Heidi Olsen

Heidi Olsen

@heidiolsen.bsky.social

๐Ÿ’ป Design Systems + a11y @ Rocket Money ๐ŸŒฑ Growing a Backyard Habitat in Portland, OR ๐Ÿ”— heidiolsen.com

454 Followers 551 Following 29 Posts Joined Nov 2024
8 months ago
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๐ŸŽ‚ The GIF is 38yrs old today! *Soft G*

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9 months ago

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

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

"Letโ€™s design for multimodal, multi-surface futures. But letโ€™s also not forget the 16% of the global population, 1.3 billion people, who live with a disability. A beautiful interface thatโ€™s hard to use isnโ€™t good design. Itโ€™s just decoration."

medium.com/@evreisberg/...

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

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

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1 year ago
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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...

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1 year ago

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? ๐Ÿ’œ

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1 year ago

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.

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1 year ago

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

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1 year ago

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.

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1 year ago

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.

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1 year ago

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".

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1 year ago

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

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1 year ago

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

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1 year ago
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.

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1 year ago

At a previous job, we would add a camp emoji (๐Ÿ•๏ธ) 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!

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1 year ago

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 ๐Ÿ˜… It makes a lot of sense tho!

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1 year ago

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.

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1 year ago

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.

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1 year ago

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.

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1 year ago

Syntax highlighting? This app is amazing ๐Ÿ’œ

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1 year ago

PITCH FOR ONION HEADLINE:

Echo Chamber Fucking Awesome

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1 year ago

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!

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1 year ago

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

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1 year ago

This is awesome Katie, thank you for sharing!

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1 year ago

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 ๐Ÿ˜…

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1 year ago

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

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1 year ago

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.

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1 year ago

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?

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1 year ago

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

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