Rituals for Creative Teams
Creative rituals provide rhythm for design teams. I’ve collected a few of my favorite activities, from standards like critiques to more experimental ideas like 15:5 updates. These rituals help teams stay creatively energized, build trust, and foster a shared language.
Regular creative rituals also strengthen team bonds and psychological safety. When designers participate in activities like warm-ups or inspiration boards, they practice being vulnerable with their ideas and learn to give and receive feedback in safe environments. This builds trust and improves collaboration during more challenging project work.
Additionally, creative rituals help establish a shared language and common practices within design teams. Whether through weekly critiques, product teardowns, or inspiration boards, these activities create touchpoints for discussing design principles, sharing knowledge, and developing collective wisdom. They transform individual insights into team learning opportunities.
Table of Contents
- Design Warm Ups — Weekly
- Critiques — Weekly
- Visual 15:5s — Bi-weekly
- Design Reviews — As needed
- Essential Journeymaps — As needed
- Inspiration Boards — Monthly
- Product Teardowns — Monthly
- Retros — Quarterly
- Walking the Store — Quarterly
Design Warm Ups
30 minutes, weekly
Goal: Inspire creativity, build team collaboration, and develop new skills through focused design exercises at the start of each week.
Format
- 30 minute session per week
- Large or small groups (3-5 people)
- Facilitator for prompts and timing
Sample Prompts
Quick Exercises (10-15 min)
- Create an icon
- Redesign a UI
- Explore a new Figma feature
- Rapid wireframe exercise
Extended Projects (across sessions)
- Create a design system component
- Practice animation and microinteractions
- End-to-end UI flows
- Accessibility improvements
Collaborative Challenges
- Pair design exercises
- Team interface assembly
Process Guidelines
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Preparation: Facilitator prepares the prompt and any resources. The prompt is shared with the group at least 24 hours before.
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Session Structure: 5 min for prompt explanation, 25 min for design time, and an optional share-out and feedback session.
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Follow-up: Archive exercises in shared spaces (Slack, Coda, etc), specifically call out new techniques and skills, and track skill development.
How You Know If It’s Effective
- Team participation and engagement
- Skill adoption and knowledge sharing
- Quality improvements
Critiques
Weekly
Goal: Foster a constructive, collaborative environment that drives design quality and team growth.
There are many different formats for weekly critiques, but here is a non-comprehensive list of best practices:
Structure and Preparation
- Set a consistent schedule and time limit
- Have a clear process for designers to submit work for review in advance
- Ensure all participants have access to the work before the session
Set the Tone
- Establish ground rules for the session by reiterating the purpose of the critique
- Incorporate your design principles and values to create a shared language for feedback
- Designate a facilitator or lead to keep the session on track and ensure all participants are heard
Facilitate the Session
- Balance context with actual design work
- Experiment with different formats for generating feedback, such as generating sticky notes or questions for 5 minutes and having each participant share their feedback
- Make sure questions are open-ended and allow the presenter to discuss their perspective and defend decisions
Provide Actionable Feedback
- Offer specific, constructive feedback rather than vague opinions
- Balance positive feedback with areas for improvement
- Tie feedback to user needs, business goals, and design principles
For Leaders
- Allocate time fairly among presenters
- Keep discussions on track, parking lengthy debates for follow-up sessions if necessary
- Demonstrate how to give and receive feedback constructively
- Show vulnerability by presenting their own work for critique occasionally
- Recap key points and action items at the end of each critique
- Ensure there’s a system for tracking feedback and improvements
- Hold designers accountable for sharing their work and feedback regularly
For Teams
- Regularly seek feedback on the critique process itself
- Adjust the format as needed to keep it effective and engaging
Visual 15:5s
Bi-weekly
Goal: Provide a summary of your team’s accomplishments, work in progress, and opportunities that anyone in your organization can read in 5 minutes or less.
