UX Guys Blog

This past summer I had the opportunity to spend six months in Berlin, Germany, on “working sabbatical” with UX Guys. The reasons for going were complex – my wife’s academic research, our possibly optimistic desire to render the daughter bilingual, and my own infatuation with the place.

One of my personal goals for the trip was to work with a local agency or client. My priorities: gain some new experience, make contact with potential partners and clients in Europe, improve my German, and simply get out of the apartment.

Finding work proved to be relatively simple. I used LinkedIn  and Xing (a European competitor) to connect with the local IA/UX community. Within two days of arrival, despite jet lag and appalling humidity, I met upwards of fifty colleagues at the quarterly “IA cocktail hour”. I learned that there was no shortage of interesting UX work in Berlin, much of it for mobile platforms, and a surprising amount in English.

While working remotely on a Calgary-based project over the summer, I pursued a number of leads until the call came from MetaDesign, an established agency with a strong print and brand identity background.

My first project at MetaDesign was a complex online catalog for an Italian manufacturer of architectural lighting products. We developed a filter solution powerful enough to cope with thousands of different products and dozens of possible facets. I divided my energies equally between designing and documenting the search and results interface, and attacking problems with the underlying data structures and labels. English was the language of client communication, though day-to-day work took place in German.

Our final two assignments were smaller interface-design problems for internal applications at Volkswagen. Working on “branding-free” projects was a refreshing change from public-facing sites, while the complexity of the applications, workflow and user tasks presented interesting challenges. Taking the high-speed train to meetings in Wolfsburg – at 250 km/h – was an added bonus.

When I look back on the experience, my overall impression of working for a German agency is that it’s really not much different from working for a North American agency, except that the office coffee is much, much better. (I still miss the enormous old espresso machine in our kitchen.) Work methodologies are similar, the work environment and agency culture are similar, the deliverables are similar.  Clients are still demanding, projects still go off the rails sometimes, people still work late sometimes. Vocabulary may differ slightly (for example, comps or flats are “layouts”) but the underlying concepts and roles are the same.

While the UX profession doesn’t differ much on either side of the ocean, European office culture does differ in slight and subtle ways. Relations with clients are more formal, at least linguistically. On your birthday, you are expected to supply your own cake and share it with your co-workers.
Language is of course a major issue when working abroad. I am lucky in that my German, though far from perfect, is good enough to work on German projects with German clients. Ultimately I found this much easier than working in English with an Italian client – being a native speaker is almost a disadvantage in that one constantly overcomplicates their speech and writing. Potential expats beware: it may be a cliché, but at the same time true that “bad English” is the global business language. And while there are many opportunities for English-only work in Berlin (Nokia in particular) some understanding of the local language and culture will makes life much easier.
Overall, I enjoyed my “working sabbatical” tremendously. Quite apart from the friendships and contacts I made, and the workout my German received, the projects  I took on presented a refreshingly different set of challenges from public-facing web sites. I had the chance to sharpen another set of skills.

Hopefully we’ll have more chances to work together with MetaDesign in the years to come.

As a team of web professionals who generally work in a virtual environment (in other words, we work from our home offices the majority of the time), the UX Guys are often asked – how do you make it work?

The short answer is that most of the challenges of working remotely are fairly self-evident, although in the web industry and particularly our niche, they can be relatively easily mitigated. Our fairly narrow focus on User Experience within the digital realm means that while we do integrate with practitioners of other disciplines and larger web teams (either our clients or partners), our singular focus does not require the same levels of extensive collaboration across disciplines as in a full-development shop.

In addition, as most people are aware, the very nature of web work means that teams do not need to be working face-to-face. In fact, since the most common model for client / web team (or agency) relationships is a remote, there are few external challenges that aren’t already well understood in the web industry overall. For the UX Guys, working with local clients and being able to meet and collaborate face-to-face is one approach, but for those relationships sustained from further afield – we follow the same practices as most agencies. This means that by in large, most of the major challenges of working in a virtual environment are internal.

So, what are these challenges and how do we deal with them? Pretty much every internal operation can be more challenging when you don’t sit next to your colleagues in the same building. Developing a sense of team, building and maintaining your individual company culture, ensuring quality work, performance management and even day-to-day communication can be a challenge depending on the personalities and communication styles of your team.

