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> 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*
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