Post Category → Blog

Remembering Jeff McLeman

Like many who knew him, I am absolutely devastated to hear the news of the passing of Jeff McLeman. I got to know McLeman while working at Black Pixel together. Though we didn’t get to work together on projects, he would come into the office every Thursday from his home in Vashon Island. If there is one thing I can point to which I cherish most about Jeff is the presence and conversations we had.

Jeff was an old school person. He believed in working hard, being authentic, and taking no BS from people who weren’t. Basically, he’s from Boston. With him, trust had to be earned. I remember my first trial and tribulation with him came from a very small gesture. I was in Cupertino visiting Apple’s campus. Jeff sends me a DM on Slack, “I need a new hat. Get me a black size medium.”

At the time, I didn’t really know Jeff. I said, “sure, why not.” I bought the hat, and next time he was in the office I gave it to him. He was so grateful, paid me back. What I remember is he wore that hat all the time. Looking back, I’m sure it wasn’t even the hat he cared about, but it was because I got it for him and that small gesture built a relationship of trust and reliability.

Even when I moved to San Francisco and he moved to Beaverton with his lovely wife Stef, I would get occasional pings from him. He never lost touch, and would check in to see how I was doing. I know he didn’t do this to just me. Authentic relationships were important to him.

My thoughts are with his wife Stef, son Ian, the schnoodles, and all of his friends and family. If you knew Jeff, he wouldn’t say pray, but perhaps embody all the things those religious communities intend to convey, to care deeply about humans, love one another, and cherish life.

Jeff, I will miss you so much. I will forever cherish our Thursday morning Real Talk breakfasts at Lola. We’d always get the Lola scramble, sausage for you, bacon for me. If there was one more thing I could tell you how much it meant to me how much you believed in me, not only as a professional, but a person.

I will truly miss such a great mentor, and a wonderful friend.

Seeking walking conversations

As many people, I’ve been thinking about the new year (and decade) and reflect what I want to focus on. Health and wellness is something on the top of my mind. This is the year I’d like to substantially improve my health, which includes more dieting and exercise. I noticed a lot of gatherings and conversations often happen over food and drinks. Don’t get be wrong, I love such activities but they are contrary to my goal. I’d like to experiment with cutting alcohol out of my diet entirely.

Happy Hours are great to catch up and have conservations with people, but I’d like to find a new activity to do so. When I was at One Medical we often took advantage of being right on Embarcadero to do walking 1:1s. It was a great way to have conversations and get some exercise in. Why not do this with friends and new friends?

Now at Webflow, I work remote and in San Francisco. You can find me in Presidio Heights (where I live), Los Angeles, or SOMA (where Webflow’s HQ is). I’m looking do walking conversations with individuals or small groups. I love the idea of grabbing a coffee or tea to fuel the walk, have great conversations, while getting a bit of exercise in.

If you’re interested in meeting up in San Francisco or Los Angeles to go for a walk, let me know! Also if you’re remote, we can walk in our respective locations and talk on the phone.

Avoid Design Re-Shoots: Leveraging Thumbnail Sketches

The role of a product designer comes with a lot of responsibilities, such as ensuring you’re making the most considered decisions since there is a downstream impact in the product development process. Designers can combat this by learning as quickly as possible. A designer has a unique skillset in which they can take requirements/problems and make it tangible in a visual way to create understanding. A very small percentage of this is screen design and in the conceptual process.I am a huge fan of film production and am often inspired by the process. One of the most costly elements in the process is extensive and costly reshoots. The definition of a reshoot is when a movie has to incorporate additional shots to capture content, whether it’s missing some key shots or there are changes in the process. Two prime examples of films that suffered from this are Solo: A Star Wars Story, and The Justice League; where extensive reshoots arguably affected the quality and success of the films.

Xin Xin, a UX Researcher on my team at One Medical often says, “You want to make sure you’re not polishing a turd.” There is no purpose in refining something that is not the right solution.We want to learn as quickly as possible, and this is where thumbnail sketches come in handy Thumbnail sketches are quick, abbreviated drawings, usually done very rapidly and with no corrections. You can use any medium, though pen or pencil is the most common. Thumbnail sketches, usually are very small, often only an inch or two high.The legendary Ridley Scott once stated that “the storyboard is the first look at the film.” I equate storyboards in films to sketching, wireframes, and flows as it pertains to design.

Similar to filmmaking, we as product designers can avoid extensive debt in the development process by ensuring we have the whole picture thought out at a low fidelity level.

Low fidelity iterations in thumbnail sketches can really drive the direction to something excellent. So before your team starts designing screens, consider storyboarding the project out together in thumbnail sketches.