Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Rayana Verissimo

How I am achieving my goal to be a greater designer in 2018 with OKRs.

Photo by Fab Lentz on Unsplash

For the past couple of years I’ve been setting some personal goals and taking a look back on the year. To me it’s important to have that moment of appreciation for the milestones I achieved and to evaluate the setbacks so I can make new goals for the coming year. This post is the initial step into improving myself as a designer (and person!) in 2018.

A lot happened in the last two years — I moved countries (Brazil to Netherlands), started a new job, got to travel to incredible places and met amazing people. Some of those things were planned while other ones were just a strike of luck ✨. And to top it all off, in 2018 I am celebrating 10 years of my professional journey! 👩🏻‍💻

I started this year feeling like I needed to be more realistic when setting goals. I want to make an impact not only in my personal life but also share some lessons I’ve learned in design over the years. And what better place to do that than the internet? That’s why I am using my personal OKRs (my Objectives and their Key Results) to help me focus on what’s most important while tracing a plan with measurable ways to check the progress of the results.

Here are my objectives for 2018:

Choose my battles
Share knowledge as often as possible
Keep my focus on Design Systems
Ride the SASS Unicorn 🦄
Get my 🍑 to the gym more often

Sounds doable, right? I’m thinking big here. Every single objective and key results try to combine a bit of personal and professional growth in specific areas I want to improve.

Choosing my battles

Last year was a turmoil of changes and initiatives I tackled at work. From documenting design decisions and UI guidelines, to setting up a pattern library, initiating a design system, figuring out how to engage our team into realize a more collaborative design approach, streamlining communication across the company, figuring out how to apply agile practices to our design workflow, producing more effective prototypes…

Phew!

The more pieces I added to the puzzle, the more difficult it became to focus on my ambitions, commitments and tasks. The stress was affecting my personal life and, honestly, that is something we all should avoid. I really want to get a lot better at saying no and focus on one thing for an extended period of time.

I know what my strengths are as a designer but I won’t be able to use my full potential if I don’t manage my workload smartly. I should compromise to the battles that are worth fighting for. The focus now is on me. It’s not only about ownership but also collaboration and delegation, empowering my team to be more independent on their design decisions.

Key Results

Delegate some of the initiatives I started (UX patterns, Design Kit, Product Design Team board on Jira) to fellow designers so that I can focus on UX Engineering.
On every Monday, write down my weekly plan in my agenda to avoid overcommitting.
Clear up my calendar from avoidable meetings whenever possible.
Lock down 2 hours per day to get work done.

Share knowledge as often as possible

I have been thinking a lot about how I want to put myself out there as a professional and not only showcase myself, but also help people as I learn. What makes me unique is that I am a creative with a set of technical skills. I want to make sure the lessons I learned are being passed ahead to my community, and I will use the magical powers of the internet for it. Knowledge should not be kept only in internal Confluence pages.

Maybe one thought or another can be useful to a designer that is new to the job, or someone that really digs the same things I do — such as design systems, cooking, and living abroad.

Key Results

Participate in at least 5 meetups/conferences as a speaker.
Write at least 10 post on Design and Engineering.
Speak to the Backbase company about Design during a Town Hall meeting.

Photo by Brittney Burnett on Unsplash

Keep my focus on Design Systems

This is something I thought would be easier to do, but as explained above I have the tendency to get involved in one too many initiatives at a time 🤭.

I have been working with Design Systems for about 4 years now — when they used to be simply called component libraries — and I can definitely say this is what I want to continue focusing on in my professional career. Design Systems help products grow and scale in a consistent manner and are so powerful that they can completely change the way design is perceived in companies with a stronger development focus than a design-oriented culture.

Two years ago, while still in Brazil as part of the amazing CESAR team, I was working hands-on coding to build a UI Pattern Library on top of the Bourbon and Ember.js frameworks, as well as a reusable set of accessible and content oriented markup patterns for one of the biggest worldwide technology companies (you can check the case study on my portfolio). Being a UI Engineer was extremely exciting! I learned a lot about the development of design systems along the way by using HTML5, SASS, and transforming the components’ UI design into code, validating together with the development team the necessary pieces of markup used to build the templates for the Ember components. This is probably a topic for a next post 😃.

