This episode features an interview with Alexis Morin, a Design System Lead. Alexis has over 15 years of experience collaborating with teams and organizations to create and ship digital experiences, working with brands like Google, Meta, and Audi. In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Alexis to discuss what a design system is, removing biases in your work, and over-optimizing Duolingo experience points.
This episode features an interview with Alexis Morin, a Design System Lead. Alexis has over 15 years of experience collaborating with teams and organizations to create and ship digital experiences, working with brands like Google, Meta, and Audi.
In this episode, Cassidy and Zach sit down with Alexis to discuss what a design system is, removing biases in your work, and over-optimizing Duolingo experience points.
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Episode Timestamps:
(01:32): What Alexis is working on right now
(03:22): What Alexis’ day-to-day looks like
(08:47): What tools Alexis uses
(09:46): How Alexis got into the industry
(12:48): Rapid Fire Questions
(24:34): Random Segment Generator
(31:20): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“I always try to keep in mind, and this is a design rule, that the people who will be using the thing that you're making, it's probably not you. A lot of the times, we want to build something and the intent is, ‘This is how I would do it.’ But at the end of the day, that's rarely the case. It's important to just keep that in mind and sometimes you just exercise a little bit of empathy, put some empathy into your work. And that can go a long way into removing some biases that we all have.” – Alexis Morin
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy Williams: Hello everybody and welcome to the Dev Morning Show (At Night). My name is Cassidy and I am here with my wonderful as always, co-host Zach. Hey Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey Cass. Are you enjoying the winter wonderland that is outside right now?
Cassidy Williams: I'm like worried for the planet cuz it finally snowed a little bit in Chicago and then it melted about two hours later.
That's
Zach Plata: true. That's true. Maybe one day it,
Cassidy Williams: yeah. Yeah, it's, it's like, it's great because I can go outside and not just freeze my face off immediately, but I'm also like, but I should be freezing my
Zach Plata: face off maybe in April. I think that's the brunt. It just shifts .
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway, we have an awesome guest today, the very cool Alexis Morin, who is a design systems lead.
Alexis, welcome to the. Hello. Thanks
Alexis Morin: for having me.
Cassidy Williams: Is it cold where
Alexis Morin: you are? ? It is cold. Uh, I'm, I'm in Canada and the forecast for tomorrow is two feet of snow, so that's gonna be
Cassidy Williams: fun. Oh gosh. Casual. Wow. Classic Canada with all of their snow. Maybe we won't
Zach Plata: complain. ?
Cassidy Williams: Yeah.
But yeah, and a design system lead. I think you might be our first full-time designer on the show.
Alexis Morin: Ooh,
Cassidy Williams: exciting. Hmm. Yeah. Fun. Very, very special. What are you working on right now?
Alexis Morin: Uh, my main project, uh, is my four week old baby at the moment.
Cassidy Williams: That is a very big project. That is an incredibly important one.
Alexis Morin: So just coming out of parental. Uh, and back to work, uh, where during the day. Uh, I work on design systems for web applications that show up in, on computers, on phones, on standup kiosks, tablets, um, wherever our customers eyeballs or our customers' customer's eyeballs end up. ,
Cassidy Williams: that is so important and awesome.
And I know that Zack has worked in design systems and stuff before and has lots of thoughts and opinions on it. Yeah.
Zach Plata: We actually worked ourselves or we worked together. Um, what, uh, gosh, what was that casual feels like a year or two. , doesn't it? I go, uh, feels like forever, but yeah, it, it was fun. Be entering together and talking about Pokemon and stuff.
um, people things only. Yes, exactly. . And now it's time to hear about our awesome sponsors LaunchDarkly. The Dev Morning Show at night is a sponsored podcast, means someone has to pay the bills around here, we're sponsored by LaunchDarkly. And LaunchDarkly is the first scalable feature management platform.
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Cassidy Williams: Thanks LaunchDarkly. You keep the lights on . So anyway, Alexis, what does your day-to-day. ,
Alexis Morin: yeah. On, on the daily. Um, as a design systems lead, I work with product teams. I work with, uh, designers and engineers to understand what they're working on, um, to see if there's any common needs that they have that might be systemizable.
Um, and I build tooling with my team, um, either. Design tools or in code tools or in documentation, to really try to meet those challenges and empower those builders, those makers to build faster, um, to get their ideas, uh, into an app and have those ideas be high quality, uh, as fast as possible. So that's, that's what I do on the daily.
