The Value of Guilds: Design Conversations

What are Guilds?

Phase2 uses the term guild to describe groups of employees who meet regularly to discuss and work on a particular area of interest or specific deliverables. The guild experience fosters better collaboration and communication between distinct teams, helps identify ways to adjust structuring our engagements, and ultimately helps us work together more effectively.

First and foremost, guilds exemplify Phase2’s value of “learn, collaborate, and share knowledge openly.”

What is the Design Implementation Guild?

We use the term design implementation to refer to the process of taking the user interface wireframes and mockups created by designers, and writing software code to build them as part of a website or web application.

The design implementation guild is the place where the Design, UX, Frontend Development, and Solutions Consulting practices get an opportunity to discuss what it takes to transition a project from creative work to a web application interface.

The guild is a space in which design teams can demo their work, get feedback from developers, and innovate their designs. We've had demos of stylescapes, wireframes, Figma designs and even design systems (coded components). Most importantly, it’s a space for designers, UX, and frontend developers to openly discuss issues and come up with solutions.

In the guild setting, designers welcome questions from the development team to better understand the reasoning behind visual decisions and deliverables. Designers also provide details about their process and the considerations they make while working. In turn, developers give input on how designs are delivered, as well as techniques and organization tips that help developers use and interact with the designs. 

The Importance of Conversations

Guild discussions help us stay on the cutting edge of innovation especially when we can identify gaps in design implementation and fill them immediately. Design implementation check-ins ensure designs are feasible and meet accessibility standards across projects. As a result of the guild experience, frontend developers are now part of project teams from the very inception of an initiative. They’re able to ask questions, give feedback, and offer implementation approaches. This is resulting in wireframes and designs that more accurately reflect the product we ultimately deliver. 

Guild meetings provide a casual space to collaborate, keep design, UX, and development aligned on approach and expectations, and reduce confusion or potential misunderstandings. We also use the opportunity to highlight techniques that are working well so they may be replicated across projects. Finally, project team efficiency increases as designers, UX, and developers gain a shared understanding of each other’s work.

Evolving to Meet Clients' Needs

Guilds have had an overwhelmingly positive impact on client initiatives.

For example, regular design/development syncs keep the feedback loop open—avoiding any issues or ambiguities, freeing up necessary resources, and honing communication—all helping to produce a robust final product. This creates an opportunity for the project team to talk about tradeoffs of different approaches with the client early in the project:

“If we use this design, it will take this much time to build, but if we adjust the design slightly in this certain way, we can build the feature faster for you, achieve the same goals you had for the feature, and have more time for building other features.” Implementing feedback from ongoing guild meetings also means that clients get a more finalized experience earlier in the project. 

Finally, design system documentation is now delivered alongside the application development documentation, giving clients an in-depth opportunity to watch their designs come to life within the browser.

Is the Guild Experience Right for Your Organization

If the guild experience sounds like something you would like to implement at your organization, here are some considerations:  

• Look for opportunities within your own projects and teams to open up the conversation to include interactions outside of your discrete discipline.
• Create an open conversation space, on a regular cadence, where discussions can be had with people from all departments.
• Define goals and desired outcomes for what interdepartmental conversations should look like, just as you would for your clients.

Let it be a feedback loop, not a feedback line. Everyone should feel comfortable speaking up when they face issues and have suggestions. Most of all, keep it relaxed and let these conversations evolve and grow as a part of your culture—you could be surprised by where it leads your projects. 

Thanks to the entire Design Implementation Guild for helping put together this blog post—especially Dan Muzyka, Matt Curtin, Ofer Shaal, and Justin Kalaskey.

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