IMMO capital is shortlisted for the UK prop tech awards 2020!

Real-time collaboration is all the rage now. Design tools nowadays are focusing more attention on collaboration rather than on creation features.

We were looking for a collaboration solution even before we went remote. Primary reasons for that were projects that were growing in size. And more often than not, we were in a situation where we had to increase the number of designers working on the project. This was especially true for products with longer timelines or some large-scope website projects.

Our tech stack at the time relied on Sketch, Abstract and Zeplin. While this is something that still worked for the product part of our company (Abstract’s versioning is a life-saver for product design workflow), our Creative unit (peeps focused on interactive/websites) needed something that focused more on quick ideation rather than producing and maintaining a single source of truth. At this moment, the pandemic situation was getting worse, and it was evident that we’re going to need to adapt our workflow to work from home.

Lockdown and the need to work together (again)
So the start of WFH (work from home) was a copy/paste of our usual workflow. Each designer was working on their own in Sketch, and occasionally, we would have a sync where we would show each other what we were up to. Over time, designers ended up being somewhat isolated from each other, and we were missing that knowledge-sharing component of our company. We quickly realized that we need some kind of collaboration mechanism, and we needed it for two reasons:

Adopting a new form of Design reviews
Our weekly design reviews took a completely new shape. We prepared and shared our progress on progress meetings and exchanged feedback twice a week. That ended being a big part of our day, and we were discussing a lot in these meetings: visual design, project strategy, or client communication.