DS: All-Hands Meetings (2022)

[Hanastevenson]

Overview

This issue tracks the agenda for the design systems meetings and weekly roll call for projects.

Please check in on the Roll Call Spreadsheet

Template

[DATE] Agenda and Notes

### Prework
- [ ] Invite new members to the team meeting

### Roll Call

#### Recurring items: Happens on the PM Monday meeting
 - [ ] review any issues that are in the [new issue approval column](https://github.com/hackforla/design-systems/projects/1#column-15412961)
 - [ ]  review any issues that are in the [In Progress column](https://github.com/hackforla/design-systems/projects/1#column-15133576)
 - [ ] Accountability and Support Check.
    - [ ] Review assignments for each team
       - [ ] [Research](https://github.com/hackforla/design-systems/projects/1?card_filter_query=label%3A%22role%3A+research%22)
       - [ ] [UX/UI Team](https://github.com/hackforla/design-systems/projects/1?card_filter_query=label%3A%22role%3A+ui%22+label%3A%22role%3A+ux%22)
      

#### New Items
#### Task items from Team meeting to review
  - [ ] Carry forward the "New Items" that we did not get to look at today

### FYI

### Notes from meeting
- 

### New Task Items

#### Items for next week's agenda

Closing All team Meeting 2021 #7

[Hanastevenson]

Monday 17th January Agenda and Notes

Prework

• Invite new members to the meeting
• Confirm new first issue with research team
• Interview Issues need to be on the board
• UX/UI lead and PM meeting

Roll Call

Roll call

Items:

• New joiners introduce themselves - Name, role, location, learnt/goals
• PM to run through the agenda
• PM to run through the Getting started page on the Wiki
• PM to run through the board
• Accountability and Support Check.
  • Review assignments for each team
  • Product Manager
    • Research
    • UX/UI

New Items

Task items from Team meeting to review

• Carry forward the "New Items" that we did not get to look at today

FYI

Notes from meeting

• New and returning team members introduce themselves
• Nasim announces that Jeanette will be joining her as Research Co-Lead
• New members present: UX/UI: Wataru, Alena; Research: Rosalie, Dongchen, and Kelene
• Hana addresses onboarding and setting goals, pairing new joiners with mentors and resources
• Hana turns to issues
• Updates on "Getting started" page on wiki
• Updates on Experience Profiles
• Provides overview of DS Project Management Board by column
• Describes importance of learning and working within Kanban / agile methodology, including pivoting and rethinking roadmaps
• Goes over first issue ticket templates
• Returning team members give updates
• Hana: working on Figma/wiki audit insight report
• Jeanette: provides research team update (research history and interview insights)
• Ryan: provides UX/UI updates (Figma foundations document)

New Task Items

Items for next week's agenda

Roadmap
History

[Hanastevenson]

24th January Agenda and Notes

Prework

• Invite new members to the team meeting

Roll Call

Recurring items: Happens on the PM Monday meeting

• review any issues that are in the new issue approval column
• review any issues that are in the In Progress column
• Accountability and Support Check.
  • Review assignments for each team
    • Research
    • Hana
• finish adding labels to the issue that are still missing them (see audit links above)
• review issues with epic label and define how to break down further

New Items

• History
• RoadMap

Task items from Team meeting to review

• Carry forward the "New Items" that we did not get to look at today

FYI

Notes from meeting

For today’s meeting the PM went over the Github board to make sure that everybody feels comfortable while navigating Github and creating the tickets/issues. A few highlights:

• Tickets and issues are different names for the same thing. Github refers to tickets as issues.
• Please do not assign yourself when you create a ticket. Inform your lead instead if you have an interest in a ticket.
• Nobody should close a ticket. Instead place them in questions/review column and write a comment on the current state. If you have accidentally closed a ticket, no problem. But do inform your lead.
• Leads may write a comment for your ticket to ask for an update. Please, respond to this comment whenever you have the time, this update-comment is for planning purposes.
• If you have time to spare and want to practice your skills with new assignments. Ask your team lead if there is a ticket/issue that can be assigned to you instead of assigning and moving the ticket across the board yourself. This is not meant as an activity to hinder you, but to keep track of project development.
• The PM highlighted various issue labels, amongst which the milestones labels. These milestones are related to the project roadmap.

