As a senior IC, I apply leadership skills from my managerial experience to foster collaboration, set high standards, and support fellow designers' growth. I’m also passionate about creating inclusive and accessible designs that can connect with a broader audience.
Role
Lead and facilitate conversations
Keywords
design crit, design system accessibilty, inclusive design
Date
Ongoing
This is the deck I send out weekly to leadership and cross functional partner with the latest design updates. It serves the purpose of informing our partners and leadership, also to encourage conversations across fuctions and teams.
My team is made up of 9 squads, each with a lead and a senior designer. We get together three times a week for feedback sessions, where I help facilitate and make sure we're staying consistent. I really encourage a feedback-friendly atmosphere, where design leads have the freedom to decide how best to use the input. I also use tools like context setting frameworks, best practise to set up figma, the 'Do, Try, Consider' method to keep communication clear and helpful for everyone involved.
While the team explores new ideas and maintains existing designs, it's crucial to have a shared library system. I worked with design engineering to build design tokens and create a comprehensive library, with product designers consolidating components for easy integration by engineering.
In my design process, accessibility is extremely important since we have millions of users using our products. Things like color contrast, text readability, alt text labeling will go through rounds of reviews.
One example is election, there are lots of very specific colors in the map and we used tricks like adding textures and the background and shadow around the text to make sure it is legible despite some specific color we have to use. Also using modal on the map and tables further down the page for detail information in case users want more clarity.
Design work and porfolio site made by Cat Tai