It's Brina!

[sabrina-arcella]

7th week

We’re done with the last individual project called “Spreadsheet-ectomy” that aimed at improving the workflow inside companies by removing the use of spreadsheets, and I’m proud to say that I’m very satisfied with my results!

I even got the chance to meet 1 on 1 with Rafael Mojica, VP User Experience at DigitalOcean, and I received some priceless feedback from him (thank you Ironhack for giving me this opportunity, I will be forever grateful!)

If I were to have a look back at what I did during the first weeks of this amazing bootcamp, I can clearly see some improvements in my skills, in my methodologies and in my mindset as well.

I feel like I’m growing already as a designer, so kudos on that Brina, you’re doing a good job!

However, I can’t say that this was an easy challenge for me to face.

In the making of this project, I had a courtesy visit from my dear ol’ pal anxiety, and she brought friends: fears and insecurities. It was a real party, I tell you!

I struggled a lot with all those feelings that used to bring me down in the past: I was doubting myself, my work, my capabilities, my commitment and my motivation. I felt so small and insignificant, I thought I would never feel this way anymore. The worst thing is that these emotions have their own sadist and charming way of feeling comforting, because it’s what you’re used to, they wrap you up like a blanket that you can’t really take off.

Luckily I managed to recover from that, getting back to work was no child’s play but once I got back on track, there was no way of stopping me.

This episode was a friendly reminder that these things don’t just disappear, even though they may seem far away, like a childhood memory. They’ll never stop trying to bring you down and demolish all the self-esteem you’ve tried to build and all the efforts you’re making.

They’ll never stop, but I won’t either. Next time, I’ll be prepared.

Today's convo: "Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it.” “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

―both quotes by Maya Angelou

[sabrina-arcella]

How to stand out

Hello everyone!  I just quickly wanted to share with you some thoughts about this article that I just read about case studies, that is written reports that we use to showcase our projects.

I found it quite insightful and I totally resonated with many of the things that I read.

I understood that, even though it may look like there’s a set scheme to follow to build our case studies upon, the truth is that there isn’t, even though all the reports that you read on Medium may convey this message: in fact, they all look the same.

Sure, there are some general rules of thumbs that one could follow, but in the end the only things that a designer should really keep in mind while writing a case study are the following:

Define your area of focus

Align the story with the medium

Set up the context of the project

Focus on insights rather than process

Design your case study reading experience

Obsess over your case study visuals

Make it personal

The thing that strikes me the most is how hard we try to do what everyone else does (because it’s safe, it’s comfortable and it surely can’t be that bad after all, right?) and how little we try to make our voice stand out and let our personality, skills and strengths show in our work.

If only we started to be braver and risk more, we’d be experiencing some positive changes in our career, and that’s exactly what I aim to do.

[sabrina-arcella]

Week #6

Things are getting a bit harder now.

The project that we’re working on right now has to do with spreadsheets and all the awful, inappropriate things that people do with them (data entry, planning, inventory...).

There surely are other tools out there that could do a better job than spreadsheets for all of these tasks, but people don’t really care.

Spreadsheets are convenient, flexible and free, so why shouldn’t they use them?

Well, with the app that we are ideating, we should be able to SOMEHOW make them give it a second thought, and that’s really really hard to do, because users are attached to the tools that they are accustomed to, so unless we can give them an experience that feels familiar to them, they will never loose their grip on Excel.

- - -

Also this is the first time since the start of the bootcamp that I’m feeling a bit disappointed with myself. The last couple of days I didn’t manage to do much, and I don’t really know why.

I feel like time slipped away from my hands, precious hours that I could have used to do some more work. I’m not happy with that, not one bit.

This is something that used to happen a lot to me before the bootcamp because I didn’t feel motivated, I didn’t have a purpose in mind, so why did this happen now?

Maybe it’s true that, sometimes, I need time to stop moving. 

I need time to stay useless.

I’ll try and recover quickly from here to keep up the pace. I need to.