Um, and as well, I'm like the. I'm the smiling customer service space of the design system because , it's a tool set. Um, it comes with constraints, it comes with guidelines, dos and don'ts. Uh, and really anybody who has an impact on the final product that people end up using, designs it in a way. So it's really important to get that alignment, not just by people who have designer and their.
Mm-hmm. . But that understanding needs to permeate across, uh, everyone who's touching this thing, right? It starts with product people. It's usually handed off to designers and it's usually handed off to engineers. Uh, but across all of that, our decisions and the tooling that we make has to be resilient to all of those handoffs in order to really provide that best.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. For those who don't fully know what a design system is, how do you describe it? Because for myself, I usually just say it's like a Lego set and you have a set number of pieces that you can use and it is in a set and like I, I like kind leave it at that, but I don't know if it's the best description.
Alexis Morin: there are certainly competing opinions as to what a design system is and, uh, where the boundaries lie. Hmm. I would say one thing for sure is that design system is a bad name for a design system. . Um, mostly because great way to start . Right. Um, so many things in tech right are, are just like hard to, hard to name, and they just, they have a name and that's what they're called.
Yeah. Uh, so design systems can include certainly like a UI library that, uh, designers can copy paste from and build mock-ups. That's one aspect of it. Um, it also can include content guidelines. How does this product speak to its user base? Is it cherry? Is it delightful? Is it professional? Uh, it also includes, uh, like high level UX pattern.
uh, how many primary actions should any screen have? Mm-hmm. , ideally, you want that number to be one. You want the UI to be a guiding experience. You want things to be clear and easy to use for, for your users. Um, it can also include like operational principles, meaning who gets to contribute to this UI library and to these guidelines.
Is it a centralized. Kind of siloed off and just doing their thing and, and, uh, going really fast. Is it, uh, distributed across the org and what happens when you make a contribution? So it can be all of these things, right? Yeah.
Zach Plata: And it's. , it's, it's really telling when like, uh, you have an organization, or at least personally speaking, when you have an organization or a group that's dedicated to kind of managing a lot of these rule sets or guidelines and mm-hmm.
you know, maintaining all these things that are used on a daily basis by engineers and product man, uh, product designers and, and content people as well. Um, versus, you know, orgs that don't really have that in place. And it's just like, everyone's just like, kind of frazzling to just kind of put a blob together, but nothing's really quite organized and so it, it becomes a little dysfunctional
Alexis Morin: precisely because these rules will emerge from the woodwork.
if there's nobody handling them, um, yeah. But they will be extremely chaotic if you let that happen. And so having, uh, a team that's dedicated to like wrangling those cats and hurting those ideas and uh, creating signal from all the noise, that becomes really helpful in creating focused experiences for, for your users
Cassidy Williams: at the end of.
Yeah, it reminds me of a friend of mine who used to work on Internet Explorer, so this was back in the day before Edge existed and stuff, and she was told, Hey, will you work on the design system side of things? She's like, okay, we haven't had this before, but I'll try. And they had something like 29 different blues.
Throughout the browser, like , and they were all just close enough that the, that there like probably should have been just one color. And she was like, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's so many sizes and so many buttons and things that just are thrown on top of a pile. So yeah, it's probably good to have that from the start
Zach Plata: I'd love to read about that. That that sounds like an interesting like Yeah. Whole deep hole. You could, you could rabbit hole, you could get into serious.
Alexis Morin: design system. More stories.
Zach Plata: Yeah. . Exactly. So, uh, you know, with your day-to-day, what kind of tools are you using?
Alexis Morin: Um, I touched upon this, um, in the previous story.
So, uh, spend a decent amount of time in Figma, um, obviously finessing, uh, design assets. Um, I spend some time in Google Sheets, you know, planning as a design system lead. I, I don't just do the making, I also do the planning, uh, the problem framing, all of. Uh, spend some time in Jira as well, gathering requirements and making sure that, uh, conversations from beatings or slack threads are all captured.
Um, and, and recorded. And yeah, when I, when I write code, which happens, you know, a good day is when I get to write code. Um, yeah. So I usually use the S code for that. , plain, simple, very basic. . But yeah, it's amazing and does a great job. So very happy with that.
Cassidy Williams: So you design and you write code, which I feel like that makes you a unicorn already.
What got you into the industry in the first place?
Alexis Morin: Yeah, I mean, way back in. . 2004, I went to vocational college showing my age, aren't I? Um, went to vocational college in Quebec and this was a program that taught you everything. It was called multimedia integration. And it was really that, it was like, here's a bit of everything and here's how to work the basics of it.
