Enable closer collaboration between pair designers
Problem
The latest changes to the MR UX reviews, having designers being randomly suggested as reviewers, has increased designers' exposure to each other's work. In my initial experiences reviewing MRs that followed design specs produced by other designers, I saw shortcomings in the designs that could have been addressed in the design phase by closely pairing with the other designer.
Design collaboration on every issue was the norm when I joined GitLab, but we lost that along the way. What remains from that guideline can still be seen in https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/product-designer/#ideate-and-iterate:
Ask for feedback from other Product Designers in Design Reviews to help improve your work. At minimum, you'll get objective feedback and new ideas that lead to better solutions. You might also get context you didn’t know you were missing, such as GitLab-specific or industry-standard design conventions.
In the Product Designer Workflow page we don't mention pair designing and in the Pair Designing section the guidelines are very flexible:
Pairs decide what to share and when; there is no pre-defined schedule or guidelines.
I think this is too flexible. When collaborating with other designers, many times I've asked if their pair designer was involved, and the answer is usually “no”.
Recently, we updated the Product Design Managers' responsibilities to emphasize the need to keep a close eye on their reports' work, which could be alleviated by pair designers:
Design quality: Be an active participant in monthly milestones by reviewing UX deliverables (such as research and designs) that your team creates, and provide feedback to ensure high-quality output.
Possible solution
What if pair designers actually paired on each other’s work? It takes away time from other things, but pair designers really pairing up on their work is powerful, like when engineers do pair programming. I know this increased the quality and consistency of our work when the UX team was starting at GitLab.
Actually, this is what I've been doing since the last few milestones. I'm experimenting with doubling down on my commitment with my pair designer (@gdoyle) by encouraging her to involve me more than usual, according to her needs. Right now it’s unidirectional, there’s no expectation for her to do the same for my work. I believe that so far this experiment is a success. Gina has consistently praised our closer design collaboration (comment 1, comment 2, comment 3).
Pairs will switch soon (at the end of this quarter) and this is a great opportunity to, for example, set up a pilot with a few pairs that try to work as a team on each other's issues. There's still one design DRI, but sharing and feedback would be standard practices between those pairs.