Designing for our Personality Results

Every six months or so, our design team settles into the Austin Central Library for a themed campfire to get us thinking about where we’ve been and where we’re going. They are often great for bonding, vulnerability, and historically, a good way to get aligned internally.

Following a period of transition at Creative Director, designer Stephanie and I wanted to use our campfire to better grasp the team’s disposition before we began interviewing director candidates. It was important we understood our collective values and goals, so we could all move forward in the same direction.

We found ourselves in a strategic position to begin growing our design team this year, but we knew we would need to build our boat before we sailed it overseas (as our founder would say). We needed to start by acknowledging our team’s strengths and weaknesses, so we could not only communicate more effectively, but better understand the best path forward and the types of candidates that could help us get there.

We spent time drafting island-themed interpretations of our 16personalities results to share with the team — after all, we’re visual thinkers. While our team’s approach to this activity varied from more photographic renderings of themselves in spaces to pirate-like sanctuary maps, we found out that — to no one’s surprise — we’re a bunch of introverts with feelings. ✨

Stephanie conducted what we called our Cardinal Directions activity. We posed two phrases at a time and everyone plotted themselves on a scale of agreement. For example, a lighthearted prompt had our team place themselves on a scale from 0px rounded corners to 15px rounded corners, whereas our more vulnerable axes plotted us from I support others with hard work to I support others by providing acceptance. The goal was to put our personal processes and emotions out for others to see and start a conversation about our individual and shared perspectives. We came to some interesting conclusions: for example, while Senior Designer Laura and Stephanie were almost identical in personality type, their answers more often opposed one another.

In addition to learning about our individual traits, we took some time to synthesize and understand our collective results.

Long story short: we’re constant improvers and dedicated to our craft — taking time to make sure pixels are round and users are accounted for. Our collective team disposition lands us anywhere between Mediator and Advocate.

Like I said, we’re a team of introverts. Many of us were forced to take public speaking in school, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t challenging ourselves — SXSW talks, open critiques, and presentations are all in our repertoire. We always strive to be thought leaders and look for ways to push the boundaries.

As much as we love honing our personal craft, we can admit sometimes that we make a precious design artifact out of something that could have been a quick email or rough sketch. We just love making things hot! We are always incorporating more fast-paced activities and concepts into our workflow to help pull us away from the need to always (key word: always) have everything pixel-perfect.

We presented these outcomes to our extended team to give better insight into how we can better support and understand each other. The strongest feedback we heard was the desire for more actionable ways the studio could improve communication knowing what we know now — what does stress sensitivity look like for us, and should we intervene when we can hear Taylor Swift’s 1989 album coming from your headphones, or let you ride out that wave how you know best?

Before the day was over, everyone at thirteen23 had voluntarily taken the same assessment and posted their results in Slack! In Part II, we’ll explore our company’s results as a whole and how we’ve leveraged this information to grow our team. Stay tuned…

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