Hi y'all, it's me, Matt.
Collaborating on design is maybe the most anxiety-inducing thing I do on a daily basis. It's scary because design can be so personal, because stakeholders often don't know the right way to contribute, and also because I have really thin skin.
Lately I've had a lot of success in collaborating in the research phase — focusing on early collaboration lowers the stakes a bit, and sets a good tone for future collaboration. I thought I'd share my tactics and thoughts with you.
But first, a song (well, songs). This one flew under my radar: Sufjan Stevens collaborated with his stepfather Lowell Brams on a new-age/ambient album called Aporia. It's got all the hallmarks of Sufjan's orchestral work, with a little more electro fuziness. Stellar.
Now, on to the essay.
I spend a lot of my day talking to myself. “Maybe this whole experience should just be a chat interface,” I think while brushing my teeth. “What if that component didn’t have borders?” I ask to nobody while cooking dinner. The office-less office doesn’t help; I’m nostalgic for folks walking by and seeing what’s on my screen, offering an unsolicited comment or saying later, “Ah, so that’s what you had zoomed in at 800% yesterday.” Besides, at the moment, Simple Health has a design team of one — me — so there aren’t any Slack threads for the latest font trends or design Twitter drama.
Even when I was on larger teams in real offices, design felt lonely. It took constant effort to create space for designers to share their work and safely give and receive critique. Creativity requires vulnerability, and designers spend most of their day exposed to scrutiny and interpretation. Collaboration between designers always yields great results, but it doesn’t come naturally, or easily.
And then there’s collaboration between designers and non-designers. To productively co-create with colleagues and customers requires steel-plated emotional armor. Even the best designers leave stakeholder workshops needing a hug. Once, when my boss asked me to lead a capital-D capital-S Design Sprint with a group of non-designers, I felt my life get shorter by a few months.
So over the years I’ve developed tools and techniques for opening up the design process to more folks in the safest way (emotionally and mentally) possible. I’ve run almost every one at Simple Health over the last six months. They’ve helped to bridge the gap between the isolation of the design process and the emotional intensity of collaboration.
I’d like to share one of these tools with you. Specifically, one that makes design research more collaborative. Broadening the community of research on your team not only improves the quality of the final design, but also builds empathy and trust with folks you might not otherwise have a relationship with.