Hi, thank you for your response. This does clarify a
lot.
Why do you make the distinction that UX designers also do visual when
you stated already that you also have specifically visual designers?
Are the visual designers the ones doing the UI standardisation?
How does Design Research relate to the rest of this? You state that
they are not designers, but their work is an integral part of the user
experience design process.
Also, in the future, could you please use a darker colour (or even
just leave it as the default) for your emails? That grey is really
hard to read and I misread a few things the first time that made it
look a little... different from what you obviously meant.
Thanks!
On 10/11/15 22:04, Sherah Smith wrote:
Hi Isarra,
> what is the 'design team'?
Even though the design team (as it used to be) is now split out under
different managers with no centralized Director, we still consider
ourselves a "team" in that we still work together across teams to
maintain consistency and provide feedback, collaborate, and review
one another's work where needed. We have a weekly meeting and
regularly talk and brainstorm in person across teams to support one
another in our work.
Design Research is the team that conducts research that informs the
design of products we build on all other teams. The employees on this
team are not designers.
Reading Design is a sub-team under Reading, and it designs reading
experiences, mostly for mobile platforms. Where you see "Visual
Designer" as a title, that person works on visual designs. "UX
Designer" works on combinations of visual and user experience design,
mostly the latter, and "UX Engineer" builds interactive prototypes
and interaction design.
The reorganization that you reference happened in late April this
year and was not a decision the design team itself made. Rather, it
came from upper management. We do now work within the teams you see
listed on the staff page, on experiences for those teams
specifically. So for example, you will not see a designer on the
Search & Discovery team working on experiences for the Editing team.
Is there a particular concern you have about this organization that
you feel like we should be discussing, or does this answer your
questions?
Thank you,
On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 1:21 PM, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com
<mailto:zhorishna@gmail.com>> wrote:
From time to time I see references to the 'design team' on lists
and on phabricator. But what does this really mean now? As I
understood it, the previous monolithic Design Team was
essentially disbanded toward the beginning of the year, with the
designers themselves distributed amongst the other WMF teams in
order to more directly integrate their services into the
development workflow (which sounds like a pretty good idea to me,
at least, since design is such an integral part of most
development). Did this happen? According to
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors, there
seem to still be two teams now with the word 'design' in their
names, Reading Design and Design Research, though these both seem
to have somewhat more specialised functions than just general
design, namely Reading (sounds like front-end non-interactive mw
stuff, the visuals perhaps?) and Research.
So what is the 'design team'? Is it one of these, though the
teams only have 5 and 4 people on them, respectively? Is it just
WMF designers in general?
As much as this is also just a plea to please be more specific,
if you have an actual answer, or if you have been saying this,
please, speak up, share your experience and where you're coming
from. As confusing as it is, I suspect a discussion of what and
why this has been going on could also clear up quite a bit.
Thanks.
-I
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*Sherah Smith*
UX Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
206-660-6585
sherahsmith.com <http://sherahsmith.com>
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