Ryan, Hana, and Nas walked the team through the history of the project. On a high level the following elements were covered:

1. Why and how the project came to be
2. Sharing of the current drafting of different HfLA Design System components and design pieces
3. The UX research roadmap including research steps performed (e.g. primary research), current research state (user interviews), and future research steps (e.g. usability testing)
4. UI-UX research elements such as the wiki and Figma audits.

The above will be discussed in more detail during the separate research and design meetings that are scheduled for tomorrow.

New Task Items

Items for next week's agenda

[Hanastevenson]

31st January Agenda and Notes

Prework

Roll Call

Please check in on the Roll Call Spreadsheet

Recurring items: Happens on the PM Monday meeting

• review any issues that are in the new issue approval column
• review any issues that are in the In Progress column
• Accountability and Support Check.
  • Review assignments for each team
    • Research
    • UX/UI
    • Hana

New Items

• Review of the Roadmap

Task items from Team meeting to review

• [ ]

FYI

Notes from meeting

• PM went through the tickets that are in process, making sure the completed tickets are closed.
• Leads gave updates on their progress.
• The research team had no blockers. They discussed what they are going to cover at Tuesday's meeting.
• UX/UI lead went through open tickets. There were no blockers. They will be talking more about the tickets tomorrow in their meeting.
• The product manager talked about how she influenced the roadmap and also how the agile environment has affected it in the past.
• PM discussed the elements on the roadmap which are her responsibilities such as security. She also explained which roles are involved with different parts of the roadmap, and how it needs to be adaptable to the process of any project.
• PM gave a brief history of the resources that were available before starting the project.
• PM went through the second draft of the design guide.
• PM made sure everyone have access to the Figma files.
• PM will be uploading Ryans' presentation from last week.
• PM answered questions

New Task Items

Items for next week's agenda

[Hanastevenson]

Monday 7th February Agenda and Notes

Prework

N/A

Roll Call

Please check in on the Roll Call Spreadsheet

Recurring items: Happens on the PM Monday meeting

• review any issues that are in the new issue approval column
• review any issues that are in the In Progress column
• Accountability and Support Check.
  • Review assignments for each team
    • Research
    • Hana

New Items

Task items from Team meeting to review

• Where are we with recruitment for interviews
• How to add images to the wiki, or Issues
• How to add articles to the wiki
• Need to create a new zoom link for the

FYI

Notes from meeting

• Research team to Duplicate ticket Read and review second draft of the Design System Guide #305
• Next week bring along Interview questions from recruiters/interviews
• Research will talk further about collecting insights
• Hana to add articles regarding Personas, how to act interviews.
• Nas to talk separately to Eric.
• Jeannette is working on the onboarding survey, with feedback from Hana and Ryan.
• Discussed using https://www.typeform.com/ for surveys since it has branching.
• Hana announced that she will leave the project. The team is going to miss her terribly.

New Task Items

Items for next week's agenda

Discuss interview questions.
In two weeks time the UX/UI team will show their Figma Foundations work.

[allthatyazz]

Monday 6/13 Agenda and Notes

Roll Call

Please check in on the Roll Call Spreadsheet

The Agenda

First 5 mins

• Ctaching up with new joiners on their progerss

5 - 30 mins

• Recap the team's progress in the previous week
  • Research team would go over their recent progress + Discussion
  • Design team would go over their recent progress + Discussion

