Alaska Airlines

After my internship, I joined full time as a Product Designer for Alaska Airlines’ design system, Auro. We support more than 30+ designers. I continued my work that I started from the internship and am continuously adding new components, design documentation, and educating our designers on best design practices.

Role

UI/Product Designer

Platform

Web, Mobile web

Timeline

Oct ‘21 - Present

Tools

Figma, CSS, SCSS, HTML, Javascript, Github

Projects

I wear many different hats at Alaska Airlines. Here are just a few examples of work I’ve done during my time here.

Jump to a project

Design Documentation

Components

Education

Engineering

Design Documentation

Continuing my work from the internship, I am always adding more documentation for designers. I aim to be a bridge between designers and engineers.Design documentation includes but is not limited to:

Organizing Figma components in our central UI toolkit library
Creating instructions for how to use components within Figma
Writing release notes for every component/pattern/documentation release
Updating Figma components to most up-to-date features
Creating documentation for best design practices with our design system
Building foundational design elements: grids, spacing, design tokens
Creating tools for designers to better communicate to developers

Design Documentation

Components

Education

Engineering

Components

I love to get my hands on everything and anything related to components. Here are projects I’ve been working on.

Restructuring Token System

Auro, Alaska Airlines' design system, is aiming to enable any product group to use our design system by enabling theming capabilities. I am involved in restructuring the tokens as well as aligning with other product design systems.

Restructuring current tokens

Aligning with other product design systems

Building Components

I design and oversee component development from start to finish. This is the process I follow to bring a component design to life.

Designing a component is not simply about the UI. Let’s say I’m creating a brand new button component. Here’s what I would do.

Research best UX design practices and accessibility implications
Conduct competitive analysis on other design systems, design leaders, and airlines
Identify existing use cases in our product
Brainstorm ways to improve current design and user flow
Ideate component design (UX/UI)
Get feedback on both UX and UI (if possible, conduct user research by collaborating with a researcher)
Reiterate on design and apply to current use cases
Finalize design and blueprint (a process where I redline and document details about the component)
Review and hand off to engineering
If there is an opportunity, contribute in code–mostly front end

Researching best UX practices

Redesigning existing flows

Component Design Workshops

When a component needs improvement or if there is a large chunk of component work to be done, I gather designers who need the component and conduct workshops. In each workshop, we put our heads together to figure out the best solution for various use cases. Product Designers gather from different teams, so we have a wide range of perspectives to integrate into components.

Finalized definition and design of a Left Hand Navigation component

Design Documentation

Components

Education

Engineering

Education

I am passionate about educating our designers on best practices of design systems.

In efforts to do so, have been educating our designers on “Design System Thinking” by creating a course called Auro 101. The course starts from defining basic design system terms such as “token” or “component” and guides our stakeholders through the design process.

I also create tutorials for designers to contribute to our design system. For example, I’ve created a step-by-step tutorial from creating an icon that is up to par with design standards all the way to submitting an issue in Github.

Lastly, I’ve been involved in leading an internal guild on our design system. Developers, designers, and product owners join to ask questions or learn more about Auro’s design and development strategies.