Billea Breen, Senior UX Designer
Hi, and welcome to the Design Systems podcast. This podcast is about the place where design and development overlap. We talk with experts to get their point of view about trends in design, code and how it relates to the world around us. As always, this podcast is brought to you by Knapsack. Check us out at Knapsack.cloud. If you want to get in touch with the show, ask some questions, or generally tell us what you think, go ahead and tweet us at the DS pod, we'd love to hear from you.
00:00:21 - Chris Strahl
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Design Systems podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. Today I'm here with Billea Breen. Billea is a senior UX designer at Monster. Welcome to the program.
00:00:30 - Billea Breen
Hi, thanks so much. I'm happy to be here.
00:00:33 - Chris Strahl
So we have kind of an interesting hero's journey, an odyssey, if you will, through this. I'm not sure if, like, the monsters, the cyclops, whatever, but anyway, you had this really interesting sort of career decision you made to join Monster, and when you came in, things were a bit of a challenge. Talk to us about that.
00:00:52 - Billea Breen
Yeah, so Monster was like a nice big shift for me. I really got to step up. And one of the things I was excited about was coming into a place that was established and had a design system ready to go. I didn't realize what that design system looked like, but they definitely had one, so it was a good start.
00:01:09 - Chris Strahl
So what did it look like? What was the idea of, like, oh, I'm getting hired. I've got this cool new job. You're telling your friends, you're telling your family, I'm super stoked to work on a design system. What did that look like on that first week?
00:01:22 - Billea Breen
So it was exciting. I got in and I was like, where are all the tools? Where do I get to play with things? They sort of were like, get yourself comfortable, and all that. So I reached out. We had two great designers working on what we used to call the core system, and they pointed me to the files, and I dove in, and it was awesome. We had a million different variants for buttons. There were form fields. It looked super legit, ready to go. And then there were some things that I was like, oh, that's different. And we had some extra layers, and the onion just kind of started to peel.
00:01:54 - Chris Strahl
Basically got you. So you have this initial first impression. That first impression is like, wow, this is really well put together. But then as you're peeling that onion, you start to run into some things. What were some of those initial moments where you went, that doesn't feel exactly right, or that's not exactly what I was hoping for?
00:02:13 - Billea Breen
Well, the first project I worked on was adding a filter. So at Monster, it's all about looking for a job, job searching. So we thought, okay, let's add some filters. So you can filter by location, distance, all those stuff. So we're talking standard forms, buttons, drop downs, radios, all those pieces. And they had them. But as I started to use them, I realized, oh, if I change from the primary button to the secondary, I lost my text. And it just went back to button, and I was like, Hold on. And then I'd do a drop down, same thing, style it out, change the text update from idle to hover. Lost it. I was like, oh, this doesn't quite work.
00:02:53 - Chris Strahl
And is this all in Figma or is this elsewhere?
00:02:56 - Billea Breen
So this was all in Figma. They used to use sketch beforehand, and they had gone through a shift in general. So Monster had I believe she was the art director. She sort of ran the boat, and she wasn't a huge fan of design systems. It appeared she sort of built her own. So as I started to get into these Figma files, I would go to check the main component, go to see what was detached and all those things, and I'd find five different versions of a radio selection, and it didn't line up. And then I'd find one ready to go out the box with actual locations listed. So there was just kind of scatterings everywhere. It was like someone came and just dumped the Legos out and they were there. I just didn't know how to put it together. Right.
00:03:40 - Chris Strahl
Yeah. In house of the five year old, I totally get the idea of a dumped out box of Legos. And so as you're trying to make sense of this and get organized, you had these thematic things that were pretty strong. Like the idea of components was obviously present. There was the idea of variance, and you were talking about some state stuff, but ultimately this ended up not really working for you all. What was the moment where you kind of were like, oh, man, we need to really think differently about this?
