VMware Design 2020 — Year in Review

No matter where in the world you were in 2020, we all shared some very similar experiences — ones that redefined the way we worked, lived, and supported each other. For VMware Design, this challenging year highlighted our resilience as an organization, our ability to adapt, and how we came together as a community.

Going into 2020, we had clear objectives for our design organization. Following on the previous years, our overarching goal was to become one experience-led VMware, focusing on delivering consumer-simple and enterprise-ready end-to-end experiences for customers, users, and partners. We aimed to drive key end-to-end experiences, grow and foster the team, and improve operational efficiency.

Events of 2020

When COVID-19 hit in early March, we pivoted to remote work overnight. The majority of our team worked in-office, and the sudden shift to working from home tested our organization’s resiliency. Thankfully, our strong foundation in our culture, tools, and community made this switch relatively seamless. Teams quickly took this opportunity to reevaluate the way they worked and streamlined processes. This new, all-remote workforce blurred the barriers across our global team. Our team had the flexibility to iterate on their personal styles of working, and we all became more accommodating to the simple truth of “life happens.”

Shortly after, we saw racial justice movements spark in America and across the globe. The Black Lives Matter movement gained unprecedented momentum, and our organization stood in solidarity and support. Through a VMware Design-driven project, the Black Lives Matter Handbook, we encouraged our team to learn more and take action. To date, we have curated fifteen editions that highlight 80+ resources, ranging from organizations you can support to content you can share with your kids.

Following this, we had teams in Armenia that were going through civil unrest in their part of the world with a one month war. We acknowledged the stress each of these events brought on our team and encouraged everyone to take time for themselves. These events brought our lives back into perspective and centered us on what was truly important.

Accomplishments of the year

Growth

Despite all these challenges, 2020 was a year of growth for VMware Design. Our design organization doubled as we hired designers, researchers, engineers, content writers, and program managers globally, across 18+ regions. We also welcomed new individuals to our team through acquisitions like Pivotal and SaltStack.

Impact

We delivered beyond our expectations for 2020. To name a few, iF International Forum Design recognized our Wavefront team with an iF Design Award for Design Excellence. Clarity, our design system, launched a new website and Clarity Core, a framework-independent design system based on web components. We launched our first developer experience focused website. We held our first Accessibility Hackathon, which brought awareness to how people with disabilities are using our software.

This year, we leveraged the power of end-to-end stories to drive strategy across VMware. We created stories at every layer — from cross-product to specific product features. These stories showcased pain points for our personas and opportunities for more integrated experiences. This year, we introduced personas with disabilities into our end-to-end stories. We also introduced API focused stories from our developer experience work. These end-to-end stories ultimately set the vision, influenced roadmap and feature delivery, and advocated for a unified, user-centric experience across all of our products. As a team, we made the most of our circumstances and used this year to accelerate forward.

Virtual conferences

Two stand-out accomplishments of this year include our two biggest conferences, SHAPE and VMworld, going entirely virtual.

SHAPE, our internal design conference, was held in May 2020, shortly after we started working from home. Without missing a beat, our team quickly redesigned the entire experience, from mainstage sessions to networking events, in just two months. The virtual conference was a resounding success, with over 500 attendees, 50 speakers, and 3 days of content across all timezones.

VMworld, VMware’s customer-facing conference, is an incredible opportunity for the design team to gather research insights from users. By the time VMworld rolled around in October of 2020, we knew we needed to reimagine how we conducted remote Design Studios at scale. The virtual experience had its upsides: VMworld was free, so we could reach more users than ever before. In 2020, we spoke with 1100+ customers, across 400 companies, had 150+ unique sessions, and 100+ new research insights.

Collaboration and Culture

Cultivating collaboration

As designers, our day-to-day work is largely collaborative. We are constantly ideating, whiteboarding, and working with other designers and our cross-functional teams to find the best solutions possible for our users. In 2020, we focused on providing our team with the needed tools and practices to enhance remote collaboration and productivity. We piloted a workshop series that captures the critical moments for team collaboration called “End to End Product Sprints” and identified tools like Miro that could recreate the collaboration experience we’ve come to know and love.

Strengthening our culture

The culture of VMware Design makes us look forward to work every day. We spent the last couple of years creating and building on this culture, especially in the office. In 2020, we learned how to stay connected and strengthen our culture through remote experiences. We expanded our Community of Practice, including Lunch & Learns to share work with the broader team, Experience Squads to reconnect with designers across teams, and Mentor and Advisor programs for career growth and fulfillment. We also took the time to celebrate in 2020, with virtual surprises for work anniversaries, birthdays, and special occasions. We made animated cards in Figma, played all types of games together online, and treasured these moments of connection. Above all, we supported each other through the year and made sure to celebrate all of our wins, no matter how big or small.

Opportunities to grow

In 2020, we also identified areas we can further improve on in our hiring and onboarding processes. Onboarding in an all-remote world was a new space for us, and in 2021, we are looking for new ways to connect our new hires with others across the team and help them onboard. Designers on the team have already taken the initiative to create boot camps for them to hit the ground running.

We are also focusing on our Diversity & Inclusion efforts to build a more diverse and global team. We are working on hiring more women and underrepresented minorities. We are also looking to expand our team across disciplines, building an even more robust organization filled with designers, engineers, content writers, and researchers.

