Design team meetup Istanbul edition

Archive
1

The Design team had a meetup in Istanbul following the Status offsite.

Here’s an overview of the topics discussed and outcomes.

Agenda

Day 1

  • 11:00 - 11:10 Set agenda

  • 11:10 - 12:00 Retrospective (Q2 + Q3)

  • 12:00 - 13:00 Futurespective (beyond next year)

  • 13:00 - 14:30 Lunch

  • 14:30 - 15:30 Project updates (demo, summary discussion)

  • 15:30 - 16:30 Review Wrike + define other projects

  • Influencing roadmap / Getting buying (Andrei)

  • Teller blog post (Simon)

Day 2

  • Sightseeing, hangout, connect

Retrospective

A reflection on the last 5-6 months, ca. since april, using a sailboat metaphor.

What makes us happy

Maciej

  • @yalu’s contributions (valued bounty contributor)
  • V1 focus
  • Simon’s work on Teller
  • W.B.N. (Window based navigation project)
  • Core UI team’s perseverance
  • (recent weeks) More balanced distribution of weight for shared design tasks

Simon

  • Status Design results
  • Status values
  • Hester, Maciej, Andrei (support and design feedback)
  • Embark team

Andrei

  • Onboarding
  • Wallet + Keycard

Hester

  • Support for design from @naghdy
  • Resilience of (design) team
  • Collaboration on design topics/content
  • Face-to-face time
  • Andrei, Maciej, Simon (being back, responsiveness and support, proactivity)

What holds us back

  • MultiAccount (complexity, unanticipated impact)
  • Organizational changes (2x)
  • Unbalanced distribution of weight for shared design tasks
  • Lack of UI engineer(s)
  • Unclear vision
  • Lack of data
  • Lack of priority chat
  • Missing Slack/rich communication (2x)
  • Repeating of discussions
  • Switching between details and bigger picture
  • Backtracking of decisions
  • Tunnelvision (Topics dominating conversations, losing perspective)
  • Lack of clear decisions

What drives us forward

For all of us it was easier to name things that make the work rewarding or slightly easier. The space and way of working is challenging all together. “Like walking against the wind” (? Description by Maciej)

  • Collaboration with PM’s @rachel and @guylouis
  • Keeping distance/picking battles
  • Support from others
  • Challenges are rewarding (2x)
  • Feedback
  • Coordination by Hester and @rachel
  • Planning
  • Good work/results

Futurespective

We had a free format discussion around what design at Status should look like beyond next year. This led to 1) a stakeholder map, 2) a discussion on communication flows and cross project requirements, and 3) a discussion about to what extent and how we can bring a design way of working in line with our principles.

Stakeholder map

Size of the circles indicates relative size of swarms. Green dots are Maciej (Core), Andrei (Keycard/Payment network) and Simon (Teller/Embark). Red dot is Hester.

20190924_131054
20190924_131054416×600 178 KB

The rough map shows where we lack presence and miss a communication flow specific to design; To understand upcoming changes and design requirements.

Outcomes:

  • Maciej to initiate talks with Rachel and Nimbus team. Recommendation from Dustin to talk to Zachary or Jacek on impact as a result of the different development phases. Specifically Iuri (Nimbus) about web3 impact. (E.g. what shard a DApp is on)
  • Maciej to initiate talks with Rachel and Protocol team.
  • Simon to initiate talks with Hester and Iuri (Embark) about other DApp projects (e.g. decentralized Reddit)
  • Hester to monitor SWARM or other storage solution development

Communication throughout the design process

We discussed how we can keep each other in the loop of decisions made within a given project.

Outcomes:

  • Depends on project.
  • Communicate more visually during design calls (extend to 1h if needed)
  • Requirements for other projects flagged in design weekly. Relevant designer will champion and prioritize with PM and circle back to the requester. (Flagged during meetup by Simon: Teller, and Liquid Funding, need account switching in browser to select a wallet to connect. Cc @Rachel @guylouis. Teller needs a more accurate )

Organize design in line with principles

We discussed how we can apply our principles to the design process.