00:04:08 - Billea Breen
Well, the hardest part was I talked to the other designers, and the conversation was always, well, just detach it and adjust it how you need to. And I was like, but if I do that, then how is Dev going to understand what I did? We'll get lost in translation. I've always been big about the handoff. Like, I can draw circles and squares, but they can't always code it the way I draw it. So for me, that's always been a big importance to understand how that connection works.
00:04:34 - Chris Strahl
Yeah, I think that that's probably something that makes you a much better designer. Thankfully, we're sort of moving out of this world where we think about the separation of concerns between design and engineering as this pretty impermeable wall. I think that people are starting to realize if you want the thing you're designing to actually get built the way you designed it, you have to think about how people actually are going to build it. So I love that take, and thankfully, I think that's becoming more common than uncommon. But in terms of your look at this system and all these detached components and all these differences in the way that people were designing versus implementing, what do you do when faced with that?
00:05:13 - Billea Breen
So it's really hard because all of a sudden, you went from having a full design system to being told, like, it's okay. You can just detach everything and sort of adjust, and it's like, well, then why do we have a design system? What's the point? Then we've wasted all this effort. You've wasted all these resources. Let's just fix what's broken. So for me, it was pretty clear that we had to fix that part. There was plenty of buy in from the other UXers, and even the devs were happy to do it. Everybody was ready to talk together. We just couldn't settle on which language to use.
00:05:46 - Chris Strahl
So what did you ultimately end up picking? Like, what won out? And what did that process of making that decision look like?
00:05:51 - Billea Breen
So I kind of did something that I've been doing in every job, and this was the first time I actually got great support by management, which was awesome. I went rogue, and I basically did a full inventory. I did a full visual inventory. I started to work on the project, and then I actually got one of the other designers on the core system to work with me. He kind of was headed in the same direction. So we had a meeting of the minds, and we spent the weeks, that whole dead time in December between Christmas and New Year's, when no one really wants to work, but you got to do something. We're all remote anyways. So we just had, like, four hour meetings where we would pull up the website and chunk it out. That's a tab. That's a button. That's a link. It's this type. It's that type. Full visual inventory.
00:06:41 - Chris Strahl
And so you're doing this on, like, zoom or whatever and snapping screenshots and organizing them and kind of doing the traditional inventory work.
00:06:51 - Billea Breen
Oh, yeah. It was full mirror board. Had we been in an office, we would have been in a bunker. It was that level of whiteboard crazy. List it out. Where can I see this? Because I'm so visual, and it's hard to do that virtually. That's a big struggle. I couldn't print it or draw it even. We had to work on a computer. So it's funny because our job is computers, but I learned we learned how to do it and a way to make sense, and we'd go off, tackle one section, the other would tackle the other, come back together. What do you have? I called it that. You called it that? I mean, it was like a week solid of getting this list together of what we needed.
00:07:31 - Chris Strahl
Yeah, that's an ambitious task to take on during a time when like you said, people are a little full from Christmas dinner. People are starting to look at New Year's plans, but you all just buckled down and got it done. And the net of that, I assume, was a set of common names and an idea of common components and variants.
00:07:51 - Billea Breen
Yeah, it was really great. So we came out with everything we needed. We knew what was live, what was built. Right. So that was the stuff. We knew code existed for these pieces. We knew there was technically styles for these pieces. So then it's a matter of, okay, what's in Figma? Does it match? Is the purple the right purple? Does the hover state match? It was all those little, like, that minutiae. You're really going back and fine tooth comb. Where did they divert? Why did they divert? Was it dev? Couldn't do it. Was it no one told dev. Was it design went rogue. What happened?
00:08:25 - Chris Strahl
Yeah, it sounds like this theme of vigilanteism runs deep inside of the organization. And so you and this other person, you form this together. You kind of, like, determine where your gap is, your delta between what's live in production and what's in design. And then what happens? You go to work and you start to harmonize or you make a bunch of tickets in jira or what does that look like?