And over the course of like three years, eventually people tend to like gravitate toward. , uh, I want to build flash applications, or I want to make websites in Dream Weaver because that's like, that was the landscape at the time. Um, so some people ended up being like, uh, motion graphics designers. Some people ended up programmers, some people ended up making games.
Uh, I really gravitated towards writing code. So very quickly, like I got internships and jobs, um, writing good old MySQL and PHP c s s and mm-hmm , jQuery, uh, and uploading files to an FTP server in order to push it to production.
Cassidy Williams: Those are good times, man, who
Alexis Morin: after, after a few years of doing that, uh, I was working at small web shops for as little as like 10 or $15 an hour.
Uh, , I was wondering like, okay, there, there has to be more to this. So I pursued, uh, an education in Interaction sign at the master's level. Uh, I did my bachelor's in computation arts, which was basically a super open bachelor's program where you make art using computers or computation. . That's neat. It's really weird stuff.
Sounds very broad. , . It really was. And that, that program was like you, you get out of it, what you put into it. Mm-hmm. very much. And I ended up making like, uh, little electronic birds that are still stuck, that had like magnets to them. And they would chirp according to like the temperature of the air, uh, or the amount of sunlight they received.
And I stuck little button magnets, neo Tanium magnet magnets to them and threw them high into the school ceiling. Like they're probably still stuck there to this day. Um, kind of GI art projects using micro controllers. Yeah. Lots of fun stuff like that.
Cassidy Williams: That's such magical art. That's permanent. I
Alexis Morin: love it.
Okay. Yep. So after all, make, making all that art, learning all that interaction design, um, I had to make heartbreak and remove any reference from being a developer on the LinkedIn and yeah, started. Uh, and yeah, I was now being called a designer and that's, that's how I got into the industry and it's 15 years in and, and going, so it's, it's all
Cassidy Williams: right.
That is awesome. Love that. Okay. It is time for rapid fire questions.
We're going to ask you questions rapidly, and the first one is we've all got domain names and project ideas and stuff that we're squatting on. What's one of yours?
Alexis Morin: Ooh, I've, I've been very, I've been a good. With regards to buying extraneous domains. Good for you. Yeah, I do have a redirect to my personal website, so you can go, I have an Indian domain, so you can go to alexismor.in Oh,
Cassidy Williams: that's cool.
That's pretty cool. Nice.
Alexis Morin: Uh, that, that's just a redirect at the moment, but it's, otherwise I've been, I've been putting out like a few side projects over the years. My latest one was like a Figma plugin that allows you to check like crypto prices. Uh, that was done in, done in like three days. Uh, doesn't require a domain though.
What
Zach Plata: is the most recent thing you over-optimized?
Alexis Morin: Continuously over optimizing the amount of experience points I gain a Duolingo, I think , I'm a notorious dual lingo fanatic. Um,
Cassidy Williams: that owl little
Alexis Morin: get you? Yeah, he, yeah, he's in her skin, uh, currently running a 2042 day streak at Duolingo, which is more than five years.
Oh
Zach Plata: wow.
Alexis Morin: In what language? Uh, a few. So I've, I've lived in a few places and every time I've lived in a new place, I was, I would always try to like, learn a local language is just give it a good shot, right? Yeah. Without any, like, I, I don't need to be perfect or fluent or write a academic paper. Just like try.
Um, so I, I've done some in German. I've done some in Chinese and I'm currently doing Japanese. . Cool. All right. So I know at which time of the day and which time of the week is the best time to get double XRP points and do a lingo.
Cassidy Williams: Oh gosh. You have over optimize this .
Alexis Morin: Oh, I really have. Yeah. If you do a lesson in the morning before 12 noon, you get a chest, which you can open at 6:00 PM between six and midnight.
Oh, which doubles your xp, and then if you do the one in the evening, you get a chest for the morning. So as long as you keep that virtuous loop going, you get double cadence, go xp.
Cassidy Williams: That's amazing.
Alexis Morin: Go ahead. I, I also, um, you know, going back to work things, um, certainly try to put out the best figma components possible, you know?
Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Figma is so complicated that it's, it's. , it is possible to like build something that behaves correctly on the surface but isn't built the right way. Very, very similar to code. Um, so I'm very sensitive to that stuff and like having the least number of layers possible, uh, and have every layer be named and every value.
Wow. Point back to design token. It's just part of the.
