Visualizing Team Dynamics for Better Collaboration
How might we make collaboration more visible, so that teams can better understand their dynamics and reflect on their work together?
Noura is a speculative design project developed during my graduate studies at ArtCenter College of Design. It emerged from my interest in how teams collaborate, how contributions are recognized, and how digital tools might support more intentional reflection. My role in this project included leading research, concept development, and interaction design, with a focus on building a system that could make invisible aspects of teamwork more tangible.
The Problem
Collaboration tools often prioritize task management and productivity, but they rarely support the deeper dynamics that shape how people work together. In conversations with peers and reviewing existing platforms, I found that teams often struggled with a lack of visibility into who was contributing what, how ideas were evolving, and whether communication was balanced across members.
These gaps not only made it harder to acknowledge contributions, but also limited the team’s ability to learn from their process once a project ended.
Initial Research & Insights
To explore this problem, I conducted research on collaboration frameworks, studied existing tools like Slack, Miro, and Jira. My portion of the research focused on the design experience of engineering, design, and product management teams. I got the opportunity to interview several design professionals, including the design director of a prominent company.
Teams wanted a clearer record of how work unfolded over time, not just a final deliverable. They valued having a space to reflect at project milestones, but most tools offered no support for that. And recognition was a recurring theme: people wanted their contributions to be visible, but without reducing collaboration to metrics that felt competitive or punitive. Based on this research, I created user personas that you can see below. I also included some design notes that I took early in the ideation phase.
Design Goals
The goal of Noura was to design a lightweight tool that could sit alongside existing workflows and bring more visibility, recognition, and reflection into collaborative projects. Instead of replacing productivity platforms, it aimed to complement them by surfacing contributions.
Early Prototyping & Feedback
Early explorations focused on how to visualize contributions in a way that felt human rather than transactional. I sketched ideas ranging from network maps to narrative timelines, testing which formats could show relationships without overwhelming the viewer. Low-fidelity prototypes explored features like:
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Team contribution summaries that visualized participation over time.
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History tracking that displayed how discussions and decisions evolved.
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Reflection prompts that surfaced at project milestones to encourage teams to pause and share insights.
Feedback from peers suggested that visualizations were most powerful when they were simple and easy to scan. This led to iterations that pared down complexity and emphasized clarity. For example, using clean charts paired with short reflective notes instead of dense data views. Below are examples of low-fidelity prototypes when I was still exploring features.
Outcome
The final prototype of Noura introduced three core features:
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A contribution timeline that tracked how team members added to the project over time.
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Collaboration summaries that highlighted patterns, such as who was initiating discussions and how ideas moved forward.
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A reflection space where teams could pause at milestones to record lessons learned and acknowledge contributions.
Together, these features created a richer picture of collaboration, blending data with narrative to help teams understand not just what they accomplished, but how they worked together. The following gif and images show the final product.
Reflection
Noura underscored the importance of designing for the relational side of teamwork. The project challenged me to think about how to represent contributions without turning them into competitive metrics, and how to design tools that encourage reflection rather than just productivity. As a speculative design, Noura raises questions about how digital platforms might better support the human aspects of collaboration.