30-50 mins open floor for discussion

• Discussion and brainstorming

Final 5-10 minutes

• Each lead would give direction for their team meeting

Notes from meeting

• Leslie gave a summary of the progress she and Hannah have made on designer synthesis since last week. The current document has the following format: 1) Insights on the major categories ( Onboarding, documentation, mentorship expectation, design systems, design workflows, and .... 2) Individual participant synthesis 3)Takeaways from the major user pain points
  • Leslie asked if there is a recommended format for how to present the findings. PM suggested pain points related to each category can be organized into tables with columns specifying the prevalence of the pain, and seriousness ( how big that pain point is - for example if the pain points prevent the users from accomplishing their tasks or just add an extra headache ), the priority level for our team to address the issues, and the potential solutions/opportunities for improvement.
  • Regarding the specific audience for the report/reports, as of now we have not decided on a firm audience. The team has to contact the relevant projects/teams at HfLA to present the work. For example, insights related to Onboarding might be most useful to the VRMS team and the insights about documentation are most relevant to the Guides team. Materials that are to be presented to Stakeholder is better to be concise Slidedecks.
• Sandra summarized the design team's progress in the previous week. The design team discussed strategies to improve the workflow and collaboration between designers.
  • Each design or Figma frame can be annotated with the date so others would know what is the latest design.
  • The annotation can enhance further if a couple of sentences are added for each design: What problems the design tries to solve / the relation to the user pain points.
• In order to increase the consistency between the work of the designers, John has created a design system/style guide for the Figma Kit.
• The team discussed the preliminary Personas or the low-fi personas, designers created before working on the design of the Figma Kit which used to be called Figma Foundations. Please refer to
  • The team addressed the need to improve the preliminary personas based on the interview data.
  • The team also discussed that concise user stories/ or use cases can help the team include features in the Figma Kit that are more relevant to the users.
  • Although there were earlier doubts and concerns about the usefulness of the personas, designers find Personas to be a very useful tool for guiding them in the design and coming up with solutions.
• Some valuable reminders from team members:
  • Dongchen " we cannot expect the Figma Kit would solve all the user pain points."
  • Sandra "Personas that are based on the real research data are the most valuable".
  • Yas " Figma Kit is only the MVP and we can make it better over time."
  • Wataru " we are doing agile."

Direction for the following team meetings

• Research team can discuss ways that they can improve the low-fi personas or expand them to include PM participants
• Design team must reach a consensus on the MVP of the format for at least the cover page.

FYI

• Dongchen would become less involved for the next two weeks as she has to relocate to a new city and wrap up her teaching assignments.
• Hannah would be in India for the following weeks and she might have less opportunity for attending the meetings due to time zone differences but she would be able to contribute to the research.

[allthatyazz]

Monday 6/27 Agenda and Notes

Roll Call

Please check in on the Roll Call Spreadsheet

The Agenda

First 5 mins

• Catching up with the DSers

5 - 20mins

• Recap the team's progress in the previous week
  • Design team would go over their recent progress + Discussion
  • Discuss items from research team meeting : Team's Priorities and Big Picture vision

20 - 35 mins

• Discussing User stories relevant to Figma Kits + Discussion

35- 45 minutes

• Each lead would give direction for their team meeting/ or their team work for the week

Last 10- 15 mins

• Critical thinking practice : What role can civic tech play in response to recent SCOTUS rulings?

Notes from meeting

Direction for the following team meetings

[allthatyazz]

Monday 7/11 Notes

• We had two designer observers from other HfLA projects who came to our team meeting with the hope to learn more about design systems and design operations.
• We put each designer in a Zoom breakout room so the research team can conduct introductory interviews with them separately. The details can be found here Analyze breakout room interviews #437 .

[allthatyazz]

Monday 7/18 Agenda and Notes

Roll Call

Please check in on the Roll Call Spreadsheet

The Agenda

First 5 mins

• Catching up with the DSers

5 - 20mins

• Research team's progress
  • Dongchen presents the findings/insights from the designers interviews

20 - 40 mins

• Updating the team on Stakeholder feedback + design team progress
  • Future steps for the Kit
    • Housekeeping Rules from Start here example pages
    • Building A Design System for your project
    • Color systems
    • Typography +Typeface

40- 45 minutes

• Each lead would give direction for their team meeting/ or their teamwork for the week

Last 10- 15 mins and beyond : Working with your team in a breakout room

Notes from meeting

Direction for the following team meetings

[kelenelee]

Aug 1

Attendees @kelenelee @hdchangie @LeslieCi @hannahcarlan @kangina-tech @winoue90

Yas is on vacation. I lead the all-hands tonight and presented the preliminary findings from the product manager interviews. Debbie asked for feedback on the new lighter blue banner, which I approved because it matched the cover art closely.