Outcomes:
Consensus that fully decentralized, permissionless design (I.e. Open design) requires:

  • Quality level of resources that allows contributors to gain full understanding of materials and required product context
  • Maturity of best practice design patterns to ensure good product design.
  • Significant effort to achieve both that cannot be achieved with current resources and workload

We can work in phases to gradually become more open:

  1. This month - Transparency. Post links to Figma with some context on Discuss

  2. Coming 2 months - Transparency. Blogpost for Hero project Teller describing way of working (Hester to start thread with Simon and Jonny. Format: Interview style)

  3. Coming 6 months - Continuity and Inclusivity. Leave breadcrumbs, add captions to projects in Figma, Record video (call) of handoff if applicable, Create issue on Github with sufficient context (instead of PM)

  4. 2030, or before :wink: - Open Design. Design system with edit permission control. Contributor requirements to obtain editor permission control.

Project updates

  • Demo by Simon on Teller V1.1 (initial improvements after joining in June), V1.2 (Updates after UX testing at ETHBerlin) and V2 (Future higher (implementation) impact changes.

  • Core by Maciej mostly PR’s and ioning out issues for Core V1 release.

  • Keycard/Payment network by Andrei. Recap of roadmap discussed during offsite: Keycard for iOS, Ledger, Point of Sales. Flagged that Core Wallet experience and update of transaction flow (design available for validation against use cases) is critical for Payment Network. Cc @Rachel @Guy-louis

AOB

Influencing roadmap

We discussed how we can safeguard that improvements or features critical to the user experience are included and prioritized on the roadmap of respective teams.

Outcome:

  • Work embedded in product team as much as possible. Get involved in product definition early.

  • Reach out to infrastructure team/projects to understand impact and translate to UI requirements early.

Teller blog post

See Futurespective 2nd bullet

10 Likes
2

Awesome recap, nice work folks!

1 Like
3

thanks for the awesome claps :clap: we got from the pops meetup next door!

1 Like
4

This is great, you guys. Thanks for the thorough share-out, @hester.

I want to add a fat +1 to the following:

What makes us happy

  • @yalu’s contributions (valued bounty contributor)
  • Core UI team’s perseverance
  • Support for design from @naghdy
  • Face-to-face time
  • Andrei, Maciej, Simon (being back, responsiveness and support, proactivity)

and

What holds us back

  • Lack of UI engineer(s)
  • Missing Slack/rich communication (2x)

I hope we’re well on the path to addressing issues with org changes, unclear vision, and lack of data, and that we also learned from our MultiAccount mistakes—especially with this conversation advancing.

I’m working with Jakub (and hopefully Adam as well) to get a simple dash in place that we can all use to start benchmarking success—namely, using unique Peer IDs as a proxy for active users. The data exists for Whisper IDs, now it’s about making it a bit simpler to access.

On this note:

  • Maciej to initiate talks with Rachel and Nimbus team. Recommendation from Dustin to talk to Zachary or Jacek on impact as a result of the different development phases. Specifically Iuri (Nimbus) about web3 impact. (E.g. what shard a DApp is on)
  • Maciej to initiate talks with Rachel and Protocol team.

I’m more than happy to collaborate.

And on this:

Influencing roadmap
We discussed how we can safeguard that improvements or features critical to the user experience are included and prioritized on the roadmap of respective teams.
Outcome:

  • Work embedded in product team as much as possible. Get involved in product definition early.

I know we didn’t dedicate a tremendous out of time for planning in Istanbul. I was thinking about hosting a session dedicated to v1.N planning in the next month. I feel the best theme is @andrey’s slogan “Make Chat Great Again,” but we do have some other needs to balance, and I’d like to push the UI engineer recruitment a bit further too (so we can plan with a bit more leeway :crossed_fingers:).

What do you guys think about a synchronous planning session in the back half of October?

For v1 release requirements, the best record is the GH label, or Wrike. Within Wrike, I’ve split the labeled issues into features & bugs and P0 (release blockers) and P1 (we’d survive without).

2 Likes
5

“Make Chat Great Again,”

:raised_hands:

What do you guys think about a synchronous planning session in the back half of October?

:raised_hands:
sgtm, I’m ready to get started on that whenever you are

6

Awesome write up @hester. Can’t wait to see all the awesome work that the design team will create in the next coming months/years.

Looking fwd to reading a Wired article in < 5 years with the title “Meet the team that designed for the new internet” :rocket::rocket::rocket:.

You guys rock!

5 Likes