[sabrina-arcella]

Remote Contextual Inquiry

For our next solo project we’re asked to come up with an innovative and user friendly solution to spreadsheets, commonly used in companies for accounting and data entry.

To do so, we need to reach out to different professionals or employees who rely on spreadsheets (or similar digital tools) and understand what they do with them, how do they use them and what their goals are while interacting with the tool.

We could easily be asking questions through surveys and interviews, or we could see how they interact with the service giving them a specific task to perform during a usability test.

However, to really get to know about our users intentions and behaviours while using the product, the best practice would be conducting a remote contextual inquiry, and this interesting article will tell you why.

The gist of it is that a remote contextual inquiry lets you observe the users in their natural environment, analysing how they interact with a product, how long it takes, which roadblocks they experience, which features are prioritized and which ones are useless: this approach is super important to get significant insights from our users that will help shape the product that we’re developing. Also an RCI is cheaper than an ordinary inquiry since you don’t have to travel to your users and you can simply ask them to share their screens during a video conference (of course you’d have to make sure that they are okay with it and let them know whether you’re going to record them or not and how you’re going to use the data provided).

I never used this methodology during any of my previous projects, but I find it really valid and I can clearly see how it would add value to my work. I’m already scheduling some interviews for this first phase of process where I’ll be focusing on research and ideation: my plan for the interviews is to ask some questions to my users during a video conference and then ask them to share their screen and walk me through their daily interactions with the digital tools that they use for their work, and from there I’ll keep track of their clicks and their overall experience in order to find out how they feel about the product, which are the major pain points in the interaction and how they would like it to be improved.

This is it for now, I can’t wait to give RCI a try! Bye!

[sabrina-arcella]

Week 5

Another week is gone, and I’m all like “Whoaaaaaaah, we’re halfway theeeere!”

Yep, in just another 4 weeks the bootcamp will be over, and I can already feel that lowkey sadness that will come with it, but I’m trying not to think about that too much! (I really love what I’m doing here, so I want to enjoy it fully till it lasts!)

This time we had to redesign and existing website for a small business. My team and I redesigned Bravas Barcelona, and I gotta say that we did a pretty good job with it (of course it could still be improved a lot, but we worked hard on that and came up with some interesting solutions to the issues that users were experiencing on the website, so we’re proud of that!)

I enjoyed working with the team that I was assigned to, the girls were super nice and sweet and we decided to divide and conquer to make the best out of the available time before the delivery. Of course there were some hard times and some roadblocks on our path, but we always managed to push through!

A super duper cool thing that we got to do during this project was coding. We didn’t get to do a lot before because that is not our primary area of expertise, but man ain’t it fun! Frustrating at times, I admit that, but when you’re designing a responsive webpage for the first time and after many and many errors your code is finally working it’s suuuuper rewarding! I find it super fascinating and I can’t wait to learn more!

Now, for the next two weeks I’ll be working on my last solo project. I’m a slightly worried about this one, it’s going to be hard, but I won’t let this stop me: I faced so many challenges so far and I always delivered results that I could be satisfied with, so I’m sure that it won’t be any different this time, I just need to trust the process and believe in myself.

Let’s see how it goes!

[sabrina-arcella]

Week 4

Another week has gone by, and I gotta say that I’m pretty tired.

This time around we had to come up with an MVP for a Travel booking app, thinking about things like business, brand identity, revenue models and so on so forth.

It has been quite an interesting project, even though I gotta say that I felt pretty drained, I still have to learn how to manage my time in order to be more productive without wasting too much time.

My hope is to get better and better with that, as well as with visual design (I seriously struggle a lot with things like contrast, font size, spacing and stuff, but no one is perfect, and with practice I’m sure that I’ll become more proficient and develop a good eye as well!)

See you soon! 

Brina.

