Real-time collaboration is all the rage now. Design tools nowadays are focusing more attention on collaboration rather than on creation features.

And it’s true, working remotely, while still being the part of the hive, is the most challenging for a team collaboration. So, how did we collaborate before the pandemic forced us to stay at home?

How we started pre-COVID-19

We were looking for a collaboration solution even before we went remote. Primary reasons for that were projects that were growing in size. More often than not, we were in a situation where we had to increase the number of designers working on the project. This is especially applied to products with longer timelines or some simply larger-scope website projects.

Our tech stack relied on Sketch,Abstract and Zeplin. While this is something that still worked for the product part of our company (Abstract’s versioning is a life-saver for product design workflow), our Creative unit (peeps focused on interactive/websites) needed something focused more on quick ideation rather than producing and maintaining a single source of truth. At this moment, the pandemic situation was getting worse, and it was evident that we’re going to need to adapt our workflow to work from home.

Lockdown and the need to work together (again)

So the start of WFH (work from home) was a copy/paste of our usual workflow. Each designer was working on their own in Sketch, and occasionally, we would have sync where we would show each other what we were up to. Over time designers ended up being isolated from each other, and we were missing that knowledge-sharing component of our company. We quickly realized that we need some kind of collaboration mechanism for two reasons:

• it enables designers to ideate in the same file
• it facilitates real-time creative reviews

** So… Figma? Yup, let’s do it in Figma.**

Adopting a new form of Design reviews

Our weekly design reviews took a completely new shape. We prepared and shared our progress on progress meetings and exchanged feedback twice a week. That ended being a big part of our day, and we were discussing a lot in these meetings: visual design, project strategy, or client communication.

Real-time collaboration features in Figma helped us tighten the feedback loop in our projects, and you could see the quality of our work starting to improve.

But as a result, this ended up requiring a large investment of energy trying to maintain normal project workflow and implementing feedback from senior designers at the same time. Our process did not plan for that. At that moment it became apparent that we’re going to have to reinvent our workflow more thoughtfully than just adopting an initiative pulled from the article on the internet and slap it on without changing anything else.

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