00:08:51 - Billea Breen
Kind of it almost looks like that. There's just one more step that Monster has that's specific to Monster that I found that we had to deal with before that. So at Monster, their team has built their own platform. It's open source now, I believe, actually. So they have the ability to take our library in Figma and convert it into a theme. Right. So it all just shoots out JSON, and it looks great. And it's understood that gets packaged with other things. And forgive my code understanding. It's not perfect, but in theory, I do it in Figma, JSON appears, and it goes live. It's all nice. It's great. I don't know code like so, but because you have those pieces, I can't break something in Figma because I will lose the code.
00:09:36 - Chris Strahl
Right. So you have this connection that is both a logical and actually a really core production code connection between what you're doing inside of Figma and that export that comes out of Figma as JSON that ultimately goes and powers an app.
00:09:51 - Billea Breen
Right.
00:09:52 - Chris Strahl
So how do you not disrupt that sacred balance, that data contract that some engineer is completely reliant upon in a build process and basically rearchitect your system at the same time?
00:10:05 - Billea Breen
Exactly. The golden handcuffs. Like, that's what you're stuck with. So we do have a loophole where we can say, ignore this. Don't look at it. It's over here. You don't know it exists. And by naming different parts of our components or with Figma coming out with sections, we were able to hide things in a section. And by doing that, we were able to start to work in branches and start to offer things for designers and make updates that required no dev work, because dev wasn't even talked to. Like, they didn't need to know. They've already built it. It exists. There's a storybook version. You're good to go. But we never had one in Figma that did the same thing. So we started the whole behind the scenes. So that's where we are now. It took a while. It took a month of figuring out how to set this up. Our Jira tickets finally are fully detailed now as we're in the home stretch. That took a minute. We had a merge of teams halfway through this process. We're in the first phase, and we lost some developers. We lost some designers. We had a shakeup. So it's a lot trying to figure out all these pieces.
00:11:14 - Chris Strahl
So what keeps you sane in this process, then? Because it sounds like not only are you in this place where the process is not necessarily conducive to large scale change of this nature, but there's also just, like, general work chaos that is kind of around you. And so what keeps you sane? Looking at what ultimately represents a bunch of design files that should reflect what's in code and also probably, like, production code is changing while you're doing this as well. And so what keeps that sanity? Is there a tool? Is there a process, is there a workflow that just kind of makes you feel like you're chipping away at that mountain?
00:11:54 - Billea Breen
Yeah, I mean, I got to say, I work with great UXers and great devs, so really, having the right personnel makes a big difference. The co designer that I'm working on this with, he's been so knowledgeable. He gets so excited when Figma rolls out the new stuff, new tokens. He always is like, oh, we could maybe add this layer and input this. So that always keeps you moving forward. My UXers are ready to use the components. They're like, great. It works. I'll use it. I'll use it tomorrow. Like, sure thing. Just tell us when to go. And then we had a really great developer. He just left us for Square, but he was awesome. He and I would just have, like, a quick call, and he could whip it up in code pen, and then you could see it live. You could have all these pieces. He helped me understand code, so now I'm getting this sense of like, okay, I understand a lot of one world. I'm learning a little more of another, and it's working. And like I said, management actually supports it because we'll be able to prototype faster, and we'll be able to kick things out the door faster, and we're moving at a pace. We're not taking forever. Right? We've been doing this for a couple of months. We're making solid progress. There's a result so that keeps everyone happy.
00:13:05 - Chris Strahl
When you say management supports you, what does that look like in terms of a tangible way? Is it that they give you space and time to do this? Is it that they have a project space that they've sort of blessed for this? What does that actually look like in terms of support?
