Stop! Collaborate and Listen! How 3 words changed the way we work.

When our team was briefed on the redesign and rebuild of Women for Women International, a project with a fast turnaround and no room for error, we decided to try something completely new. We decided to Stop, Collaborate and Listen.

Come hear our story and how we learned to:

Stop! Identify inefficiencies and stop reinventing the wheel.
Having worked closely together on several builds, we had seen patterns emerge showing our inefficiencies. Too much QA time was spent cleaning up spacial inconsistencies (margins, padding and grids). We decided to define how we think about space from design through implementation.

Collaborate. Get the design and dev team on the same page. Create a shared vocabulary and experience how the other is approaching their tasks.

• Design created a robust style guide defining gutters, padding and margins across every breakpoint.
• Design and Dev worked together to define spatial systems and translate the design into mathematical relationships.
• Dev created and refined a series of mixins to standardize space across the site, checking and aligning regularly with Design. (Includes code examples)
• Design wrote documentation defining sitewide spatial rules. (Includes examples)
• Dev wrote frontend documentation defining sitewide rules and keeping everyone on the same page. (Includes visual examples)

Listen. Creating and maintaining an environment where ideas can flow and people can fail allows room for innovation, efficiency and progress. On this project, Dev and Design collaborated from the very beginning.

• We met weekly to share new ideas and refine existing ones.
• Nothing was sacred and input was welcomed.
• Devs collaborated in real time. When we had an idea, we shared code and an example of how it could be used on Slack, evolving our approach only when we had consensus from the team.

Come and hear our tale of custom SASS libraries, a happy client and an beautiful site that was on time and on budget.

Who should attend?

• Project managers who are interested in encouraging collaboration and increasing efficiency.

• Frontend developers and designers who are interested in joining forces to make great work, while enjoying the process.

• Frontend developers who want to be more consistent and save time in QA.

• Designers who want to know how to collaborate with developers to create a more streamlined process for bringing designs to life.

Attendees will walk away with fresh ideas about how to approach problem-solving, how to create space for innovation within tight deadlines and budgets, and practical examples of how to create sass systems for translating designs into code.