Cassidy Williams: Honestly, even naming the layers is impressive. As a Figma nu, I feel like I just have like tens of thousands of frames where it's just a pile of things on top of each other and I just kind of hope it looks good. . Yep. Same
what is your golden rule for designing or working in general?
Alexis Morin: I always try to keep in mind, and, and this is kind of a design rule, um, that the people who will be using the. that you're making, it's probably not you. Mm-hmm. . And so a lot of the times we wanna build something and the intent is this is how I would do it.
But at the end of the day, like that's rarely the case. It's important to, to just keep that in mind. And sometimes you just exercise a little bit of, of empathy into, put some empathy into your work. and that can go a long way into removing some biases that, uh, we all have, I think. Yeah, for sure. I like that.
Zach Plata: What's your favorite? It depends. Question.
Alexis Morin: Uh, so a hot topic when it comes to design systems is should this thing, this component, this pattern, be in the design system? Mm-hmm. ? Yeah. And there's lots of ways to answer this and there's rarely. a single easy answer, and it usually is a conversation with the team who needs a thing?
Can it be, yeah, this other thing. How soon do you need this? How robust do you need this to be built?
Cassidy Williams: Mm-hmm. . Yeah, that makes sense because there's always edge cases for something. , and that's, that's design, that's code, that's everything. And it
Alexis Morin: depends because they, they want the component for one use case.
But if, if it's a good citizen of the design system, uh, it should work in a variety of other use cases. Mm-hmm. right needs to be reusable, and so they obviously are tunnel visioned onto this one use case. and we're trying to advocate for, uh, adaptability and composability in other use cases as well. So balancing those is, is, uh, a constant
Cassidy Williams: challenge.
Yeah, that makes sense. A pleasurable one nonetheless. . Yeah. . What is the oldest piece of tech you still own?
Alexis Morin: I have a vcr. Whoa. I fished out of the in-laws Dang. Like basement. Uh, I think there's a tape stuck inside of it. A lot of these were like to try to view old tapes that like family videos? Yeah. That my dad was cleaning out when he sold, uh, my childhood home.
Zach Plata: I'm like having flashbacks of like having taped, stuck inside the VCR and freaking out ,
Cassidy Williams: especially if it's a rental.
Zach Plata: Oh my gosh. Blockbuster Would the
Cassidy Williams: fear. ? Mm. No. I've seen so many like talks and stuff recently of parents asking their kids, do you know what be kind rewind means? And so many kids are like, it just means you step back and remember you should be kind. And you're like, no, it's an actual practical thing.
Rewind your tapes. .
Alexis Morin: Yeah.
Zach Plata: That's such a fan. Oh man. Memory lane. All right. Have you written a piece of cringey code?
Alexis Morin: I don't write a lot of code. As a designer, I write a lot of like prototypes and just like ideas to get outta my head. Um, so I had to think back on this to when I was a full-time programmer and I wrote a site generator, which wasn't a site generator at all.
It was just this boiler plate for, uh, a Canadian political. . Hmm. Because my boss at the time had them as a customer, and so for each candidate, we would take the file tree, upload it to a different FTP server and like change out the headshots in the title. Oh, extremely cringe. Considering what you can do today with, with
Cassidy Williams: statics.
Yeah, just like a JSON object of variables or something. I'm sure. Nice man. Good times. You, you mentioned Dream Waiver earlier, and so all with FTP and all of these, it's, it's taken me back to old days. . What is your favorite tech or programming? Pun.
Alexis Morin: I like, I like markdown as the opposite to markup.
Cassidy Williams: Oh yeah.
Yeah. I haven't actually thought of it that way before. Yeah.
Alexis Morin: Um, so that's, I think that's a nice one. I mean, markdown is a great, great language. to use in so many places. Um, also a huge fan of recursive acronyms. Not sure if they exist outside of tech,
Cassidy Williams: where it's,
Alexis Morin: where it's like, it's a self-referential acronym, right.
Where I
Cassidy Williams: think the most famous one is acronym in it.
Alexis Morin: Yeah, correct. So I think the, the most famous one is, uh, gnu, which stand stands for new is not un. That's perfect. Back, back in the day, um, with a friend, we were, we were learning c plus plus, um, and happened to write a command line Twitter application in c plus plus, which is like the worst c plus language you could ever pick.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, I was gonna say that's a bad choice
Alexis Morin: coming back upon here. Terrible choice. Um, but the application was called, and it stood Stands for guys Updates your Status. . Nice. Yeah. So the G is just this black hole of meaning
Cassidy Williams: it. It reminds me there was one where it was like intern. So meta, even this acronym, because the the acronym is then is meta.