00:13:19 - Billea Breen
It's more like they realize that what we're doing is for the good of the whole and so they are giving space for it. I will say so my manager was more than happy to understand the basics, right? They get the three main points. It's broken, we're going to fix it. Everyone will use it. Yay. So as long as they're seeing progress along that line, they're happy. I've even had one of the heads of Dev come over. We've talked and he was like, Fill me in, where are we going? Sure, you can have dev, you can have some resources. It's also problem solving, which is what UXers are all about. So I have a ticket that needs to be updated in Figma. Great. But now it needs to be updated on Dev. And the only way to get that time, that money, that allotment for that, is to figure out another way it'll impact the company. And one of the biggest ways is accessibility, right? So we all need to hit certain color contrasts, states, keyboard accessibility, all those pieces. And we're finding as we're doing our own audits and going through things, stuff's changed, stuff's evolved, there's new rules. So now if I'm going to update a radio, let's fully update the radio component. Let's go take the Figma work that we've done. Let's make this nice and clean and tidy, which I really appreciate. A place that wants to build it correctly instead of bandaid over everything, right?
00:14:39 - Chris Strahl
It makes it a much cleaner house and also a lot better work environment. And actually, I've been harping about this on the podcast a couple of times. I think that one of the more subjective that becomes objective measures of success of a design system is how happy the people are that are working inside of the system. It's not necessarily like, hey, I feel better about my job, but I feel like my job is productive. I feel like I can get work done. I feel like there's less friction in my workflow. And those are a lot better than velocity points on a jira board. Because the idea of the vanity metrics around adoption and stuff like that, I mean, there's a lot of things you can force. One of the things that's really hard to force is, like, are people feeling like they're happier and more productive.
00:15:23 - Billea Breen
And it's hard when you're remote trying to gauge those metrics and understand how everyone works together, when you can't just get a cup of coffee together or see somebody microwaving their lunch and understand like, hey, how's your day going? Are you frustrated by what we're working on? You don't have that space. So that was a real big thing to sort of overcome being remote and new. And here, like, I don't have offices to go into. I can't just stop on someone's door and touch base. You have to actively do it. That's a big step.
00:15:55 - Chris Strahl
Yeah. So is your entire team remote then?
00:15:57 - Billea Breen
Whole company is remote.
00:15:58 - Chris Strahl
How do you feel like that's really impacted this process? Because I think, look, we're 100% remote company too. We had an office in Portland. COVID happened just happened to be our office. Lease renewal was that year, and so we didn't renew and we went 100% remote. And it's definitely been a very big shift for us. I'm curious what that looks like when it comes to a practical team trying to do a pretty major overall of a design to code process.
00:16:26 - Billea Breen
Yeah. I will say, for me, my personal growth development was like, this was a big one. I had to get comfortable just calling a meeting. I had to be okay with just saying, like, no, I need these people in a room. We have to talk about this. I haven't talked to this project owner in a while. Let me throw something on our calendar just to touch base. Instead of working in a silo and just sort of getting through something, I reach out to people and instead of thinking like, oh, well, they're probably too important to take my meeting, or They've got 20 million plates spinning. No, I just throw time on their calendar and we move it forward.
00:17:01 - Chris Strahl
So when you think about that idea of remote work and how it's altered kind of the DNA of how you operate, do you feel like there's advantages there as well? I think about often the problem that we used to describe all the time in design and engineering organizations, where design is on floor seven. Engineering is in sub basement, too. And the fact that those people don't sit next to each other was a very painful part of that handoff process of making your intent match your production. Do you feel like remote work offers us any advantages in that paradigm to break that down and make it so that people are more collaborative?
00:17:38 - Billea Breen
I mean, a little. I feel like as designers, we almost get more annoying. Like, we really become a nat because we're like, hey, can I see it? Can you send me the link? Can you send me a screenshot? I know you're looking at it on your machine. Can you send it to me? And so that sort of trying to I don't know if it's pester or just sort of engage. That's definitely been, like, a key piece. I haven't been afraid to ask, like, hey, can you send me your test area, whatever it is? So that's helpful. And that's a big piece of remote. If you don't do that stuff, you completely miss it. And then it ships and you're like, Wait a minute. You're sitting in the demo going, that wasn't we didn't discuss what happened.
