GOAL

The design philosophy would encompass a host of topics.

There was the design system (containing the component library and brand guidelines).
The planning and road mapping (OKRs to establish long-term goals, and sprints to establish short-term goals).
Approaching products and problems (tools at our disposal to pull from without constraining ourselves).
Fostering relationships within the design team and alongside other departments (namely Engineering and Marketing).

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APPROACH

Design System

Design systems are arguably the most complicated and time consuming tools for designers to build. Design systems have huge up-front costs, and require constant upkeep for new additions or changes down the line. In small teams, it’s unnecessary to allocate all of that time for something so behemoth. However, if time and objectives permit, you can slowly build rudimentary elements of a design system and refine over time. That’s exactly what we did at Fraction. We wanted to treat it as a source of truth, but not one that constrains us. Rather, it would be a flexible guide that we would use as long as it helped solve the problem in front of us.

‍Component Library

Created and updated by Thomas Griffiths in Figma. Thomas used a variety of techniques to make the design of new UIs fast and seamless.

‍Brand Guideline

Created and updated by Taylor Newman. Taylor included all the elements of the Fraction brand, and did a phenomenal job with clear and concise explanations for best practices when interacting with brand elements.

‍Design Wiki

Taking both the component library and the brand guideline, the team and myself compiled documentation (ongoing) into an external wiki that the rest of the company could access with ease.

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Planning and road mapping

Fraction used OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to define goals for upcoming quarters. OKRs provided a clear roadmap for every individual so that they never felt lost in their workload.

Alongside OKRs the design and engineering team implemented 2-week sprints to narrow the focus of OKRs to actionable targets. These were never strict in their timeline but allowed for guidance and clarity when planning workloads.

To bundle both elements together, we used ClickUp as our project management tool. Clickup provided excellent integrations with other tools we used and gave us the customization needed to manage workloads in a way that made sense for us.

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Approaching products and problems

This is an interesting component of the design philosophy. I had initially created a workflow for how to approach product and feature problems when starting from scratch, taking steps to automate much of the process from the moment a new ClickUp project was created. As I finished and implemented the workflow, I realized that it was a very unnecessary part of the design philosophy.

Workflows tend to generalize problems that run through them (Do A then B then C for a given problem). It’s almost impossible to encompass the set of all problems within a product design space. Products and features are different, made differently, for different people. Even when we have an established user group, it is difficult to predict what elements of our workflow need more focus or less. I made the decision to scrap the whole thing and instead present resources that give insight to the tools and techniques available to designers (research, define, test, question, design, iterate, prototype, etc.) and leave the judgement to the designer that works on the project or feature.

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Fostering Relationships

Other Departments

Design has a unique position in a company. It is one of the few departments that needs to have a good understanding of what other departments do in their day to day. We receive a lot of requests for assets, from documents to illustrations, and it can get quickly overwhelming if we don’t have a request process in place, and more importantly, if we are not clear on the requirements of the requested asset.

I created a design request form and a testing request form that allows for team members to place official requests, provide all the detailed information needed on our end, and automatically process it into Clickup as a task so that it is slotted into our ongoing sprint.

Further resources created to help communication with other departments:

Project status - Links to all Figma files with an indication on their status (ongoing, in-progress, complete).

Best practice documents (created by the very talented Emily O’Leary and Taylor Newman respectively) - Testing and experimentation worksheet and example, Retool guide for key-variable document updates.

Figma hand-offs - View only files for marketing and engineering to leave comments and inspect screens that are finalized sources of truth.

Everything bookmarked on Slack.

‍Design Specific

My primary goal in managing a small team was to create a work environment that provided challenges, support, and amiability.

I stay far away from micromanaging and overwhelming. I trust the team will come to me for collaboration and support whenever they need it, and the weekly check-ins act as scheduled time to chat about how they’re doing. It also helps that the team is comprised of highly talented individuals.

Collaboration is a big part of what makes a team run. It allows greater understanding towards what other folks are working on and another set of eyes is always valuable when it comes to validating ideas and directions. We created a design-review slack channel to post in-progress or completed designs for feedback from the rest of the team.