Building a Design Practice During the Onset of the Pandemic

Article by Pablo Bariola—Head of Design at Glooko, July 2020.

Our research shows that people working remotely are learning new things about their counterparts, by seeing their homes, relatives and pets in video calls.

In some cases, this information is important for the discussion, such as in healthcare settings. Past studies have shown that there is a broad opportunity to enhance the quality of care by incorporating a holistic understanding of the patient’s environment in the provider’s assessment. This effect also applies to co-workers in a company like ours. We are sharing a portion of our personal spaces, but in turn we have lost the capacity of building a physical team space.

 

 

I joined Glooko shortly before the onset of COVID-19 to build a human-centered design practice. I hired our first researcher in early March 2020. After the last interview, I have not met her in person. Our next hire, a product designer, has never seen any of us in person. Regardless, I feel we act as a tight knit team, we support each other and contribute to a work environment that is conductive to design. These are my notes on how we are building a design practice remotely during the Coronavirus pandemic.

 

Ceremonies

Theory distinguishes formal versus informal collaboration, chatting on the hallway versus sitting in a scheduled meeting. COVID-19 has reduced the number of opportunities for unplanned conversations, although chat tools help to a certain degree. We follow a weekly schedule of meetings to discuss work matters. In parallel, I found it foundational to create a space for non-work related conversations. We call this the Meta Meeting. Although this is a practice we stablished before the pandemic, I find it substantially more relevant now.

The Meta Meeting allows the team to bond and discuss matters of common interest that are not strictly related to the subject of our projects. Design, being a humanist discipline, benefits from the creativity you can get from tangential thought and a holistic understanding of who you design for, as well of those you design with.

For this meeting we keep a backlog of topics and everyone can contribute to it. Together, we pick one or two topics to cover in that session. In the past, this list included the history of the software tools we use (Notion, Figma), choosing home office furniture, personal art projects, semantics of the design world (what does UX mean?), computer game design, inclusion in the Design profession, and me playing the piano for the team.

Our weekly cadence:

• Initiative and Project Status Meeting
• Critique Session
• meeting
• meetings with each team member

 

Presence

Leading design has always been for me an exercise of sharing, collaboration and teaching. The remoteness brought by COVID-19 was a gap that our design practice needed to bridge. The counterbalance is that being a design leader is also about enabling others. Being too outspoken, too bold, or “too present” can in turn diminish the voice of individual contributor designers. I feel reaching this balance is a little bit harder when remote. The tricks I learned from my first managers, such as nodding to encourage a new team member to make a statement do not translate as well to video calls. As with other aspects discussed here, more intentionality might be a solution, creating structures that give all designers a platform to have their voices heard.

 

 

Same process, new tactics

Our team follows a human-centered design approach. We use qualitative research techniques to understand the needs of those we make software for. As we build concepts that respond to those needs, we validate them empirically. We do all this in a collaborative manner, working across functions and shaping a common vision.

The broad principles remain the same in the pandemic, but now we can no longer conduct contextual interviews or collect artifacts from the field to understand user needs, nor can we conduct in-person workshops to make decisions together as a team.

Our research process is now based on video calls. That limits the depth of our work to a certain degree, but it reduces costs and gives us more efficiency. We’re using tools to conduct remote workshops, which are slower and less engaging, but we can now process results faster.

My personal schedule turned into 8 hours of daily video calls during the first days of the pandemic. I began blocking time to work “asynchronously”, crafting design or writing comments on other’s work. Driving design in a participatory manner is now for us an act of balancing synchronous (video call) versus asynchronous (notes, comments, messages) collaboration.

 

Multiplayer tools

Past collaboration theorists outlined several ways of enabling remote work. These included the idea of having shared computer work spaces where all users see what others are doing in real-time. Experiments proved that cursors and mouse pointers with our names made for more effective conversations (we can point and gesture with the mouse). Today many tools have these capabilities, I’m happy to see that science has been translating into practical tools in industry.

Interestingly, many of these tools act as work spaces and retain information in their own cloud storage, which means we are managing less information in computer files and folders. These tools are key in our process, allowing us to maintain a practice remotely that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Our toolset includes, most notoriously, the following:

• Figma—Synchronous editing of user interfaces. Designers and product managers have edit permissions, everyone else can see and comment.
• Notion—We use these to plan, for pace keeping and as a repository for our research findings.
• Miro—Remote workshops, to support group dynamics, design drafts or creative exercises, such as drafting User Journeys.
• Slack—Emoticons are key.
• Zoom—When we have something to share that is not in a synchronous tool, otherwise to see each other’s faces.

We still use other more traditional tools, if less often, such as Google Docs and Gmail.

 

The New Opportunities

For many years, the healthcare industry has been timidly exploring ways to provide service remotely, but constraints imposed by the pandemic have allowed for change at a much faster pace. Regulating entities are now allowing doctors more ways to see their patients remotely.

Our research shows that care providers have adopted this change fairly quickly, but in a way that closely resembles the old practice. Many report both gains and losses in efficiency. For example, they are now working harder to get patients ready for a video call with their doctor, but there is less waiting for everyone. Patients do not have to relocate to see their doctors — a big issue in rural areas — and there is a broader access to specialists. Remote consultations have limitations of course, a doctor cannot perform a physical examination properly speaking, but they have access to information they did not have before, such as getting a glimpse of the living conditions of patients. Providers said they are seeing family members participating in the consultation video call, which may result in better care.

Our team builds software for collaboration, tools that help patients and doctors work together. If we can do our job right, we might enable better care remotely, overcoming the limitations imposed by current technologies and distance.

 

The Utopic-Dystopian

La Suite Punta del Este, by Argentinian Composer Astor Piazzolla (theme to the film 12 Monkeys) could be a good soundtrack for COVID-19, even if we’re not living underground and skimping for polluted air.

We have the remaining question of what will be the lasting effect of this pandemic. Some authors point to the fact that an effective treatment and a vaccine are needed for us to return to “how things were before”. I hope that as a society we are able to leverage these imposed constraints to build a better future for everyone, hence instead of just returning, we forge a better new. In the meantime, our practice looks to remain remote, working our best to be adaptable as our cultural foundations shift to that new stable state.

 

My role in this work
Head of Design—leading product strategy, user research and product design.