For design team with love <3
A shared desk for the team's tools that grew, on its own, into a small internal home.
Mid-June I had a small idea: a "Saved" for the whole team. One page where our design team at ExpoPlatform could drop the tools, articles and videos we actually use, and find them again a month later instead of scrolling back through Slack. That was the whole plan. A desk, nothing more.
Then I liked the process too much to stop. Every small thing I added, someone on the team noticed the next morning and said something about it, and that turned out to be the best feedback loop I have ever had. By September the desk had grown into a small internal home for the team: shared links, articles people wrote about their own work, time tracking with streaks and kudos, an analytics page, a window for feature requests, and a bot that gently nags about unlogged hours on Fridays.
Nobody asked for it. That is exactly why it was fun.
The problem
Seven designers, one product, and the useful stuff kept evaporating:
- A good plugin or a workflow trick lived in a Slack thread for a day and was gone.
- Nobody could see what anyone else was working on without asking.
- Tracked time sat in Jira, where checking it takes longer than tracking it.
- Ideas for our own tooling had nowhere to land, so they did not land.
None of this was on any roadmap. It was small friction, every day, for everyone I sit next to.
A desk first
The first version was exactly that: paste a link, it unfurls into a card. Tools, articles, videos, channels, posts and notes. Filter by kind, switch between cards and a list, and if the label guessed wrong, tap it and fix it.
Filter by kind, switch Cards or List — and tap any label to correct it.
Every card can carry the disciplines it helps, Product, UX, Web, Motion or Brand, and "For me" reads the disciplines on your own profile and shows only what is yours. Small thing. It is the first filter people reach for.
Tag a card for the people it helps. “For me” reads the disciplines on your own profile.
Next.js and Supabase, gated to company email addresses so anyone on the team could sign in without me handing out invites one by one. The first time I opened it and saw someone else's avatar already there, I knew it was going to become more than a desk.
2 online right now — Sam just opened the Desk.
Then it became a hub
Time tracking came next and took longest to get right. The standard Jira tooling caps worklog history at the twenty oldest entries per ticket, fine for a small task and quietly wrong for anyone with real history. So I wrote my own script against the Jira REST API, cached it in Supabase, and let it refresh on its own schedule.
On top of that sits the part people actually look at: a heatmap per person, a weekly leaderboard, working-day streaks, and little badges you earn without trying. A streak is a silly thing to care about. Everyone cares about it.
Sam
1043h logged · last 48 weeks
For our team lead this became the quickest read of the week: one page, who is on what, whether the hours are in, no message needed. A "Current focus" card per person shows the tasks they booked time to most recently, newest first.
- Investigate & redesign the home screen
- Role visibility matrix
- Meetings — design review time
- 7designers signed in
- 26items on the shared desk
- 712page visits logged
- 3what's new releases
Kudos, with confetti
Caught a teammate nailing it? Send a little hype. It lands on the wall, sets off a burst of confetti, and shows up in their notifications. One of the designers asked to thank several people at once, so now you pick everyone involved and send once. The counting stays honest: three people receive it, you sent one.
“carried the whole release week”
I did not expect this to be the feature people used most. It is.
Ask for a thing
A little cartoon me sits in the corner of every page. Tap it, describe something worth building, and it lands in a queue I work through: in progress, done. Most of what shipped after July started right there, including the multi-person kudos above.
Got an idea?
Describe the feature and it lands in the queue.
- Thank several people with one kudosKimDone
- A place to list the channels I followSamIn progress
- Stop smoothing the cursor, track it 1:1LeeDone
A bot that nags, gently
Friday afternoon a bot posts to the team's messenger, tags whoever is short on logged time that week, and says so plainly. Nobody scrambles on Monday any more, and nobody has to be the person who reminds everyone.
Writing it down
Anyone on the team can write an article about their own workflow or a new tool. A rich text editor with a cover, a coloured folder, tags, even an animated title. Drafts save as you go. Write it in English and Ukrainian with one toggle, and see how many teammates have read it.
A new writeup
Pick a folder color, an animated title, drop a Markdown card to copy or download — and publish.
Seven pieces are live, from a native app prototyping guide to a walkthrough of installing a Figma plugin. Every article has a comment thread now, with mentions and reactions, so the conversation lives next to the work instead of in a chat that scrolls away.
- KKim
This flow is so much cleaner now 🙌
🔥❤️ - SSam
@Lee can we reuse it on the desk overview too?
👍 - LLee
Yep — already ported. Reply here if it breaks.
🔥👍❤️
The craft part
What I enjoyed most was slowing down on one small component and testing it on the people next to me. A teammate used the feature request window to ask for something tiny: stop smoothing the cursor, track it one to one with the pointer. I rebuilt the whole component for that. It shipped because one person asked and would notice if it were wrong.
That loop, build a small thing on Tuesday and hear what the team thinks on Wednesday, is rare in product work. Designing for designers is a strange and good experience: they notice everything, and they tell you, and they are kind about it.
What moved to this site
Some of it did not stay there. The command palette on Cmd+K, the fixed dock along the bottom of the screen, the idea of showing a feature with a live component instead of a screenshot: all of it had already been tried on a real team before it got here. This case is written the way the desk's own "what's new" pages are written, for the same reason.
What I am not claiming
This never went past a private team of designers, and it never needed to. There is no public user I do not know by name, and no metric here says anyone's week got better because of it. Seven people opening a page most days is a different kind of evidence than a dashboard nobody touched after the demo, and it is the only kind I have.
It was made with a lot of care for a very small audience. That is the part I would do again.