Introduction

Orange Bees has a small in-house team of designers taking care of tailor-made projects for multiple clients. This created a need for higher levels of alignment, both internally as well as with external stakeholders. Lee Garkusha, the company’s Design Lead, and Erin Morris, a UI/UX Designer at Orange Bees, spoke to us about how Overflow complemented their existing Adobe XD workflow and helped them create their own internal hub for design feedback and documentation.

Mistakes and misalignment became a norm, especially as design projects scaled up

Orange Bees offers a range of services to their clients, from design-only engagements to turnkey software solutions. Each project, such as the development of a mobile or web app, has an assigned production team comprising a UI/UX designer and several software engineers. Designers are key players in the process; as Lee explained, she and Erin don’t just work on multiple parallel projects with different teams, but they also communicate directly with both internal and external stakeholders.

Until recently, the two designers mostly used Adobe XD and various other ways to seek client feedback, as well as hand off work to their colleagues in product development. The main issue was that looking at a click-through prototype without a bird’s-eye view of all screens made it difficult for stakeholders to navigate through the project and understand where each subflow started or ended. Additionally, Lee recalls being forced to generate separate share links for how the app design would look for each user persona, something that made alignment with internal and external stakeholders difficult. The situation only worsened as projects scaled up since it only became harder to keep all links up-to-date and make sure that everyone was using the right links to review design work.

Introducing Overflow as the company’s hub for all things design

Lee randomly discovered Overflow on one of the most popular online design news aggregators. She first tried it for herself before quickly introducing it to the company. Today, the team over at Orange Bees basically uses Overflow as a single source of truth for all their design documentation, feedback, and handoff needs.

The designers use the Overflow plugin for Adobe XD in order to sync their design artboards into Overflow and put together user flows and design presentations to share both internally and externally. Everything remains on file and gets updated by simply resyncing from the latest Adobe XD designs every time there’s a new iteration. The team’s best practice is to maintain one publication link with multiple boards for each project, splitting different subflows, variations, or responsive designs on different boards for an easier navigation experience.

Use cases

As already mentioned, Orange Bees uses Overflow for pretty much everything that comes after designing their screens in Adobe XD. More specifically:

  • Asynchronous design review: When the designers have the first solid samples of work to share with the client, they generate an Overflow publication link, which they share with their stakeholders. It’s then up to the client to check and leave their feedback at their own pace. New clients with no prior exposure to Overflow’s interface get introduced via a quick onboarding call before receiving the link.
  • Developer handoff: The design team at Orange Bees uses Overflow as their sole developer handoff tool. They like to split complex flows into different subflows, each presented on a separate board. They leave notes and external URLs (such as Adobe XD design specs) to developers to make their life easier and add context to the document.
  • Design documentation: The team likes to keep all their past and present projects well-documented inside Overflow. Erin said the possibility of adding an infinite number of boards to each Overflow document stands out, as both designers like to present variations of their screens separately, based on different user personas, device types, or similar.