Don't let designers push to prod

I worked on a futures trading software for one of the top five banks in the US. My job was to make the complex financial stuff easier to read.

This design engagement was different because I also had to contribute in code. The software was written in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and XAML. I had never used it, but it seemed similar to HTML. I could learn on the job.

I decided to start with something simple: changing the text color. There was one button with black text on a dark blue background. It was unreadable. I could tell a developer designed it. So I decided to change the text color to white.

I updated one line of code and the text color changed to white. The contrast was magnificent.

I dusted my hands off and logged off for the day.

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I walked in to standup the next morning to a bunch of mean looking devs. Like, really mean.

Turns out, I had pushed changes straight to the main branch (it was also my first time using SVN). But that wasn’t the main issue. What I didn’t realize was that I had accidentally changed the text across the entire application to white. This included tables, charts, and forms, which already had a white background. So it was white text on a white background, and the traders couldn’t see anything.

The traders freaked out. Who in turn freaked the devs out. The devs had to triage the situation after hours while I was happily playing video games at home.

Oops.

I guess it wasn’t too terrible since I didn’t get fired. Plus the devs realized that they needed a more robust testing process for the UI as well. But I did have to rebuild a lot of trust with my team from scratch.

We eventually built a slick design system that was optimized for trading. It was a fun challenge trying to coherently cram as many things as possible onto a screen. Power users hate white space—maybe even more so because of the whiteout I caused.

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P.S. I still test in prod (for personal projects).