Visual 15:5 derives from a practice created by Yvon Chouinard, of Patagonia fame, and draws inspiration from Scrum’s standup formats.
Getting a line of sight on work-in-progress for large teams can be challenging. At AppFolio, we tried several formats: Google Slides, Coda/Notion, and Trello. The implementation mostly looked the same: a description of what each designer completed in the last week and a visual artifact to help those who were unfamiliar.
We remixed Figma’s weekly team update FigJam. Every two weeks, we open a copy of this template for each team to fill out. The board “closes” toward the end of the week, and the design manager is responsible for synthesizing updates and providing a summary, which goes to their manager. At the end of the week, a large FigJam with all of the week’s updates is shared with the team, along with the written summary by the senior-most leader.
At the end of each quarter, we have the design leadership create a “UX Hall of Fame” to recognize and celebrate each designer’s most impactful contributions.
Design Reviews
As needed throughout the development process
Goal: Ensure alignment, quality standards, and diligence throughout the product development lifecycle, from initial concept to final implementation.
Design Reviews are crucial for maintaining high standards, ensuring alignment with business goals and user needs, and promoting diligence throughout the product design process.
Types of Design Reviews
1. Concept Review
When: Early discovery stages
Purpose:
- Strengthen the team’s understanding of the problem to be solved
- Ensure alignment with broader initiatives and potential integration with other products
- Verify that the initial design direction maps to business goals and user needs
What to Review: Design concepts (scenarios, storyboards), preliminary navigation models and maps, market and problem definition, task analysis, competitive evaluation.
Key Questions:
- How does this concept achieve the business goals?
- How did research help shape this concept?
- How does this product integrate with other products?
- What are the guiding principles that will drive the rest of the UI design?
2. Prototype Reviews
When: Mid-stage development
Purpose:
- Review interaction behaviors
- Confirm utilization of interaction standards, best practice, and design system components
- Ensure proper fit to the brand(s) and consistency with related products
What to Review: Wireframes and prototypes, navigation flows with entry points, task analysis and/or scenarios.
Key Questions:
- How is the UI design solving key problems?
- What interaction standards or best practices have been employed?
- How is the interaction design consistent with the overall product experience?
- Does this design require new components or patterns?
3. In-App Reviews
When: Late-stage development
Purpose:
- Ensure designs meet quality standards
- Protect against usability or brand risk
- See the product as our customers do
What to Review: End-to-end flows in-app, icons, graphics, logos, artwork, emails, and other visual assets.
Key Questions:
- How confident are we that this design will improve the user experience?
- What risks or constraints are we working with? What are we leaving out right now?
Review Process
- Schedule the Review: Set up the review at the appropriate development stage.
- Prepare Materials: Create a brief to share with reviewers, including the design, any relevant research, and any key questions.
- Conduct the Review: Present the design, discuss key questions, and gather feedback.
- Document Feedback: Record all comments, suggestions, and decisions.
- Approve, Revise, Stop: Determine if the design is approved as-is, needs revisions, or presents significant risks and needs to be revised before moving to the next stage.
- Follow Up: Implement approved changes and schedule any necessary follow-up reviews.
Roles and Responsibilities
- Designer: Presents the design and explains rationale
- Product Manager: Ensures alignment with product goals and user needs
- Design Manager: Provides design oversight and guidance as a reviewer
- Design System Representatives: Approves concept and UI design reviews
- Optional Reviewers: May include Engineering and Product leads, UX researchers, and other stakeholders
Essential Journeymaps
As needed
Goal: Align on a set of journeymaps that solve core needs for most of your users.
Essential Journeymaps are simplified, high-level representations of the most critical paths users take through your product. They focus on the key steps, touchpoints, and potential pain points in core user workflows.
Components of an Essential Journeymap
- User Goal: The primary objective the user wants to achieve.
- Key Steps: The main actions or pages the user goes through, both inside and outside of the product.
