My baby's back

One of the parallel efforts that the PayPal standards team kicked off is "refactoring" -- web developers lightly rewriting thousands of legacy pages to use shared layouts and our new standard components.  Because we don't yet have a full "critical mass" of completed standards, and also, frankly, because we have a lot of weird stuff on the site, web developers frequently ping me for design advice when refactoring some particularly hairy pages. 

Today, a developer in our Chennai office wrote to confirm that he had gotten button alignment right on our common file upload page.  It sounds exceedingly mundane, except for the fact that file upload was my very first project at the company.  It's good to see the old gal again!

Making progress

My first full quarter leading the design standards effort at PayPal is in the books.  In these few long (!) months, we've more than doubled the number of documented, coded, usable standards at the company.  Each standard includes a design pattern document on a central intranet site with interaction details & best practice recommendations, a link to a neatly layered Photoshop template file for visual design (new for 2009!), and a collection of code (both server- and client-side) that will ensure that what any project-level designer asks for will be precisely what gets implemented, pixel-perfect.

Not a bad start, I suppose, but I'm itching to do more, faster!

Courtesy -- you never know when it'll come in handy

On my way to an important, potentially tense & politically-charged meeting today, I took an elevator with a complete stranger.  We both were going to the same floor, and when the elevator opened, I held the door and politely yielded, ushering him out ahead of me.  About 30 seconds later, I was sitting in the meeting room when that same gentleman came walking in.  As it turns out, he's the director of one of the groups we were meeting about.  When we were introduced, I could sense that we were both silently thinking, "Ah, but we've already met, in a way."  Things started off on a very positive foot.

It always pays to be kind.  Well, maybe not always, but it certainly never hurts.