00:18:15 - Chris Strahl
I hear that a lot, where it's like, hey, show me the thing in production. And then I'm always also like the other side of that. So I'm going to ask you, like, an on the spot question. Do you show your drafts of your Figma files to your engineers? Also, like, while you're still working on them?
00:18:29 - Billea Breen
Sometimes it depends on how big the project is. I will say there are times when I want to do something and I know I can do it in Figma. I know I've maybe seen it somewhere. And so I'll have a conversation and I'll call up a dev and be like, I want it to do this. Can you? And they look at me like, I've got five heads. And they're like, do you realize how much time and money that will cost? And I'm like, but it's so cool, right?
00:18:53 - Chris Strahl
The idea of this is a really interesting feature. But I think that the wonderful thing about that, though, is very often a creative developer will be like, Well, I can't do exactly that, but this is pretty close. And it's also something that's easy. And I think that that's the best kind of collaboration. Because one of the things that's really hard about Figma is it's still an abstraction, right? It's not working in the medium it's destined for. And so because of that, there's a gap innately between what we're building in design and what ultimately gets shown to a user. And the idea of, hey, there's this black box that is really arcane, and nobody totally understands how the things that happen in Figma ultimately end up becoming things that happen on the Web. And because that's so arcane and so difficult to understand, very often the design decisions that we make in Figma are actually really hard to implement in code. But there are alternatives that would be much easier to implement that may be just as good or maybe even better than some of the original concepts done in Figma. And that's where my question came from of this idea of, like, do you share your drafts with your engineers? Because the interesting thing about the two way street of design to code is we always mentioned it in that order, right? Design to code. But there is a lot also of design decisions that are happening in code every single day. Like, what's above the fold? What's the page load order? What happens when you have some perceived performance problem? All those things are design decisions. And I love the way that you think about this collaboration as, hey, I want to see your early work, and I'm willing to share my own early work so that we can end up with a better result for our users.
00:20:34 - Billea Breen
Yeah, it's been really great, honestly. Our devs actually have a strong design background, which is something that I'm finding more and more as I've continued in my career. Having somebody who also knows the right color pairing, some padding alignment, like all those basics or even just general aesthetics on like, this will be better. This way it'll look nicer, you'll get more engagement, just that extra layer. I came from the marketing world. I was working on print for a long time, so I had to learn that stuff. I've never been a strong visual designer, but damn if I can organize myself. And if you've got the blocks, I will build the crap out of it. That's my bread and butter. So it's awesome that I'm finding that aesthetic piece that I'm missing in my developers. It's even better. Yeah.
00:21:22 - Chris Strahl
And I think that as a former developer myself, you end up just exposed to so much design decision making. And when you have that flow down to you all the time, there is some sort of contact high you get from being close to good design a lot, where you start to be able to kind of smell it and understand what it is when you see it. I think that that's cool that you have that sense of collaboration. So on to the hard hitting question how's it going? Is it going the way you'd like? Is it directionally the right stuff right now? Because you're what, you're three months into this?
00:21:58 - Billea Breen
Yeah, we're a solid three months into it at this point. We're at? I think our jira epic or confluence epic. I forget who which one it is, but our Epic is 65% complete, which is great. It's good, it's taking some rework and it's almost like UX Basics, where you build it one way, you think it'll work, and then you take it to your audience, which is our other UXers. And they say, oh, no, I don't use it that way, or Oops, it broke when I tried to do something. We call it our tire kick, basically. And it's humbling because you think you know all of it and you don't, which is honestly the principle I love about UX. And you go back to the drawing board, you adjust, and then at the same time, we've got way more tickets coming in now, which is great because our developers are saying we want to actually work on what you're doing on their side. They're trying to do the same thing. They're trying to clean up. They're trying to set up sticker sheets, visual discrepancies, all those pieces. They're cleaning house on their side too. So it was almost like we started a tidal wave and we're just riding it on home.
