Bye bye, PayPal

Wow!  That's it!  It's over!  I'm done!  Earlier in the year I promised the execs my team would get us to 50 complete standards by the end of the year, and as of last week, we had 37 code complete and a further 14 UED complete and undergoing implementation.  That's right, we actually narrowly beat our numerical goal, but did it nearly four months ahead of schedule.

I do believe that's called "kicking butt."  Now it's time to finally catch up with the rest of my life for awhile!  Of course, for almost a decade I've been a PayPal user and that's not going to change any time soon.

Here's to the next chapter!

Take a number, please

Yesterday I worked from home to improve productivity and save 1 1/2+ hours of  driving.  Today when I got to work, it was quite literally 30 minutes before I had four designers lined up at my desk for quick consultation, all with different questions on different projects.  While helping those four in sequence, another two got in line!

Made it to the top

Over the past six or seven months, I've led or been deeply involved in more presentations than I could ever have imagined.  Some of the earlier ones were small group affairs with UED managers, and we've slowly been working up the chain through directors, VPs, and recently to a senior VP.  Today, we finally made it to the top, presenting our backstory, progress, and plans to the company president and his direct reports.  I'm just glad that we've reached the end of the line on this particular little trek, because now I can start pretending to forget how to use PowerPoint so people will stop bugging me for help with their slides.  Trust me, you never want to be known as a PowerPoint wiz.

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.

I am so sorry

With the February product release, four of PayPal's most-sent emails were redesigned, a very difficult effort that took quite a long time to pull off. It's the first time these emails have been been fundamentally updated since I can personally remember, and I've been a PayPal user since 2000. The new emails look much cleaner, require far less scrolling to get to important info, and even have more useful information in them. Oh, but there's bad news.  For some reason, most of the text is rendered in footnote-sized 11-pixel Arial medium-light gray text. I don't know how this could have happened, but to all PayPal users with less than perfect vision and/or high monitor resolution, I sincerely apologize.  I'm escalating this problem to some high powers and I will make sure this gets fixed as quickly as possible.

A rare type of compliment

I don't know exactly why, but I usually don't take well to compliments.  I'm just not into receiving accolades for getting work done; I'm into just getting work done.  Today, though, I received an in-person endorsement that I actually very much appreciated.

I was in the elevator on the way to lunch, and heard a voice behind me say, "Hey that was a great presentation the other day." I turned around and had never seen the person before. He's a content manager of sorts who has been trying to "change the mindset" within the company with respect to presentations, and thought my LEGO-themed standards presentation at a large all-hands gathering a few days back set a good example. We've had senior VPs revolting against neverending PowerPoint decks and insisting that presentations have literally no more than 5 slides.  As a result, some teams now fill up 5 slides with 30 slides woth of bulleted lists in tiny fonts.

This gentleman in the elevator said he was watching people at the preso I gave and it was unlike any other large meeting he's attended at the company.  Nobody was thumbing away at their blackberries, and no heads were buried in laptops during my talk.  Every slide was basically one fun, but effective image, and I was walking people through a cohesive story using plain English.

This was really great to hear, and I hope many people in the future will be able to receive the same feedback.  I just figure, if nobody is going to follow a presentation, why give it at all?  It's better to present a managable amount of information with a delivery that the audience can connect with, rather than trying to push out huge amounts of rock-solid data that's going to fly over everyones' heads.

Ah-HA! Take THAT!

I worked all day & night Sunday, and got more actual tangible work product completed than I did the entire week previous.  I've literally completed tasks that have been on the "to-do today" list for over a month!

Different wavelengths

My new work with design standards at PayPal is going so-so, or at least that's how I feel.  UED and development managers seem to disagree.  They're raving incessantly and passionately about what our tiny cross-functional standards "SWAT team" has been able to accomplish in just over three short months, especially compared to the previous status quo.  Me, I simply do not share their enthusiasm.  There have been far too many meetings for the sake of meeting.  Literally every manager or lead in the design organization has tried to get a piece of the new standards pie, and I've been fighting tooth and nail to keep things lean and results-oriented.  If I was able to just do my job, the way I planned out & proposed in October, I estimate that I'd have accomplished literally three times as much by now!

C'est la vie, though.  The fight will continue as I patently refuse to allow "design by committee" syndrome take over an effort with such huge potential to improve both company efficiency and consistency of the end user experience.