JUST DO IT: 100 Days Challenge of UI Design

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DAY 3: Dial pad 

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Day 2: product page 

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I’ve been following Elle Luna and her “100DayProject” for a while on Instagram. Finally, I know I need to start my own - inspired by designer Paul Flavius Nechita, I decided to create a UI element everyday for 100 days. Here we go: day 1 - login form.  

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When you’re starting out in design you hunger to fix all the things. Your imagination and passion are boundless. So what turns a junior designer into a seasoned pro? It’s more than experience—it’s an ability to be in the moment and be a whole person.

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The Double Diamond: Strategy + Execution of the Right Solution

By Jonny Schneider

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1001 ways of candy sorting 

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Good design is innovative. Good design must be useful. Good design is aesthetic design. Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is honest. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is long-lasting. Good design is consistent in every detail. Good design is environmentally friendly. And last but not least, good design is as little design as possible.

Dieter Rams 

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UI, UX: Who Does What? A Designer's Guide To The Tech Industry

Plus: How Apple, Facebook, Google, and more tech-world heavyweights describe their design jobs.

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The Only UX Reading List Ever

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Finally I finished reading Scott McCloud's book “Understanding Comics” 

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First week done! 

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Day 2 Conducting User Research 

Things I learned today:

1. Avoid leading questions. Seek out user’s behavior, not opinion.

2. To be a good user researcher, sometimes you have to unlearn everything that makes a good conversationalist. 

3. Powerful tool to synthesize findings from the interviews - Affinity Mapping. It helps you see the patterns. Grouping the post-its is a way to connect your data point. What’s the common theme that occurs again and again? What kind of pattern do you find among different users? Be creative and play around it. It’s like playing a puzzle game - where does each puzzle piece fit in the big picture? Data visualization is powerful. 

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GA UXDI 

DAY 1 

First things first, setting up some important ground rules for class.

Ground Rules

Be clear about objectives

Be kind, not “nice"

Be constructive

Be approachable. Check in

Lift while you climb

Listen & ask questions

Trust yourself & your process

Allow others to experience challenges

Be open-minded

Don’t be afraid to fail - try to experiment new things

Things I learned today

1. The difference between a design solution and a design response.

2. The importance of storytelling in UX design. As a UX researcher, you have to understand and be able to tell the whole story of your user. Context is everything. 

3. Once you identify a design problem, don’t jump into the solution too quickly. Be open-minded towards all the possibilities. 

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Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

-  Ira Glass (Video made by David Shiyang Liu)