Andela - Chris Flashcards
Tell me about yourself?
I started my career in graphic design after graduating college for visual communication.
And after some time, I was more drawn to digital design so I became a UI designer and had my first opportunity at an early stage startup called Yourder. where i met talal. Which was a restaurant table ordering system.(far ahead of its time, cause now its everywhere) where I worked alongside a UX designer for the first time, and just learned about this multidisciplinary field in design. And I was adamant that I’ll become a UX/UI designer.
So I started my UX education with Interaction Design Foundation.
And got my first job as a UX/UI designer with another early stage startup called OYA.
OYA is an iOS mobile app that brings women entrepreneurs and customers who want to support WOB together to support each other. It was a cute idea.
And a few months after covid broke out, I decided to further educate myself in UX design so I enrolled myself in a Bootcamp with CareerFoundry and worked as a freelancer while completing the certificate.
and when I completed my certificate, I started freelancing for about a year and a half now. I’m currently at David’s bridal as a UX/UI designer working on their event planning website called Pearl as well as leading and mainting their design system.
Hopskipdrive, ammuni, LGC Biotech, friendsatwork
Can you walk me through your design system
I would actually love to show you our design system and walk you through the before and afters, how I implemented atomic design, etc.
When I started here in March, I only had a UI kit derived
from David’s Bridals Style guide to work with.
So my workflow felt very disorganized and slow because not only
was the UI kit not structured well, it also didn’t have
a lot of the components that were being reused in the prototype.
And a lot of the components also didn’t utilize auto layout.
I’ve created an extensive design system compared to what we had, it’s still in progress. I’ve been here for 4 months now and this is what i have so far.
so have you heard Brad Frost’s Atomic Design?
I love this so much. I think it’s genius.
I used Brad Frost’s Atomic Design to organize our design system.
So we have our atoms, molecules, and organisms.
We have our Atoms here, the basic building blocks; our color palette, typography, grid, etc.
Then we our molecules which are group of atoms that work together to form a functional unit that performs a specific action.
Then we have our organisms which are group of molecules that create more complex
UI components.
And as you can see there’s still a lot to be done.
I still have to create templates, and create documentation for designs and developers.
What is your design process?
so first I identify what should be created or optimized. Creating a UI inventory.
Then once the audit is complete, I would do research on the latest best practices and apply it to create a design system on Figma, applying functionalities such as auto layout, main components, variants, instances, constraints, styles, etc.
and then I would create documentation for designers and developers. Which will have the guidelines, principles, design system maintenance, developer’s hand-off, flow implementation, etc.
What design system methodologies do you use?
I use Brad Foster’s Atomic design methodology to structure components and for Pearl, I follow Apple’s human interface guidelines as well as Atlassian’s.
Do you have any questions for me?
- As a designer, what do you feel Andela’s design system is lacking or needs improvement on?
- What would your expectations for me be in this position?
Please let me know if you need any other information.
It was nice chatting with you.
Thank you so much again, for your time.
Alright bye
How do you work with stakeholders?
Did you have to convince any stakeholders?
The stakeholders I work with are developers, another ux/ui designer but she works on Pearl partime,
And the chief design officer. We’ll be hiring more UX designers in the summer tho.
We communicate a lot of slack, we’ll jump on a huddle for any questions that need urgent answers to.
We have 4 meetings a week.
So I had the sell the idea of starting a design system
With my lead which is the chief design officer.
Because its a time-consuimg project she didn’t
Want me to focus on it because I was hired to design the
actual website.
But as a designer, I knew once at least the UI kit was organized,
The designers workflow will be much quicker, we can also focus
More on being creative, etc.
So on my free time, I started building one
And showed it to her once I had every component we already finalized
How do you think a design system will help designers and developers?
For designers, I think the most useful part about have a design system is how quickly you can mock up a serious of prototypes with UI components already made. You can focus on your creativity. It’s save a lot of time.
For developers, you can copy and paste pre-tested code snippets which I’m sure also saves a lot of time.
It creates a consistent brand identity and a cohesive experience for the end users.
