My Design Journey — P1

No problem. I got this.

My thoughts ^ after accepting my first Product Design role.

With me — the one designer — and 50 Engineers (rad ratio) I felt (like any dumb idiot) ready to crush it.

After adjusting an arm chair and attempting to ingest years of product-on-boarding-non-fiction — I logged into the platform.

Shit. I had just inherited a monolithic-monster dating back to 2011 a.k.a. the beginning of time…

You could chainsaw your way through its trunk and see the dated rings of every button, typestyle, and color added since its inception.

To any experienced onlooker — this was not going to go well. Luckily, there was only me and my inexperienced onlooking. Besides, a few inconsistencies could not stop me — I would continue to forge ahead towards UX enlightenment (I had read the Odyssey at some point so I was feeling inspired).

A haiku:

Don’t add fuel to 🔥

Whoops — I spilled a lot of ⛽

Twas a flaming 💩

I cast a cluster-fuck-consistency-curse onto this product. If software could gray — I transformed this puppy into a silver fox. More on this later though :)

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The struggle was and is real — trying to build consistent experiences is fucking hard. Drift surprisingly happens — i.e. rogue 5px border-radius on a tertiary-outline-button-blue. These things add up — and seemingly ruin your life.

Due to the struggle, I’ve been spending my time (with Jono) finding ways to utilize data and software to help teams — whether big or small — create, maintain, and adopt consistent user experiences.

We’re just at the beginning but I’m looking forward to the journey ahead.

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