In my current position, I struggled for a while to earn space to do what I do best. Not every designer can code and not every company expects a designer to know its CSS. And c’mon, it’s weird to put everyone inside the ‘UX Designer’ box. Having a specific set of skills makes me special but it also makes me a bit of a weirdo. From day 1 at Backbase, I knew I had to engage my team into building a consistent set of design deliverables, or a system if you may, that would empower us to engineer greater software.

How did I do that, you may ask? I took initiative. I asked for forgiveness, not permission.

I had to step back from some of the responsibilities expected from me as a UX Designer to be able to focus on what I love — which gave me the opportunity to tackle a problem no one was really looking at. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to be working with a team of people that believed in me and gave me enough freedom to do so. That is again a story for another post 😉.

Photo by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash

I now lead the design of the system I started with. A new and exciting challenge!

Key Results

Release the Backbase Design System internally by late March 3with UI/UX patterns and components that are in use in our product and available in the Design Kit in Sketch.
Set-up the design workflow process by early May (as agreed with the product team) so that we can be able to map changes to the product that can feed the design system ahead of the development phase.
Document UI components’ requirements into a spreadsheet and prioritise them against our user needs, technical feasibility, and roadmap. This document should be available to the product team.
Measure the success of our Design System with qualitative and quantitative feedback from testing iterations with user testing and in-person sessions — this should be done every release.

Ride the SASS Unicorn 🦄

I think I have a pretty strong set of skills when it comes to web development and visual design (HTML, accessibility, SASS and CSS). Because I can use my set of skills on so many different levels, sometimes it becomes hard to focus on a strength or two to improve — knowing a little bit of everything is not a unicorn attribute. Like Eric Yi said in his Unicorn Designer Training Manual, you have to have a strength — something that you are proud of and very good at.

I take a lot of pride in styling (SASS) and contributing to my dev codebase with solutions and suggestions about file architecture, CSS naming convention, or just documenting best practices on syntax. It’s funny when an unaware front-end developer catches me reviewing their pull requests — most people still don’t expect a designer to be involved in technical tasks. I want to continue learning more on front-end topics relevant to both designers and developers to ensure I bridge the design/development gap.

Key Results

Take a class or workshop in: 1)SASS, Gulp and NPM 2) An advanced JS topic.
By Q2-2018, update my portfolio and share the takeaways in a blog post.
Build the styleguide of my portfolio and make it available on Github.
Contribute on a sprint-basis to the Backbase Design System dev kit codebase (UI features) by working on the SASS theme, to make sure a designer (me!) owns the interface.

Get my 🍑 to the gym more often

Building a healty routine that includes physical exercise is closely related to having a happy work life. Healthy body, happy mind 🤗. Tech jobs are often (well, mostly) sedentary and offer little possibilities to stay active.

Before moving to the Netherlands I was really happy with my day-to-day habits: I would hit the gym first thing in the morning, be at work on time, work at least 1h extra per day (because I was having so much fun!), eat all my meals, and still manage to stay sociable. A real example for any digital fitness influencer.

I dropped a lot of my healthy habits after moving to the cold and rainy Amsterdam, a city that has an average rainfall of 132 days a year 🌧. I am originally from Recife, a city in the warm and sunny northeastern coast of Brazil. The lack of warmth and sunshine really affected the way I perceived time, happiness and enjoyment. I became more introvert, negative and sad.

I have already started working on making my pulse increase: I’m taking zumba, pilates and yoga classes at my local gym. I can see improvements in the quality of my sleep, mood and overall energy level during the day. I want to keep pushing myself to improve my body and health over 2018 to become a better — and less cranky — version of myself.

Key Results

Renew my gym subscription starting from March 2018.
Enroll in a Zumba/Brazilian dance school.
Make an appointment with: 1) a nutritionist 2) a physiotherapist.
Once a month, book a massage/acupuncture session.
Track my life/eating habits on a monthly planner for at least 6 months to be able to establish healthier habits.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

So that’s about it. I’m really excited about taking a measurable approach to my goals (objectives) setting with OKRs. If you’re interested in more insights about design and how I am getting things done on the run, check back here on Medium or send me a message on LinkedIn. Thanks for reading!

About Rayana Verissimo
Rayana Verissimo is a Lead UX Engineer at Backbase where she advocates for design systems, scaling the organization and ensuring designers have tools to make their jobs less painful. She has 9+ years experience and previously worked as a UI Engineer on projects for one of the biggest worldwide technology companies.

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How I am achieving my goal to be a greater designer in 2018 with OKRs was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How I am achieving my goal to be a greater designer in 2018 with OKRs

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