00:23:01 - Chris Strahl
That's awesome. I'm glad it's going well. I think that it's also great. One of the things you mentioned when you're building a system, your first user is other people inside of your company and that product that serves other products idea. We haven't said that on the podcast in a little while because design systems is a product versus design Systems as a way of working is still a fairly hot topic. But the idea of your user being that other UXer or that dev and being able to get feedback from them and also seeing that contribution coming in, that probably means it's working because at least people are interested. Right. And they're leaning into a process by which you're trying to make everything better.
00:23:44 - Billea Breen
Yeah. Our true test, honestly, will be if we have any onboarding or we bring someone in new, hand them the design system like I got a year ago, and say, Go build something, and they don't come back and tell us it's broken.
00:23:57 - Chris Strahl
Yeah. And I know this is impossible, but if you were to try to take yourself back in time a year and then walk into Monster today and have it be like week one early in the episode, we talked about what your week one looked like. What do you think your week one would look like now?
00:24:14 - Billea Breen
It would be a lot cleaner. I would know where to look for things. Not to say that there wasn't documentation and a lot of knowledge out there, but I think we've done a good job of streamlining it and putting it in places so that it's easily accessible. It's in their hands. It's not understand the textbook and then go build it. You'll have the textbook next to you while you're doing it. It's the old school video game strategy guide. Side by side, back and forth.
00:24:42 - Chris Strahl
Oh, I love now everybody has their Wiki page open in the separate window from I've been playing Dave the Diver. I don't know. Have you played this yet?
00:24:50 - Billea Breen
No.
00:24:51 - Chris Strahl
So it's a game where you're like, a dude that dives for fish and then you serve them in your sushi restaurant or whatever. The game is, like, really deep. It's got huge amounts of things that you can do and stuff unlocked and all this other stuff, like big exploration game, and I get tripped up a lot. And so you have your Dave the Diver wiki open, like, one desktop over from where you're playing the game.
00:25:12 - Billea Breen
Yep. I used to do the old school Zelda.
00:25:15 - Chris Strahl
That was the, you know, all the puzzles in ocarina of Time. Right. Like the water temple and everything like that. It was so freaking hard. No. Anyway, I love the idea of a design system as a strategy guide for implementation. I think that's a cool concept.
00:25:31 - Billea Breen
Yeah. And if we're doing that, then it's less tedious. Right. I never hated grabbing those strategy guides. You buy them, you want them. You know, they'll help you. Right. It's your friend. It's not the text that your history teacher assigned you that you have to go through. It should be engaging. Just because this is for us internally doesn't mean we can't have a little fun with it. We can't be friendly with our documentation and have a vibe.
00:25:54 - Chris Strahl
So this is great to hear the collaboration, the way of working, how. This has all changed. Know, Billea, on week one would look a year ago versus today. Are there any other things that have really improved or changed over the past year that have been somewhat revolutionary to the way you work?
00:26:13 - Billea Breen
I mean, having Chat GPT as a resource is amazing. I'm visually driven, so documentation has always been a struggle to write. But now I just have my Chat window open and I say, Give me the documentation for a button. And I get three paragraphs and I read that over and I say, make it funnier. Pull pieces of it, say, Use this in bullet format, adjust this too long, didn't read the tool. Does everything practically. I mean, I'm driving it, I think, but it does a lot.
00:26:47 - Chris Strahl
Good question mark there. Who's driving who? Well, anyway, the idea of using that as a resource to document stuff, I mean, we do that a lot at Knapsack too, where we think know if we have to write tests, or we have to document a component, or we have to even go so far as to document a feature. We do a lot of that with Chat GPT, and it's definitely been pretty revolutionary. And I'm kind of like you, right? I understand the value of documentation. I also am not the greatest person at writing it, hence why I express myself creatively in audio instead of in written word. But the idea of having a robot that can sit next to you and help you write the thing that is really hard for you to do, I think that's a superpower. And it makes us a little less reliant on the crazy fools that really love to write and edit docs because those people are really hard to find.