But the big enchilada of challenges is that buzzword of creative industries and agencies alike: collaboration. Ensuring your team members are not each working in a silo is all the more difficult when there are kilometers separating them.

While we know that our model is still a work in progress, we have been fortunate to see some success over the past few years. So here’s what we think we’re doing to ensure that each of these challenges do not interfere with creating a successful team, are not taxing on our clients, nor ultimately, affecting the quality of our work:

It takes a blend of some crucial ingredients – the right team, a sense of discipline and dedication, the right tools, just a little bit of that dreaded word… process… and mostly, a true desire to make it work.

1. The Right Team: Ensuring you have the right members on your team is the first step. For us, that means we look for individuals who have a balance of seniority or experience in their practice; the desire to work in a more flexible environment; the initiative and discipline to do it; and the motivation to strive to combat some of the challenges of working in a remote team.

2. Discipline and Dedication: This is not just from each of the team members, but also from the organization as a whole. From working towards creating a collaboration space that the team can take advantage of, to investing in the best technology and hardware available, both the company and each individual has to be disciplined and dedicated to the model.

Other tools include a set of examples and templates for the types of deliverables we tend to create in our work. While these are meant to be flexible for each project, and are continually improved upon – this set of templates is a valuable asset to our team – ensuring that each of our deliverables are consistent and meet our quality standards.

3. Process: Ah, yes, this is a dreaded word for most professionals who are not fervent disciples of Agile or Six Sigma or some other “revolutionary” project management approach. While process itself may seem to be the antithesis of the UX Guys’ relatively informal and flexible work environment, in fact, it is a necessary part of the foundation without which informality could possibly descend into chaos. And so, we have slowly but surely developed and implemented general project workflows, internal operational processes (for billing, payroll etc.), and more specific HR policies, along with frameworks for evaluating our work, our clients and ourselves.

4. The Right Tools: A commonly held belief, and one we adhere to is that the tools of your trade can make or break it. At UX Guys, we have invested in web-based collaboration tools, and file repositories. Our teams are outfitted with the hardware they require to make working remotely as easy as possible – an iPhone, a decent headset and a laptop are the basics everyone needs. We try to stay up on new technologies and tools and, as a company are eager to try out new ways of ensuring communication and collaboration are as easy as possible. We have also recently leased some space which will be used for collaboration and mentoring, although there is not enough room for us all to work, nor is the expectation that we be there regularly.

We also hold mandatory weekly team meetings (in person for those in our city) and monthly show-and-tells where we can share and collaborate on recent or on-going work. Interestingly, many of these “processes” not only help to increase the efficiency and quality of our work, but also contribute to building and maintaining the strong culture of our company.

Despite the challenges, there are benefits to a virtual work environment – are there ever. The biggest advantages are clearly on the side of the individual employee – working the way we do affords us incredible amounts of flexibility. Not only that, but we tend to be more productive and focused as we attend less (potentially irrelevant) meetings and have less distractions – whether in the form of copious office emails or chatty colleagues. We also enjoy a great variety of challenging work, and freedom (most of the time) to complete it when and how we prefer. And, of course, the lack of commute, and even the need to get dressed some days, are bonuses most everyone can appreciate.

That said, some of our team choose, or are asked, to work from various locally based client offices for at least a portion of the workweek. For those that do, the social aspects and the ability to collaborate with a larger team offer a welcome break from what can sometimes be a somewhat lonely existence.

Regardless, ask anyone on our team, and chances are they’d heartily agree that all of the benefits far outweigh any struggles that come along with working more or less independently.

For our clients, the benefits are also numerous – they get a nimble group of high-quality talent with a singular focus – their project; they can rest assured they’re getting input from a team of professionals who do not have the distractions and, (let’s face it) overhead that can be implicit in working with a larger corporation.

There is a lot of effort that goes into making our team more than just a loose set of freelancers but a tight group of professionals with a common goal, language, methodology, culture and set of deliverables; so, as we continue to improve upon this virtual work model adapting our tools, workflows and processes – we look forward to sharing our progress with you through this blog. In the meantime, we’ll be sitting in our sweats and slippers, thanking our lucky stars we missed the -30 degree Celsius morning commute.