Looking forward

This year, we’re incredibly thankful for this amazing team we have built, and our culture and community that got us through the year we call 2020. Cheers to another year of discovery, creation, and growth in 2021!

We’re hiring!

Interested in helping us define the user experience for next-generation enterprise solutions? We’re hiring talented UX researchers, designers, and more.

VMware Design 2020 — Year in Review was originally published in VMware Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remote Collaboration is the new “normal”

As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the globe, VMware employees are working from home as we do our part to flatten the curve. As product designers, collaboration is a critical component in delivering a meaningful user experience. We are embracing WFH as an opportunity to develop and refine remote collaboration, whether it be for ideation sessions or design reviews.

We recently piloted a Remote Design Sprint within our Project Pacific design team, using a template we discovered in the Figma Community.

Project Pacific is a newly launched feature on VMware’s vSphere 7. vSphere is VMware’s cloud computing virtualization platform. With the introduction of Project Pacific, vSphere has transformed from an infrastructure-centric to an application-centric platform by delivering Kubernetes natively in vSphere. Our customers rely on Project Pacific to run modern applications alongside their traditional virtual infrastructure. Kubernetes and Project Pacific are both complex, and IT Admins and developers will depend on the user experience to ease their onboarding and to help them get the most out of this powerful new tool. Our design sprint challenge was creating a dashboard that would help IT Admins with onboarding, supporting and managing a new Project Pacific environment.

This remote design sprint delivered the same high level of collaboration and engagement as experienced through in-person sprints. Traditional design sprints can take up to a week to execute, but we managed to condense the sprint into 8 hours across 3 days. The process below outlines how you and your team can achieve the same outcome.

Design Sprint Day 1

Preparation

Design sprints usually require careful preparation, especially when it comes to setting up an agenda and gathering materials. The Remote Design Sprint template already has everything you need set-up within the document, from timers to sticky-notes and whiteboards. This allowed us to jump right into the sprint itself with minimal preparation.

All you need: Zoom and Figma.

Setting Context

We kicked-off our sprint by defining roles and setting context around our Sprint Challenge. Creating roles for participants allow the sprint to run smoothly. At the minimum, every sprint should have a facilitator and expert(s). The facilitator is responsible for guiding the team through the sprint, and helps keep the team on track. The expert is someone with deep knowledge in the space and provides context, challenges, technical limitations, and more.

How Might We & Experience Mapping

After aligning on our Sprint Challenge and the goals and pain-points surrounding it, we started creating How Might We questions. How Might We questions are an ideation method used for launching brainstorms. They reframe insights and challenges as questions.

The traditional method includes sticky-notes on whiteboards, but this digital experience of yellow rectangles on artboards was a fun and waste-free alternative! We also did not need to document our results along the way, since the Figma file already contained all of our artifacts.

We wrapped up Day 1 with some homework: to find best-practice examples of dashboards. Providing “homework” allowed us to keep our sprint meetings relatively short and allowed for everyone to find meaningful examples and come back with more insight.

Design Sprint Day 2

Best Practices

Day 2 of our sprint began with a roundtable shareout of our Best Practice homework. We analyzed what worked well, what didn’t work well, and common themes across the examples.

Crazy 8’s and Solution Sketching

After understanding our problem and defining our focus, we were ready to begin sketching. Crazy 8’s is an ideation method that focuses on generating as many ideas as possible within a short timeframe, traditionally with a pen and paper. “Sketching” it digitally takes much longer, but the activity can also be done with a pen and paper and then uploaded to Figma.

Solution Sketching is another Design Sprint method that focuses on storyboarding one idea from the Crazy 8’s exercise. Performing it digitally provided value here, as we were able to pull in VMware Design assets through the Figma library.

Both Crazy 8’s and Solution Sketching incorporated voting dots at the end of each activity to draw alignment around stronger ideas and priorities.

Design Sprint Day 3

Prototyping

Before we met on Day 3, we had homework to individually create prototypes using ideas from previous exercises. We each had 2 hours, on our own time, to create these prototypes.

Prototype Review

The true impact of this design sprint shone here. We each came back with prototypes that had taken our collective ideas and repurposed them in unique and thoughtful ways. Although these prototypes came from different perspectives, they were also cohesive together.

After walking through our prototypes, we wrapped up our sprint by discussing major takeaways and clarifying the next steps for the project.

Takeaways

This remote design sprint was a fun way to embrace the WFH spirit. We welcomed spending time collaborating on the file together and were inspired and energized by the final results. Our high-fidelity prototypes are valuable deliverables from the sprint that we can now share with stakeholders.

In just 8 hours, we were able to achieve a set of completely different and compelling prototypes, which all also aligned with the bigger vision. Due to the open-ended nature of our problem, this translated to a perfect Sprint Challenge.

If your team isn’t able to dedicate enough time to this remote design sprint, this template is still a great tool to use for documenting your design process. Better yet, your team can pick and choose some diverging and converging methods to get some ideation and alignment in a short amount of time.

We feel lucky to be empowered by tools that help foster a sense of community while still working from home. I hope you and your team can find ways to take advantage of them as well!

Special thanks to Vic & Leo for making this Sprint template available to the Figma Design Community.

Embracing WFH with a Remote Design Sprint was originally published in VMware Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.