- Touchpoints: Specific interactions within each step.
- Potential Pain Points: Areas where users might struggle or get frustrated.
- Success Metrics: How you measure if the journey is successful.
Inspiration Boards
Monthly
Goal: Creative people inspire creative people. Inspiration boards create a dedicated space for sharing creative influences, fostering team connection, and building a collective visual language.
Why Inspiration Boards Matter
Cultural Benefits
- Builds psychological safety by sharing personal interests
- Creates organic conversation starters
- Helps remote teams feel more connected
- Celebrates diversity of perspectives and influences
Design Benefits
- Expands the team’s visual vocabulary
- Surfaces emerging trends and patterns
- Creates a shared reference point for design discussions
- Encourages looking outside the industry for solutions
Structure
Each month, we open a FigJam board and ask a simple question: “What’s inspiring you?”
Each team member gets a dedicated area with the freedom to arrange content however they prefer. They can share notes or stories, and link to external content.
Anything goes: art, photography, music, family photos, or design inspiration. The goal is to create a space where everyone feels comfortable sharing their creative influences and fostering team connection.
Themed Areas
- Design & UI/UX
- Art & Photography
- Music & Sound
- Nature & Travel
- Personal Projects
- Books & Articles
- Technology & Innovation
Participation
- Make it voluntary but engaging
- Lead by example with your own shares
- Celebrate unique perspectives
- Welcome non-design inspiration
- Encourage messiness
Tools & Resources
- FigJam or Miro for remote teams
- Physical wall space for co-located teams
- Shared bookmarking tools
- Team Slack channel for ongoing sharing
Remember that inspiration boards are most effective when they’re expressive. While structure helps facilitate sharing, the real value comes from creating a space where team members feel comfortable sharing what truly inspires them, design or not. This ritual helps teams see each other as whole people and builds the trust necessary for creative collaboration.
Product Teardowns
Monthly
Goal: Reverse engineer physical and digital products to critique, learn, and inspire.
Each month, a designer chooses a product to analyze in depth and presents their findings to the larger team or organization. They work with product and engineering counterparts to consider usability, feasibility, and viability details and provide context on why decisions may have been made.
Examples
- App Clips in a restaurant point-of-sale app
- A new AI digital assistant
- The PlayStation 5 dual-sense controller
Retros
Quarterly
Goal: Improve practices, increase engagement, shape culture, and identify challenges.
Like many collaborative sessions, UX retros generally follow typical team retro formats: generating ideas in categories like start/stop/continue, synthesizing and grouping themes, and voting on 3-4 areas. Time for discussing the identified themes.
Retro’s value is in generating quick actions, such as stopping an ineffective practice, trying a new ceremony, or reinforcing something that works well.
Walking the Store
Quarterly
Credit: Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe
Goal: Experience key workflows how your customers do, identifying pain points and opportunities for improvement in your digital product.
“Walking the Store” is a practice borrowed from visual merchandising and brick-and-mortar retailers. In the digital world, it means systematically going through your product’s key user journeys to assess the user experience, functionality, and overall product quality.
Preparing to Walk the Store
- Identify Essential Journeys: Determine your product’s 3-5 most critical user journeys.
- Create Essential Journeymaps: Develop simplified maps for each journey.
- Assign Owners: Each journey should have a designated owner responsible for its quality.
- Conduct the Walk: Regularly go through each journey, experiencing it as a user would.
- Log Issues: Document any problems, inconsistencies, or areas for improvement.
- Prioritize and Fix: Address the identified issues, prioritizing based on impact and effort.
The Walk
When walking the store:
- Go through the entire journey as a user would.
- Try variations: returning user, mobile device, different payment methods.
- Attempt common error scenarios: invalid discount code, expired credit card.
- Note any confusing language, unclear instructions, or visual inconsistencies.
- Check that all success metrics can be properly tracked.
- Log any issues or improvements to a UX Debt board.