Hannah raised concerns that the research objectives for the next study don't feel clear. We decided that the next research meeting on the 4th should address this

[kelenelee]

Aug 8

Attendees @hannahcarlan @winoue90 @hdchangie @kelenelee

Short meeting today. We asked Wataru for feedback on the research plan and whether the research will fulfill the design team's needs. He approved of it. The research team was concerned that the research plan as it stands wouldn't be actionable for the design team, but Wataru finds that having designers walk through their file will be very helpful for designers to see what Figma file characteristics work vs don't work. Although the designers have seen other teams' Figma files, they want to hear from the designers themselves to truly understand their point of view, and figure out what organizational systems work, what doesn't, and what they wish could be better.

Wataru also suggested releasing the Kit, V1, once cover page, start here page, file menu page, and housekeeping page are done. V2 with more design system things like color, typography guidelines will be in V2. He will propose this to the design team this week 8/11 and at the next all-hands 8/15 once PM @allthatyazz is back

Dongchen suggested that the research could also investigate the collaborative aspect of understanding / finding out the latest iteration of a given design.

[allthatyazz]

Aug 15

Attendees @hannahcarlan @winoue90 @hdchangie @kelenelee @nasimbiglari

• PM gave the summary of the stakeholder meeting to the team. Then, we discussed the team's progress in the past two weeks.

• We discussed Wataru's suggested plan for releasing the Kit, V1, once the cover page, start here page, the file menu page, and the housekeeping page are done. V2 with more design system things like color, and typography guidelines will be in V2. And the team agreed on this plan.

• PM followed up on the stage of the 3 documents requested by PM during the research meeting on 7/28. DS: Research Team Meetings (2022) #142 (comment)

  • 1 sheet is ready to share with the team.
  • New interviews based on the new research plan are happening.
  • The external report slide deck still needs time. The team expressed dissatisfaction after hearing this document had been shared.
    • We discussed creating housekeeping rules for our sharing practice.
    • PM could give the team a heads-up before sharing. (PM note: I personally prefer this strategy- it is simple and requires minimum effort.)

[allthatyazz]

Aug 29

Attendees @hannahcarlan @winoue90 @hdchangie @kelenelee @rachelita2 @sandraberjan

• We discussed the release plan for V1 of Figma Kit: once the designs are ready and reviewed, we would publish the V1 along with a release note to HfLA #General slack channel and the #UX/UI CoP. The team has the option to ask the stakeholders to push the implementation of V1 but this is not favorable at the moment because we like to see what will happen organically. Also, we can post on each project's slack channel and open the discussion with their PMs and designers. The next stage would be doing the post-launch research with the goal of enhancing the V1.

• We had a discussion about the possibility of changing the name of "Figma Kit". Sandra raised the initial concern that the naming came as a result of a meeting with only 3 people and the name might be confusing for users.

  • Yas " let's not forget that the complete name is HfLA Figma Kit .... and naming like UI Kit or Figma Kit are pretty common among designers and used for the same purposes."
  • Sandra " I think it's the word “Figma" that’s a bit problematic for me since it's a product name for another product so that's what worries me ... ."
  • Hannah "I think that's a really good point, Sandra! HfLA Design Kit would be clearer - happy to spitball names later."

(PM note: The original naming of the product was Figma Foundation. Originally, we were thinking the problematic part is the word Foundation and not Figma. I still think Figma Kit sets more straightforward expectations for users who are designers familiar with similar terms and have seen and used different UI kits. Imagine they would see a link somewhere on a HfLA toolkit page and they would have a much easier time recognizing what the Figma Kit would be about. Design Kit does not have a similar impact. )

• Dongchen gave a presentation on P15. Her presentation is recorded and can be found here.