I know it makes you think a little bit turn. So even this acronym and then is. Watch out world, your brains are just broken.
Zach Plata: Gosh, I did not expect that for an afternoon thing. , I know . I've also never heard of recursive acronyms before and I'm like trying to think back on any,
Cassidy Williams: the one that i's cool can think of that's like, it doesn't really count, but it's like when people say at ATM machine, when the M and ATM is also machine and it's not the same, but it's similar.
Alexis Morin: Yeah. Well, Z Tito, the image editing program. Gimp. Gimp, yeah. Yeah, they, no, so GIMP stands for New Image manipulation program. Again, the G doesn't stand for anything.
Cassidy Williams: You just keep going
Alexis Morin: deeper. Just keeps, yeah, just rehearses into infinity.
Zach Plata: All right. And what is your most used.
Alexis Morin: I use the, the little bowing person a lot. Oh, the little, oh, he looks like this. Yeah. Yeah.
Cassidy Williams: Um, with the little, like, flares above his head.
Alexis Morin: Yeah, just like that. Um, I think as, as somebody who provides a service to other designers, to engineers, um, I'm always very thankful for like, feedback that I.
or, um, whenever I accept a task or something to work on, I say like, Hey, thank you. Like please hold. Thank you for your patience. Um, and I find in, in a remote world, being extra GEs particular, like moving a lot, um, is kind of a prerequisite to getting meaning across. Like you have to exaggerate everything in order to get like a normal level of, uh, Energy out.
So I use the bowel emoji lot. Um, close second in the new emojis for 2022 is the melting face. The melting boy, boy face is a
Cassidy Williams: good one. That's a, that's a good emoji . I like
Alexis Morin: it. Yeah. Shout out to the melting face, the face in clouds and the dotted outline face.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. I still really like the smiley face with the tear.
I think that one's really good too. Oh yeah.
Zach Plata: Very relatable.
Cassidy Williams: It's now time for the random segment generator.
We're going to ask you some random things, and the first segment is merge conflict. What's a merge conflict work or personal that you dealt with in the past and that you had to overcome? Hmm.
Alexis Morin: This is a tough one to answer as a designer. Um. I would say, so I'm gonna throw a curve ball at this. Figma has branching and Figma has merger conflicts now.
Ooh. Yeah. Um, blessing and a curse . Yeah. Uh, design systems tend to be very large files, and so even though we try to abide by like sync, responsibility and, and one branch per change, uh, yeah. Sometimes those merch conflicts are pretty gnarly to handle, uh, especially on, on large files. and sometimes Figma is not the best at like showing you what's different because obviously a different code is a different code, but a different Figma could be so many things.
It could be, well this exact thing just moved, but it looks the same or the layers changed or the names of the layers are different or, yeah, so many things are like non-visual as well. So those are pretty tricky to handle, especially in large files.
Cassidy Williams: I didn't think of it that way. It reminds me of. game development, merge conflicts.
I, I haven't really worked with Unity much, but I've heard so many horror stories of just like you change one thing and it changes everything, and, and you gave us a little gross .
Zach Plata: It also reminds me of that one tool, I think it's called Abstract, which was built on the model of like branching for, for designs, but it was, At least for me, just like super confusing.
Um, and thinking about like that whole model for like design, um, and change management is just, it's a very tricky problem. , I, I would not, I would not want to be the person working on that stuff, but, uh, yeah. Important nonetheless. . All right. Our next segment we've got is what are you proud of? So what is something that you designed or created recently that you wanna share or that you're super proud of?
Alexis Morin: Yeah. Um, so in, in 2021, uh, , I organized a, an international design conference, so I, I wasn't the instigator at this design conference. Um, rather it's a design conference that moves around the world and, uh, has been ping ponging between the US and Europe. Uh, and the conference was going to be in Montreal back when we secured the bid and then Covid happened, uh, and we had to like pivot to an online conference.
And this was the first time this conference had gone online. But yeah. Uh, so the conference is called Interaction 21 because it happened in 2021. Um, and it's part of the Interaction Design Association's greater series of conferences. So this year 23, uh, is happening. It's happening in Zurich, and it'll be the, the first time.
post pandemic that we're all getting together physically, uh, for that conference. So yeah, there was about a thousand attendees. Um, and because it was global, it ran on three times 24 hours to cover all time zones equally and to like give equal attention to all time zones. . That
Cassidy Williams: is such a big effort project to do.
