The physical health for a designer is important
I went to a chiropractic treatment and I hope I could correct my sitting posture way more earlier.
Last month, I had a visit to chiropractic clinic. It took me half hour to complete a 6 different X-ray scan of my spine. And after that, I had spent one hour for doctor consultation and treatment.
I was diagnosed with three symptoms related to “scoliosis”
My 1st to 5th spine bone curved towards left, which caused one shoulder blade that appears more prominent than the other
One hip higher than the other, which caused my leg length uneven
Antecollis, which my neck bone is tilted forward
Actually I knew my incorrect posture for many years, but I have been delaying treatment for many years. Until recently I start to aware of my neck muscle pain. I feel inferior about my body shape. Hence, I would like to remind everyone to be mindful of your sitting posture, especially if you are like me, always spending long hours in front of computer.
(An hand-drawn image of scoliosis)
What I’m learning
My design team has a weekly “Design System Sync”. Esther and I will spend one to two hours improving our current Figma design system. Since we build this system from scratch with Front End Engineers. There are plenty of design debts pending us to fix.
Here are some activities we do:
Research and documenting guideline for new component.
Create Figma master component which constraints and auto-layout capability
Resolve conflict and align design system component usage across different product tribe (shopfront & seller centre)
Last week we are discussing about the difference between “Select” and “Dropdown”. Let’s have a test. What do you call the component below?
As a designer coming from non-tech background, I always call this component “Dropdown”. But it is actually a “Select” component. (After annoying my engineers twice, I had finally recognised this component as “Select”) .
You can refer to the links below to read more about the difference between “Select” & “Dropdown”.
https://component.gallery/components/select/
https://component.gallery/components/dropdown-menu/
What I’m grateful
I am always grateful to work in a Product Team with supportive engineers and product managers. There was a delightful moment happened to me recently, with my front end engineer partner Yee Han.
Here is the context. We are working in an agile team with evolving design system. Our product team is super lean with only three full time software engineers, one QA engineer, two UI/UX designers, and one product manager. Our boss is our CTO and CPO at the same time. We wear multiple hats and we are trying to setup more processes.
The design was always completed few months ago before engineer has the bandwidth to start building. Hence the design might end up not updated to the latest one.
After working with Yee Han multiple times, we both understand our constraints. There is one day, he sent me a list of questions to check in with me before he start building our next project. With these set of questions, I can immediately know what is needed from him. And I can check back with him on some questions for the technical side.
This is how amazing when everyone of us can initiate conversation with each other. And it is extremely important for us as a small team without proper processes.
I really love working with them. :)