[kelenelee]

@allthatyazz i'm going ahead and posting these notes I took. please feel free to edit this

Sep 26

Attendees @allthatyazz @kelenelee @rsschacht @sandraberjan @rachelita2 @hdchangie

@hdchangie will be stepping back as of this meeting. in case it has not been documented elsewhere in Github, @hannahcarlan @LeslieCi @tamalatrinh @winoue90 have been hired for other positions as of several weeks ago.

Moved product v1 release from end of Sep to end of October. Cover page min req to be researched more and revisited.
@kelenelee to

• present research findings on user behavior and file menu patterns on Thursday
• at some point meet with @sandraberjan and @rsschacht to discuss copy direction
• at some point meet with @rachelita2 to discuss current research synthesis

Team to

• annotate the Kit with their thoughts. (Which page in the file?) Major points of kit to focus on: product name, excess copy
• reach out to senior UXers for advice and brainstorm improved ways of collaboration

[kelenelee]

Oct 3

Attendees @allthatyazz @kelenelee @sandraberjan @rachelita2 @winoue90

I presented a slide deck of insights and recommendations based on 3 1-on-1 interviews I had with designers from different teams, who talked about their Figma file and the way they use it and their self-reported needs.

Oct 17

Attendees @allthatyazz @kelenelee @sandraberjan @rachelita2 @winoue90

A potential new researcher Ayah came to observe this meeting. Yas went over Bonnie’s feedback of our team from their 1-on-1. I presented my recommendations based on two observation sessions I did with two design teams. Sandra presented the copy she worked on this week. We debated the pros and cons of releasing the product in two weeks.

[allthatyazz]

Oct 24

Attendees @allthatyazz @winoue90 @sandraberjan @rachelita2 @kelenelee

Sandra presented the latest design work to the team and Rachel, Wataru and Yas provided some recommendations. Kelene joined at the end of the meeting and worked with Sandra to coordinate meeting times for the following days.

This week, Sandra and Debbie met every day and Kelene participated in some of their sessions and provided consultation based on users' data.

Meeting highlights

• Research recommended that teams should avoid empty pages as a way to create breaks in their Figma pages menu (AKA file menu). Although discussed in early design meetings, Wataru reaffirmed that "the line/"wasted” pages are pretty common practice in the industry. Plus unless the team has 100+ pages and running out, the only other page issue would be having 3 pages. In that case, that's an issue beyond design systems." Also, Figma recommended the use of emojis and line/wasted pages as best practices.
• Content made the decision to relocate the yellow "caution" box from the footer to become a banner. The team had no objection to Sandra's justifications for this decision.
• The requirement for the size of the cover page has changed to "larger than 1200 x 800". The template we provided follows Figma's recommended size of 1600 x 960.

Direction for this week and the next one

Official HfLA operation will be closed for the month of December. That means no general onboarding and no stakeholder meetings. Monday 11/7 is the deadline to present work to Bonnie for her final approval before publishing the HfLA Figma Kit V1 to the CoP. This is the only way we can get something out of the door before the end of the year and save the DS project from getting dismantled.

• The ideal timeline to meet the stakeholder's 11/7 deadline is to finish all design work on Monday 10/31 so we could have spent the week on the fine details, release notes, and working with the research on the areas we want/need users' feedback.
• The more realistic timeline based on our internal workflow would be
  • Thursday 10/27 will be the deadline for the Cover page, Cover example, and Pages sidebar panel (File menu).
  • Monday 10/31 will be the deadline for the File menu example.
  • Monday to Thursday (11/3), we have to fix the Start here ( and the housekeeping section if we can)and do the final touchups on the previous pages.
  • If we cannot fix the housekeeping up to standards that satisfy Content and Research, those sections would be left out of the first release.

[allthatyazz]

Oct 31

Attendees @allthatyazz a new joiner Nirae.
This meeting happened on Halloween so the regular team members could not attend the meeting. PM met with the new joiner and explained the project and the different things we did for the full hour.