Cuz like in-person conferences, yes there are pain, but virtual ones too. You've gotta, again, handle the whole world and make sure that things are staying online and make sure things are being produced and, and working steadily as, as people are watching and stuff that, that's amazing. That's a big effort.
Alexis Morin: If you're, if you're interested, uh, the entirety of all the talks are available for free online at 21.ixda.org. Ooh, yes, please. Very cool. That's the website I coded along with, um, Ooh, some friends. That was, that was a great time. That was super
Cassidy Williams: fun. No cringey code insight, I'm sure. .
Alexis Morin: Um, well, does using Google Sheets as a database, cringey, ,
Cassidy Williams: no.
And I feel strongly about that. I feel like we have gatekeeper databases too much and we need to let people use things like Excel if it works well, and that rhymes. What a day.
Alexis Morin: Nice. It works well.
Cassidy Williams: Okay. And finally it is the mild panic trivia fun game. Ah, we have 10 seconds each to ask someone a question or compliment them.
Zach, you'll do Alexis. Alexis. You'll do me. And then I will do Zach.
Zach Plata: Zach, go. All right. Alexis, what is your favorite starter Pokemon? In the entire Pokemon universe.
Alexis Morin: Oh, wow. In the entire universe? Yes.
I'm, uh, this is very important. I'll go with the latest and I'll go with the floor. Gutto, I believe is his name.
Cassidy Williams: Oh, is that that cat one? He's the grass
Alexis Morin: cat.
Cassidy Williams: The grass cat. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yes. Uh, nice. Yeah, that one was cute. All right. I like that.
Alexis Morin: Now it's your turn. Now it's my turn. Uh, Cassidy, your tech comedy skills are unrivaled.
Um, thank you. I've been watching so many of your talks, um, and they've got me up in stitches every time I find them. Hilarious and very relatable. Still
Cassidy Williams: up. Thank you. I appreciate it. All right. Now I have Pokemon on the brain. So Zach, what's your favorite legendary Pokemon.
Zach Plata: Oh gosh,
Cassidy Williams: that's a tough one. Ho. Hoho is pretty good. The fire chicken, it's so
Zach Plata: pretty. Yeah, it's It's pretty Isn't chicken? I thought it was a bird.
Cassidy Williams: Oh, it's definitely chicken. Definitely a bird. I just like calling it the fire chicken. . I don't know if you've seen the shiny one. It looks like a burnt chicken leg with like feathers like it's.
It's pretty funny looking.
Zach Plata: I don't remember, but I'm doing that immediately after this. Look it up and I won't think of anything else now. , .
Cassidy Williams: Fire chicken, . It is really strong though. The, the fire and the, and the flying. Mm mm That's a good Pokemon Power . Anyway. That is our show, and I'd love to bring you to Cassidy's sage advice
because I'm Cassidy and I have sage advice for you. And the advice that I'd like to bring is actually coming from Alexis. Keep in mind, you're probably not your user. And I think that is the power of diverse teams. That is the power of working and talking to a lot of users that aren't necessarily like you.
When you're building, you have to think, yes, this is how I would use it, but how do other people use this software I might be making, might be designing or this, this hardware project I might be putting together because. . As you talk with more people, you get more of a rounded perspective about the things that you're building and you ultimately build better products overall.
That being said, Alexis, thank you so much for joining us.
Alexis Morin: It's been a pleasure.
Cassidy Williams: Okay, is there anything you wanna plug? Where can people find you on the internet?
Alexis Morin: Check out Interaction 23. Yay. At interaction23.ixda.org uh, happening. February 28 to March four. Ooh, that's coming up Ken. It is, yeah. Um, and you can find me on Twitter on the bird application at thealxismorin.
That's ALEXIS MORIN, um, where I retweet a lot of hot takes about design systems, , and use it as a public. Customer service forum.
Cassidy Williams: As one does, and once again, because making podcasts is expensive. This show is brought to you by LaunchDarkly LaunchDarkly Toggles Peaks of 20 trillion feature flags each day, and that number continues to grow, and you should use them.
You can head over to launchdarkly.com and learn about how. Thank you for making this show possible. LaunchDarkly, I've been Cassidy. You can find me at cassidoo, C A S S I D O O on most things, and I'm CTO over at Contenda.
Zach Plata: And I'm Zach. And I'm a DevRel at Rive, and you can find me on Twitter at zachplata.
Cassidy Williams: Thank you for tuning into the Dev Morning Show (At Night).
Make sure you head over to our YouTube channel where you can like and subscribe. You can also listen to the audio version of this wherever you get your podcasts.