Collaborative working. New approaches.

We’re working on a side project, the details of which can wait for another post, and the very nature of it has prompted us to devise new methods for team collaboration.

Without giving too much away (I’m a bit over-excited and secretive about it) the service we’re designing consists of two parts: a website and an iPhone app strung together with an API. There are dependencies between each part of the service. Things that happen on the iPhone app need to be reflected on the site and vice versa. There are other nuances but at that’s the core of it, a simultaneous broadcast / receive from app to site and back.

Working out where to begin wireframing the service proved tricky. With so many interdependencies it all became a bit chicken and egg.

I could work on two things at once. I could go as far as possible with the mobile bit, then switch. And then back again. But it just didn’t feel comfortable. I thought I’d end up re-doing things over and over.

Why not, though, recruit another team member and work simultaneously?

Tom had a spare couple of days between projects. I briefed him on what I was trying to achieve, he took the site bit and I took the mobile app.

Here’s where things started to click. We set up a shared Dropbox folder. I shared everything I had done to that point (not much) and we started working on our own Keynote files.

It worked really well. We both had space to concentrate on the structure and interaction ‘shape’ of our individual parts but could continually reference what the other was doing by periodically opening their file in the Dropbox folder. Growl notifications alerted us to when the other had updated their work so we knew when there was new stuff to look at.

Growl notification of updated file

Every few hours we’d gather around each other’s desk to catch up on progress and talk face to face about the decisions we’d made.

Over the following 2-3 days we covered a huge amount of ground. It worked brilliantly. We had room to get stuff done but each had another brain working on the problem simultaneously but separately so there weren’t the constant distractions or questions.

Every time I opened an updated version of Tom’s document I could see new parts of the service taking shape and how some decisions that I had made regarding the mobile app in the previous couple of hours had informed what he was doing with the web interface. We even dragged elements from each others documents into our own.

I’ve never worked so closely and collaboratively in that way before. It’s often a case of taking completely separate parts of a project when working jointly. Simultaneous working on shared files may be more common for development teams but it’s rarer in interaction design.

We’re looking at ways of making it work with visual design files.

In Made by Many tradition, here’s how it worked in diagram form.

It’s probably worth saying how good Dropbox is for sharing files and folders. ‘It just works.’