00:27:40 - Billea Breen
Yeah, it's hard to find a good copywriter. And you almost want to throw the task to like, a junior writer and say, I'm strengthening your skills. You'll learn a lot from know, sort of have that old school. So, you know, for me, I've had a lot of art directors that would run me through checklists and they were very detail oriented and I was missing that in this gig. So one of the things when we started to fine tune our Jira tickets, I had Chat GBT give me requirements. I said, what should be on here? What should I make sure I check accessibility wise, type wise, alignment, resizing, like, all that stuff. And it gave me a nice ten bullet list that now we go through. It's part of our process.
00:28:20 - Chris Strahl
That's awesome. I think that it's really cool to see it cropping up in unusual ways like that. We were interviewing somebody the other day for a sales job, and one of the most interesting things is they went to share their screen and their Chat GPT window was up. And I was like, oh, hey, go back to that real quick. And it was all the things that were like mock interview questions. They ran through their interview with Chat GPT about being a new salesperson at a design systems company, and it was brilliant. He's like, I feel like I'm showing you too much behind the curtain. And is this breaking the spell? I was like, no, this is exactly the kind of person I want to hire as somebody that's doing this in the background because it makes you better at an interview. It's so cool to see stuff like that.
00:28:59 - Billea Breen
It's awesome. It's something that when you talk about Chat GPT with people, I feel like there's almost two schools, right, where people think we're using it too much and we're not learning and engaging, and then there's the people that are genuinely excited by it because it's a tool. Yeah, I totally would have used it to write papers back in the day, but it's not perfect. I had it generate a great Gatsby book report. I read it. It wasn't good. It was fine. It wasn't me.
00:29:25 - Chris Strahl
It was Avalish.
00:29:26 - Billea Breen
Yeah, exactly. It would have gotten me a C and a question mark at the end of it, I'm sure.
00:29:31 - Chris Strahl
Well, I think that there's a lot of potential for these tools to continue to change the way that we think about engaging with design systems. And I think that the systems themselves help us feed the tools. Right. So you'd mentioned like, I don't know if I'm controlling it or it's controlling me. Kind of jokingly. But I think that there is this idea of, like, if we're able to expose our own systems data to these tools in the near future, there's going to be a lot of things that those tools are going to do that you're going to be like, oh yeah, that was a great idea. I should have thought of that. And that's going to be a lot of things about surfacing variants or states that you haven't thought about, like pointing out where accessibility isn't working the right way. All these different things that are tedious tasks that we do right now as a part of building digital products that I think are going to become way less tedious soon.
00:30:17 - Billea Breen
Oh, totally. And it gives us the space to focus on the extra. Right. So we all know there's a bias in these, so you have to push it and say, like, hey, can you answer that question? If I'm a mostly blind user, what should I look for if I'm using the keyboard? Like, you can push that extra because, you know, it's covering majority, so you get to ask more questions.
00:30:39 - Chris Strahl
Well, Billea, this has been a super fun episode to record with you. I'm really curious to track your progress on this crazy journey you're on right now, and I wish you the best. It sounds like you all are making awesome strides. So best of luck and thanks so much for being on the program.
00:30:53 - Billea Breen
Awesome. Thanks so much, Chris. I really appreciate it.
00:30:56 - Chris Strahl
Hey, this has been an episode of the Design System podcast. I'm your host, Chris Strahl. Have a great day, everyone. That's all for today.
This has been another episode of the Design Systems podcast.
00:31:05 - Chris Strahl
Thanks for listening.
If you have any questions or a topic you'd like to know more about, find us on Twitter at the DS pod. We'd love to hear from you with show ideas, recommendations, questions or comments. As always, this pod is brought to you by Knapsack. You can check us out at Knapsack.cloud. Have a great day
