Top Software Design Teams Must Not Overlook
With the demands and pressures hectic work environments tend to place on design teams, the creative block seems like a minor worry. There are always colleagues to hold accountable, tight deadlines to meet, and clients to gently convince that it’s best to leave the design work up to the professionals they hired.
The modern design team might be scattered and frazzled. Still, resources exist that can empower you to collaborate, organize, persuade stakeholders, and more successfully hold yourselves to a higher standard. Check out our essential software categories for design teams and remove the mundane obstacles dampening your collective creativity.
Design Collaboration Tools
The most obvious category, design collaboration tools, provides a comprehensive feature set that empowers teams to develop, share, get feedback on, and ship their designs. They let remote teams work on the same project in real-time, regardless of everyone’s location. While individual tools differ, indispensable features include whiteboards, access to various templates and other resources, document versioning, and the ability to receive and respond to comments.
Project Management Platforms
A comprehensive project management platform will successfully impose structure and focus on the creative chaos the design collaboration tools may promote. It helps team leads track demanding design projects by setting up more manageable milestones and assigning tasks to specific team members. In turn, the latter always know what they should be working on and have deadlines to help ground and focus their work.
Asset and Reference Management Tools
Building every design project from scratch would be too costly and time-consuming. Asset management tools also make it unnecessary since they efficiently store, categorize, and provide access to various asset libraries the team might need. Similarly, a reference manager is indispensable for gathering, arranging, laying out, and comparing visual references. Using both will supercharge your brainstorming sessions while also speeding up production.
Time Trackers
Whereas project management tools focus on the bigger picture, time tracking allows design teams to estimate deadlines and allocate resources accordingly. Time tracking software may identify busywork and unproductive habits, help you revise deadline estimates, and provide detailed reports necessary for accurate billing.
Password Managers
Design in the digital world relies heavily on suites of creative programs, online storage, communication, and dozens of other services team members need accounts to use. This presents a cybersecurity risk since people are prone to setting up weak and similar passwords for multiple services. There’s a high chance gaining unauthorized access to one account may also jeopardize others. Depending on the compromise’s severity, everything from confidential project files and client data to team members’ personal information may be in danger.
A password manager designed for teams is the best defense against such threats. It trivializes the creation and safe storage of complex, one-of-a-kind credentials for as many accounts as each team member needs. You can use autofill to log in from different devices and even share passwords without fear of leaks. Two-factor authentication is also a security-enhancing feature many password managers support, placing extra safeguards on credentials and preventing anyone but the account holder from accessing them.
Secure File Storage
From initial mockups to client-approved materials, the design process involves creating and depending on many files. Accessing them from encrypted cloud storage is much more secure than relying on physical media. This way, everyone can access or share assets from previous and current document versions. Not being dependent on a particular device or colleague means work can continue whenever and wherever.
Documentation Tools
An absence of standardized guidelines and clearly defined processes can hamper your design team’s productivity. Documentation tools address these shortcomings by letting teams define, record, and refer to the processes and standards everyone should adhere to or did so for past projects. They ensure consistency across projects and easy access to best practices.
Presentation Tools
Your designs have a practical purpose and need to satisfy client requirements. It may sometimes be challenging to communicate and justify design decisions or convince stakeholders of the effort and forethought you put into every project. Presentation tools help bridge the gap between professional designers and laypersons, allowing you to make abstract concepts more approachable through storytelling and understandable graphics.