• Read more about Part 3 Forming A Design Team: Tools

It’s been a little while since our last post, but none the less I’m back and ready to talk about the third portion of Forming A Design Team. We covered Structure, and Process so far, and with this post we’ll talk about the tools that will enable you and your team to excel. To me, tools can be sorted into three categories, Wireframing, Interface, and Prototyping, and we’ll cover each one and it associated apps.

I think it’s important point out that not each of these tools will work for every team, and you may already have your tool set established, which is awesome! These are the tools that we have started to use at Mobomo and so far they’re working very well for us...but who knows what the new year will bring. New tools and programs come out every month, so this list could be updated to reflect better ways of working. Below are the categories I mentioned previously, with the tools associated with them.

WIREFRAMEING

INTERFACE

PROTOTYPING

Like I said before, these might not necessarily work for your team and some are bound to change or be updated, but for the moment they are working they have proven to be great for us. It should also be noted that not every tool is right for every job, so make sure when deciding which program to use you let the project dictate that and not your feelings toward it.

• Read more about Introducing Yourtime.Intridea

The average commuter spends eight days every year just traveling to and from work. Not us: every Intridean works from home. This means we saved an aggregate of 9,380 hours last year for the things we love instead of sitting in a car or a bus.

We wondered how our peers spend their time, so we asked. We didn’t know what to expect: skateboarding, civil war re-enactment, extreme knitting?

As it turns out, 40% of Intrideans mentioned spending more time with family: Ben got to see his son take his first steps. Linus started playing the piano again—after a fifteen year hiatus. Kathleen, Chris, Batman, Javie, Mike, Serign, and Tom all run. We’ve shared our stories in a mini-site built using maps from Tilemill.

In the coming weeks, we’ll dig deeper into the numbers. Yourtime is the first part of a platform we’re building to measure our lives, our health, and our carbon footprint. We’ll share our experiences as we grow, and soon you’ll be able to add your own company’s team to the board.

Come see how we spend our time. And if you’d like to recapture eight to ten days of your life every single year, come tell us how you’d like to spend your time.

• Read more about Intrideans Gather on the Chesapeake

If you follow us on Twitter you probably know by now that a significant group of Intrideans gathered together in Maryland over the weekend for an Intridea Retreat on the Chesapeake Bay. Despite being a distributed team of Rails developers and designers, most of us do see each other throughout the year as we travel to conferences, give trainings, and work onsite with clients. Even so, the retreat was the first time almost all of us were together in one place for a long weekend.

The retreat was held in a charming (yet modern) cabin on the Chesapeake, and while there was no shortage of outdoor activities (like kayaking, ziplines, swimming and rock climbing just to name a few), we also spent an extraordinary amount of time huddled inside the cabin. We organized a multitude of sessions to share tactics, talk about best practices, collaborate on development and design strategy, and share our agile project management methods including Forge and Scrum.

Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

Vince Lombardi

Many important things resulted from this weekend's sessions, but most notably:

• Engineers learned more about the design team's process.
• Designers and engineers formulated better strategies for communicating with our QA team.
• Everyone gained a better understanding of how our technical leaders and project managers interact with clients to keep them informed and satisfied.
• We learned some quick and easy tips on how to play a larger role in the Ruby community.

Most importantly, we came away enlightened and inspired to return to our offices and do more great work. Of course, we made time to kick back too; late-night karaoke with impressive David Bowie renditions, high-energy rounds of Werewolf, competitive Xbox gaming, and mid-day laps in the pool all made it on the schedule. There were homemade cupcakes courtesy of Amelia and exotic varieties of beer thanks to Patti and Jon's custom BeerConnect session.

Though we return to separate offices across the country (and the world), we bring with us a resonant solidarity and a humble feeling of gratitude for the talents of our fellow Intrideans, for the vision and dedication of our leadership, and for the freedom to work and live in all the different places we each call home. We're all looking forward to more good design, development, and of course, the next Intridea Retreat!

You can see additional photos of the weekend retreat on our Flickr page!