Feb 19, 2021
#Weeknotes 5 (19 Feb) — My favourite tools for work
On my top tools for work: Miro, Notion, and Figma and thoughts around how the construct of the family teaches us about compassion and tolerance towards differences.
Work
Doing more analysis work this week, sifting through and recalling conversations we had with health professionals involved in commissioning and delivering physical health checks for people with Severe Mental Illness. Before COVID19, research projects like this (where I get blessed with working alongside other practitioners) we’d sit together as a team and whiteboard out insights and then create an endless amount of post-it notes and grouping them to identify common themes to make sense of it all. Now working from home, isolated from our teammates, we are still expected to do the same quality of work but without the same setup. We have no choice but to adapt. This made me think about and feel tremendous gratitude towards these amazing tools that allow us to collaborate with our teammates remotely and at times even more effectively. Top tools that really helped me in my work include Miro, Notion, and Figma.
Miro’s inevitable domination
I recall when Miro was still called realtime board few years back. At the time I was on a large project for the Department of Transport to help design and create the UK’s first Open Data Street Management service. The delivery team was big and we weren’t all colocated. There were endless meetings with different stakeholders and it quickly became an issue to ensure everyone is aligned on the same page and have visibility on the latest progress of the service development. We had no time for proper documentation, nor desire to read the documentation on a service that’s continuously changing. At one point, we tried to always have a version of the designs printed out screen by screen and pasted onto the office walls. However, it took too much time and often designs would have changed just days after it was printed. It also didn’t help team members located elsewhere as they couldn’t see it.
I knew it had to be an online tool that everyone on the team can access and be that single place of truth. That’s when I came across realtime board (now called Miro), the flexibility and ease of use made it easy to adopt and bring others on board. It still took at least 6 months until the majority of the delivery team got on board and embedded miro into our ways of working. Soon after, we couldn’t imagine working together without it. We’d have multiple versions of the design, one that’s been reviewed and signed off, and one work in progress for testing and getting feedback. I had a sketch plugin that easily syncs with miro to ensure my designs were always updated on miro and visible to everyone. With access, people can review and add comments at their own time and it greatly reduced the many meetings we would have had to bring people up to speed and getting feedback. I’ve been an advocate of miro ever since and now it’s also part of our company’s go-to tool for project work and the tool has been constantly improving (probably thanks to COVID, the demand for miro has shot up).
Now I still do analysis with my teammates with a giant board and countless post-it notes, just that they’re all virtual.
Now I use miro anytime I need to do collaborative work, be it for designing, running workshops, or creating group cards for birthdays and farewells, there are so many possibilities.
Notion to get more head space
The more I use Notion, the more I love it and can’t live without it. I have endless bookmarks of ‘cool’ and ‘useful’ things and notes and files scattered all over my dropbox and other places on my devices. I suppose my trouble is that I’m not organised enough and too often I go: “What was that thing I saw and used previously that could really help me with my current task?” then get hit with a wave of frustration.
You can use Notion like a glorified notebook or use it to create a knowledge bank like wikipedia. It looks easy to use and yet so powerful. I love that not only can one add collaborators to work on pages together, one can also publish a notion page to share with others like a webpage. How cool is that? No code needed. I even abandoned my previously designed and coded portfolio to reroute to a portfolio page I created in notion. The ease to update it is just too tempting not to leverage. Whatever helps me to reduce friction to accomplish tasks is a win for me.
Figma is leading the way for designers
I’ve always been a Sketch fan. Actually, that’s not true. Before Sketch, I was all about Adobe Illustrator. It was irreplaceable back when my focus was on visual design. As I transitioned into UX almost a decade ago now, I found it more and more limited in meeting the demands of designing for digital products and services. So I had to reassess and find more effective tools. So when Sketch came along, I immediately fell in love with how easy it is to create design elements and reusable components. It also helped that it’s an open platform which enabled others to create plugins for it to make Sketch even more powerful. For the longest time, I couldn’t imagine any other tools that can compare.
When I first heard about Figma a couple of years back, it piqued my interest as a potential Sketch rival as it was browser-based so won’t be limited to Apple computers like Sketch and it promised better ways to collaborate. But I didn’t go with it after evaluation as it still lacked a lot of the key features that Sketch had which I depended on (mostly from plugins). It wasn’t until I had to use it for a project for Women’s aid that I started having second thoughts. Since the last time I had a proper look at it, Figma has improved significantly and its community plugins and resources are on par if not more competitive than that of the Sketch community. The onboarding process was relatively easy as the interface had many similarities to Sketch and they even share many of the same shortcuts. I quickly learned that Figma had better spacing and alignment capabilities, more powerful component capabilities, and more control on transitions when it comes to prototyping. All the features they didn’t have when I looked previously, are now all there, either by default or via their plugins. The reasons to stay with Sketch dwindled and it’s remaining benefits pale in comparison to Figma’s more powerful collaborative features.
On my mind this week
What being a part of a family teaches us —Tolerance and acceptance
Earlier this week, I had an argument with my sister, via email. For some context, she lives in Vancouver with our dad and her mom and she’s 17 years younger than I am. Needless to say, we are on completely different wavelengths in thought and attitudes toward life. I always regret that we didn’t have many opportunities to be with each other and really grow our relationship. I was nearly an adult when she was born, I’ve always considered myself the only child then. Now that we’re on different sides of the world, it’s even harder to develop that bond. After trying various methods, I found that email seems to work well in terms of communication between us.
Long story short, she wrote something unexpected and hurtful. After some more back and forth we realised we have very different views on certain subjects. She eventually apologised and all is good again. But in that time I recall feeling knots in my stomach when waking up reading her email responses. Rather than telling her off or display anger, I’d calm myself down and explain my thinking and beliefs to her along with my wish to better support her as her sister. I try to remind myself that she’s still a teenager and it’s natural to say things without fully understanding the implications behind words used. If she was someone else, not a family member, would I be as patient or tolerant towards her? I’m not sure. I also share vastly different views and beliefs from my father whom I love to bits and yet I can’t help but think if he wasn’t family, we likely would never have any kind of relationship.
Most of the people around me share relatively similar views as me. Often the more we share similar beliefs, the more we get along. Maybe it’s this default attraction we have towards similar people that is making the world more polarised. We don’t have enough opportunities to interact with others who share different beliefs and exercise compassion and openness. Family is different, we don’t choose our family like with friends and partners. So when there’s dissonance, often the end goal is reconciliation as you’re ‘stuck’ with them, so might as well live as harmoniously as possible. You become more patient, try to be more tolerant, out of love. You have a more genuine desire to connect and understand their world. Agree to disagree. Imagine if we did that for other people who aren’t family? Will it bring us to a more compassionate and harmonious world?