Nov 7

Attendees @allthatyazz @sandraberjan @rachelita2 @winoue90 @edela0015

• The team received the stakeholder's approval to release Figma Kit v1.0 .
• The following Wednesday (11/9) was the release day for the CoP. We talked about the tasks we needed to complete prior to the release of V1. HfLA Figma Kit V1 Release #445
• HfLA has a winter break for the full month of December.
• The roadmap for 2023 will be
  • Post-launch user research and fixing the issues with v1.0
  • New content for the Figma kit (new sections for design systems: typography, color, etc. ..)
  • Working on an internal design system for the DS team. We don't have a system for spacing, components, and ...

[allthatyazz]

For the last three meetings of 2022, we experimented with a new agenda format in FigJam. The notes below are directly from FigJam agenda and for documentation purposes, PM added the status for the action items.

11/14

Attendees: Yas, Rachel, Sandra, Khanh (New joiner)

Meeting Summary
PM, research lead, and content lead put down stickies first and we prioritized them and discussed the next steps.

Action Items for next steps

• Onboarding new members for the start of next year (By the end of Jan 2023, the team grew to a decent size as a result of open role posts on the UX-UI CoP job board.)
• Sorting the housekeeping section of the Kit (As of 2/2023 still WIP)
• Yas to attend PM meetings and advertise the kit (PM attended 11/18 PM CoP's)
• Yas to contact the Website team to update the DS page (The issue Update Project Profile: Design Systems website#3731 (comment) submitted to the Website team on 11/18 and as of 2/2023 still a WIP)
• Rachel to work on the post-launch research during the break (As of 2/2023 WIP Write a research plan for post-Launch user testing for v.1  #476)
• Sandra to work on the mission/vision statement for the team + the wiki rewrite during the break ( As of 2/2023, we still have to expand the content team to both support the UX designers and improve the Wiki.)

11/21

Attendees: Yas, Rachel, Khanh, Faezeh (New Joiner)
Meeting Summary
Rachel, Faezeh, Khanh, and Yas talked about the potential path for the research in 2023. We did a walkthrough of Google Drive and different studies.

• Yas attended the PM CoP meeting on Friday 11/18 to advertise the kit to other PMs and she & Bonnie discussed the possibility to plan a workshop for UX/UI CoP to introduce and then conduct interviews with designers in the breakout rooms. This plan entails training other UXRs across all HfLA to help us conduct interviews with attendees in the breakout rooms. The DS team researchers not only would work on the research plan and scripts for the user tests, but also they will have an opportunity to put together a training protocol for other UXRs who are not members of the DS team. The format can be similar to what the Internship project has done here.. (In January 2023, the team leads and the PM decided not to explore this option.)
  Action Items for next steps
• Faezeh will start the onboarding process and review the previous research. (Completed)
• Yas will upload the missing recordings. (Completed)
• Khanh would like to help the researchers to come up with questions. (Completed Potential Questions for Research Team to include in post launch user testing #463)

11/28

Attendees: Yas, Wataru, Rachel, Sandra, Khanh, Faezeh
Meeting Summary and notes
This was the last meeting of the year. Khanh presented a re-imagined version of Figma Kit. The team praised the hard work and discussed the possible next steps for the year 2023.

• Based on Khanh's redesign, the team has to distinguish between the Fix and the Hypothesis.
  • The Kit Start page, the fixes in the texts (e.g better wording and typos), and changes in the font sizes and visual elements can be categorized as fixes.
  • Changes in the overall layout ( e.g Template first vs Standard first vs. Tutorials first) are hypotheses.
• A/B testing or other preference testing is not applicable when two designs have fundamental differences.
• What researchers should research the released version or the new designs that designers are working on? We test what we have released officially. We would treat the redesign efforts as our bank of ideas to pull from after we get the results back from user tests.
  Other notes from FigJam
• "Have a clear list of pages as suggested by research team as we currently are only ended at housekeeping and don’t really know what the next pages are." Response provided by PM : "Our roadmap for 2023 is to work on DS sections of the Kit. The previous team identified the following sections and I think we can stick to this for the roadmap: Color, Typography, Grids and Spacing, Radius and shading, Icons, Component libraries. We do have a starter template for these. Please refer to Design System file in the project."