making facilitation mainstream, that’s the mission of the Butter Community. To help new leaders, managers, and peers unlock transformative conversations and the collective potential of any group, they published Facilitation For All, a curated resources toolkit filled with useful, free facilitation resources.
From scoping a project to onboarding participants and creating a safe space during a session to, finally, documenting and recapping it, the toolkit breaks the facilitation process down into more than 20 key tasks. For each of them, you get a list of useful resources and a summary explaining how to master the task. There’s even a Facilitation For All GPT, trained with all the info in the toolkit. (cm)
4. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Hybrid Apps with Web and Native Technologies dev
with Átila Fassina. Jan 9–17 - The Power of Storytelling ux
with Chiara Aliotta. Jan 20 – Feb 3 - Design Patterns for AI Interfaces ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Jan 22 – Feb 5 - New Front-End Adventures, 2025 Edition ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Jan 27 – Feb 10 - Accessible Typography for Web & UI Design Masterclass design
with Oliver Schöndorfer. Feb 10–18 - Building Modern HTML Emails dev
with Rémi Parmentier. Mar 3–11 - How To Measure UX and Design Impact UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Video course + UX training - Jump to all workshops →
5. Canvases For Culture Design
“Uncover The Stinky Fish,” “Personal Washing Instructions,” and “Blameless Postmortem” — these are some of the culture design canvases that Gustavo Razzetti compiled to help teams facilitate more productive conversations about teamwork, decision-making, alignment, and more.
Created by the team at workplace culture consultancy Fearless Culture, you can use the canvases to address issues, from day-to-day to more complex ones. Whether you want to design your organization’s future state, challenge perspectives, or strengthen interpersonal relationships, there certainly is a template for you. They are available for download as PDFs and for MURAL (email is required) and come with a how-to guide. (cm)
6. User Task Canvas
Good design starts with user needs. Stéphanie Walter, Julie Muller, and Geoffrey Crofte share a lovely workshop activity to gather user needs and understand the task, dependencies, objects, tools, decisions, and pain points. You can download the User Task Canvas for free as PDF and Miro template.
For more resources to help you overcome assumptions and gain actionable insights into user needs, also check out Vitaly’s post. He compiled useful resources all around running task analysis to support your users and improve task efficiency. (cm)
7. Complete Guide To Design Interviews
No matter at what stage you are in your design career, preparing for a job interview can be stressful. To help designers master the interview process, Oliver Engels created the Interview Kit, a wonderful resource for anyone looking to land a job in product design, no matter if it’s their first internship or a role for experienced designers.
Covering the complete job hunting process from the resume to the on-site interview, the guide shares practical tips and templates on how to craft case studies, solve design challenges, write cover letters, present your portfolio, and negotiate your offer.
For more job search strategies to help you ace your next job interview, also be sure to check out Vitaly’s collection of useful resources. (cm)
8. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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