In a team, you’re constantly working together towards a larger goal. Sometimes through the midst of the hustle and the grind, we forget about enjoying the good parts of our jobs. Then the everyday responsibilities start to feel daunting or mundane.

If you’re a UX manager or even an IC just looking to help boost your team morale, this read may be valuable to you as I’ll be sharing UX-relevant activities that made a positive impact on my team.

Team bonding can be beneficial for many reasons:

Team bonding increases general morale, productivity, and communication skills. It helps team members feel connected to their work.

Activities that allow them to exercise their skillsets in a fun manner make them feel more confident in their abilities and work ethic, which encourages them to perform at a higher level of performance than they otherwise would have done without this experience.

It also gives team members an opportunity to share ideas with other members of the company or even external partners such as clients/customers/partners etc., thus fostering greater collaboration among teams within different departments or divisions of the organization (or even between different organizations).

Here are some UX-relevant activities that made a positive impact on my team.

Design Springs and Hackathons

Design sprints and hackathons are great ways to break down work and get everyone on the same page. Both design sprints and hackathons are useful for team building and can help you improve your product.

Hackathons are an event that brings together people to solve a problem in a short amount of time. They’re great for getting everyone involved, whether you’re looking for feedback or ideas, or just need extra hands on deck to help with the project.

Hackathons are also an effective way of getting your team members to work together on projects outside their normal roles. For example, if you have several designers who also happen to be developers, it’s likely that they’ll have different opinions about how something should be designed — and this can be very useful when it comes down to making decisions about what works best for your users’ needs.

They’re also great for getting your skills up to date with what other designers are doing in the market. If you’re looking for ways to improve your skillset or just want something different from traditional meetings, these events might be right for you.

Tarot Cards of Tech

“Are we designing products that support the world we all want to live in?”

-Artefact Group

The Tarot Cards of Tech was created by The Artefact Group and is a unique set of cards that invites designers, technology enthusiasts, and creators to think outside of their box through a series of thought-provoking questions.

When facilitated in a team setting, it inspires important conversations around the product that you’re building. It encourages you to think about the impact of your product from an environmental and socio-economic standpoint.

I recommend using this Tarot Cards of Tech Figma template, created by Hyam. (You can also migrate this into FigJam if that feels easier for your team)

My team allotted about 40 minutes to go through roughly four of the cards where everyone left sticky notes surrounding each card. We spent 10 minutes on each card writing in silence (you can do it with music in the background if you choose) before moving on to the next.

Some teams may leave 10–15 minutes in the end for open discussion, or have open discussion at each card checkpoint. You may have more or less time for your team, so adjust accordingly to what feels reasonable.

Overall for my team, everyone had a positive experience and fruitful discussions surrounding some of the Tarot card topics. 10 out of 10, I would definitely do this again and go through the other cards that we weren’t able to get to in the first round!

Critiquing your favorite app

This design exercise gets the juices flowing. Each person on the team is assigned some “homework” where you pick an app that you use frequently or a personal favorite app. It can be a social media app, utility app, or whatever purpose.

Everyone gets a designated section in a shared Figma board where each person can add screenshots of their chosen app. Then, in color-coded sticky notes, each person jots down what design elements about their chosen app felt effective or not effective.

During your synchronous meeting, you can allocate a length of time that you think is reasonable for everyone on your team (our team did 30 minutes) to go around and briefly share their app critique.

It’s interesting to learn what your team members’ eye for design is as well as how they rationalize or question existing apps today. Everyone gets an opportunity to learn from each other about what is considered effective and non-effective UX.

You may even discover an app that you didn’t know about before!

Thinking bold and thinking unicorn

It’s not often that designers get put into an environment where there are no constraints and no limitations. In fact, it would probably be a very powerful and crazy world if you had a bunch of unleashed talented designers running around with a magic wand creating anything they want!

Well, that’s exactly what this activity is. Imagine having free range and unlimited resources to recreate your product (if you work for a company, your company’s product).

• What would change about it? Why?
• What would you want more of? Less of?

This activity is most valuable if you have an idea that is super vague and it needs to be scoped down or if you feel that your team is running into a creative block in the solution space.

There are two approaches to getting the most out of this: Facilitating a writing brainstorming session or a design brainstorming session. The approach should depend on your team members’ comfort and strengths when exercising an idea.

This technique encourages folks to let their imaginations run wild. To essentially dream up the most “unicorn”, “unattainable”, extreme, or potentially impractical solutions they can think of to a given problem.

You would then discuss the ideas in detail, with the goal of narrowing them down to more realistic concepts to consider pursuing.

Questions that can be used to guide the discussion:

• What makes them so impossible?
• How can that idea be scaled down?

To close out

These various UX-team activities shared above are just some of the many impactful ways to boost your team’s morale and creativity. These also are not one-size-fits-all, so depending on your team’s needs and personalities, certain activities may be more beneficial than others.

Overall, utilizing skillset-based team bonding activities is a great way to get your team together, solve a problem, and build something new. They’re a nice departure from traditional meetings and could serve as a creative outlet that your team members deserve!

Thanks for reading!

🤝🏼You can learn more about my UX work here and connect with me on LinkedIn.

💬 Always welcome your thoughts or a conversation below!