
👋 Oi, mga repapips, Brian Dys here! I love music, photography, and creative stuff like UX design and art. This is a place where I collect my thoughts and works. Apart all these, I’m Jaycelle’s better half and Bryce’s dad. 🥰
This week, the UX design team is having our regular bilas (bilateral meetings) which, undoubtedly, is one of the most important part of Avaloq’s culture. Bilas serve a wide range of benefits from an unstructured kwentuhan to an avenue for the team to express what’s working and what could be better in terms of our daily work experience. This activity strengthens the bond among designers and empowers us in paving our career paths in the organization.
It is feedback that we get the most out of during bilas. Knowing that everything is going well with a person is a welcome relief, especially during this pandemic. On the other hand, feedback on how we are with our projects and collaborations is essential to the quality of our work and its outcome.
Here’s a simple guide for a constructive 1:1 discussion of feedback inspired by Scrum’s Sprint Retrospective.
Needless to say, any kind of feedback is better than no feedback at all. The source of the feedback is as important as the quality of the feedback itself.
Starting from one’s self, a self-assessment could be done then work outwards — from your own team towards cross-functional teams. The important thing to remember is relevance — the feedback must be coming from a collaborator or a person who has worked (or currently working) with you in a project.
Happy to be working with self-starters and a proactive UX design team. We catch and remedy difficulties and hindrances early on through our constant feedback activities and of course, through the openness of everyone.
This year is brighter at Avaloq as we’re growing within UX design team and others as well.
See if there is a good fit?
I have learned a new term today in terms of light mode – dark mode in user interfaces: contrast polarity. Basically, a positive contrast polarity is a light text on a dark surface (light mode) — just like the physical black ink on white paper. Negative contrast polarity, on the other hand, is the reverse — dark text on a light surface (dark mode).
Now, where else can you use this term? In CSS class-naming, of course!
See the Pen
Contrast polarity (light – dark mode) by Brian Dys Sahagun (@briandys)
on CodePen.
Revolutions sometimes change the world to the better. Most often, however, it is better to evolve an existing design rather than throwing it away.
Sure, you might be able to do the mundane aspects of your job, but you’re better off hiring someone else to do it so you can concentrate on your more important value: thinking creatively and strategically about your product and company’s future.
Scott Belsky
Every human being is a miracle, and your superior in some way.
David Brooks
Spent this Friday afternoon combing my work inbox — taking notes and flagging important emails that I will take on at the start of 2021. Most of my work that involves team management are already churned in Figma. In other words, I don’t worry about forgetting everything behind because I’ve already managed to extract the important elements. This is the practice that I want to embed consistently in my life — extract and carry on. It’s like the following metaphors or mental models: The lack of this practice would render, in my mind, a very messy backlog of things that, as time goes by, makes it even harder to make sense of because it became a giant tidal wave of mumbo jumbo — a real counterproductive practice. Forgetting them won’t simply do because experiences are a treasure trove of lessons. So the smart thing to do is to extract and carry on. An important aspect of extract and carry on highly depends on the frequency of doing it. Imagine a correlation between time and memory relevance and reliability. Our memories simply work that way — as time goes by, we tend to not remember things the same way. From a different perspective, we tend to forget. The saying, out of sight, out of mind captures its essence best. As memories fade away, the way we retrieve or remember them, and the way we interpret them also change — even with the aid of digital documents. It might help you see and remember literal evidence of how many balloons were there in your fifth birthday but memories are different from ephemeral experience. That’s why if it’s not in the now, it’s not wholly what you experienced but a memory of your experience. For how long until you will feel that your backlog is already a giant tidal wave? Don’t let it reach that point. If you could wrap up your life weekly or monthly, then that’s more manageable than wrapping it up once a year. Looking back a year long when you’ve got a weekly or monthly chunk of the important stuff would be easier, and could actually be an enjoyable activity without the arduous stuff of remembering and extracting. Pushing this idea to the extreme, I ask myself if I could save only thirty-six photos of a particular month, which could these photos be? It could mean forgetting about the rest of the photos that didn’t make the cut. That could also solve the problem of digital storage, but that’s a different story. You get the idea — extract and carry on aims for a hangup-free and richer life.Extract and carry on
Relevance
Reliability
Frequency