Heidi Olsen

🎂 The GIF is 38yrs old today! *Soft G*

Completely agree! I would love this to be released as a "mode" or "theme" that users opt into, not have to opt out.

Pretty Hurts Apple and Google are bringing character back to UI, but at what cost to accessibility?

"Let’s design for multimodal, multi-surface futures. But let’s also not forget the 16% of the global population, 1.3 billion people, who live with a disability. A beautiful interface that’s hard to use isn’t good design. It’s just decoration."

medium.com/@evreisberg/...

Kingfisher Bird 10331 | LEGO® Icons | Buy online at the Official LEGO® Shop US Create a captivating display for your home or office desk with the LEGO® Icons Kingfisher Bird home decor building set for adults

It's the Lego Icon Kingfisher set, highly recommended: www.lego.com/en-us/produc...

LA Fires | IN PERSON Volunteer Opps

If you are in or near LA, or if you simply want to find ways to help through donations, this spreadsheet has a lot of detail.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

What does the title #DesignEngineer mean to you?

I'm putting together an article and I'd love to hear what your thoughts are, especially in relation to #DesignSystems. Boost for reach? 💜

Yes please do and I'll do the same! I have an old ass car that only plays the radio or CDs so KMHD + XRAY are my go-tos.

Exactly, my manager oversees infrastructure, DX, platform, and other core engineering teams whereas my designer counterparts are under the Head of Design.

Fortunately we have full agency at the team level to dictate our roadmap since historically we prioritize work that fits into the company's larger goals.

We have one shared DS roadmap that we share with the rest of the product org that includes any cross-team initiatives that would require support from feature teams.

We have two designers and two engineers that make up a dedicated Design Systems team. We all sit in our respective orgs and have different managers. We find this helps increase our reach and impact vs being in a silo. Next step is to hire a Product Manager to complete the "3-legged stool".

Wonderful, we are currently in discussions on how to improve our current accessibility annotations. Would love to check it out!

I love Porkbun! Maybe it's time to treat myself to a couple new domains and finally update my handle on here.

LEGO Icons Kingfisher Bird assembled and displayed against a white background on a wood table.

I spend my week playing with digital LEGO bricks, so naturally I spend my weekends with the originals.

Pictured: LEGO Icon Kingfisher set. It was a rad build, highly recommended.

At a previous job, we would add a camp emoji (🏕️) to the commit message to signal a QOL improvement or "leaving the code better than we found it". I appreciate the encouragement instead of adding a ticket to the backlog. Granted these are low risk/low effort updates, like returning your bin!

Thank you for sharing Dave! That's similar to how we've been operating and agreed, it's a lot of work. Also while hitching a DS initiative to a feature build helps get it prioritized, you can start to lose control over the end result 😅 It makes a lot of sense tho!

Completely agree on being informed and I love the team structure. We're working towards having more advocacy at the feature team level but our small but mighty team spends a lot of time supporting and educating.

I agree, I think the opportunity with experimentation is around testing new variants and validating existing decisions. We've had feature teams create clones of DS components to test but without DS ownership, there may be a lack of follow through and can result in redundant code/increased tech debt.

This is currently our workflow as well: A new component will be created for a feature, it's tested behind an experiment, validated, and then becomes a candidate for the Design System. At that point it's a decision around reusability and scalability.

Syntax highlighting? This app is amazing 💜

PITCH FOR ONION HEADLINE:

Echo Chamber Fucking Awesome

Oh neat! Our research team conducts user tests so it would be interesting to see if we could incorporate our component testing as part of that. Thanks for sharing!

Cool! I'm a subscriber, I'll definitely check this out.

This is awesome Katie, thank you for sharing!

Love the feature flag idea. We are also currently building out our design tokens and I was pondering an "experimental" mode but that could get pretty gnarly pretty quick 😅

Exactly that! The verbage we use at my company is experiments but that's absolutely what it is.

That makes a lot of sense Rogin, the ownership of the tests is a sticking point. Our team would like to take control and facilitate the entire process, but need buy-in and some participation from feature teams in order to find a place within the product to test.

Not exactly, but prototyping has been extremely valuable for internal user feedback!

We are interested in validating design decisions with our external users like a new button variant (lol) or perhaps a larger UX pattern like the placement of a destructive action. Does that make sense?

Oh wonderful, must have missed this talk. I'll take a look, thanks Teddy!