[sabrina-arcella]

Android vs iOS

For this next project we’ll have to design a travelling app for both Android and iOS devices. To do so, first of all we need to understand which are the main differences between the two and what guidelines we should be following in order to come up with a coherent prototype that aligns with the native design that users of these operative systems can recognize and feel familiar with.

Here are some examples:

Tabs

The location and logic of the tab bar options on iOS and Android are different. Platforms have different rules and guidelines for UI and usability, and you have to take them into consideration when designing a tab bar for a particular platform. Tabs appear at the top of the screen on Android and at the bottom of the screen on iOS.

[source]

Date pickers

One example of an element that’s typically designed differently on the two platforms is a date picker. Android users aren’t familiar with the slot machine reel-style date selector that’s common in iOS. Using this style of date picker in Android would require custom views, which can get complicated, increasing the complexity and duration of development and making your app design look alien to the Android platform.

[source]

Buttons styles

There are two styles of buttons in the Material Design Guidelines — flat and raised. These buttons are used in different situations. The text on buttons in Material Design is usually all uppercase. Sometimes we find uppercase button text in native iOS apps too, but most often we find title case.

[source]

Action buttons

We have two different types of buttons: floating action buttons on Android and call to action buttons on iOS. A floating action button represents the primary action in an application. For example, the compose button in a mail app or the new post button in a social network app can be floating action buttons. The analogous design for the primary action in iOS apps is call to action button, which is located in the center of the tab bar.

[source]

Differences in typography

San Francisco is the system typeface in iOS. Roboto is the standard typeface in Android. Noto is the standard typeface for all languages in Chrome and Android that aren’t supported by Roboto. You’ll need to pay close attention to the typographic and layout conventions of each platform.

[source]

However, these are just some of the interesting things that I learnt today.

If you wish to find out more, have a look at these resources:

“Basic Patterns For Mobile Navigation: Pros And Cons”;

“Interaction Design patterns : iOS vs Android”;

“Differences between Designing Native iOS Apps and Native Android Apps”;

“You don’t always need to follow native Android or iOS patterns when designing an app”.

[sabrina-arcella]

Good design is (not) easy!

These quite messy sketches that I made summarize the most important things that I learnt from this cool presentation by Ryan Olshavsky and Jonathan Cho, senior interface designers from the amazing Apple team.

First of all, you need to ask yourself the right questions: “What are we making?” “Who is it for?” “Does it actually work?” “Did we get it right?”

These questions are what makes every design choice so difficult, even those that apparently seem straightforward and effortless, and the truth is that finding the right answers doesn’t get easier with time. There’s a long stage of research to be done before jumping into a visual design, and here are some of the major steps behind every good design.

Step 1: define your app based on features that both you and your users need

However, keep in mind that you are not your user.

Don’t design thinking about what your assumptions and desires are, otherwise you’re going to build your app on bias and preconceptions on the user experience that only make sense to you, but are completely wrong for everyone else. 

The opposite is also true: your audience shouldn’t be everyone because it’s too vague, it doesn’t allow you to draw any meaningful conclusions about what would be most important to the people who are really going to use your product, so make sure that you focus on the characteristics of your target audience.

Step 2: understand your users’ goals

Once you define your users’ characteristics, you can rephrase them into a set of goals. This will help you maintain the design user-centered.

Step 3: understand your app goals and your business goals

This helps you describe what you think your app should be like, how it should feel and what makes it memorable or unique.

Step 4: consider features from step 1 from a user perspective and an app perspective

Prioritize features that your users really need and that would benefit from the most, and set aside those that are not pivotal to your app release (they could come in handy in the future, so don’t rush and throw ideas into the trash can either!)

Great, now you know what you’re making!

...but how are you going to make it?

A great tip would be starting with what you already know and iterating from there.

Never stop asking yourself “What can we do differently?”, “How can we improve this thing?” and you’ll be on the right track for success. 

Remember that your first idea has few to none possibilities of being the right one and that you’ll eventually come to the best solutions only after many iterations and variations in your design.

[sabrina-arcella]

Week 3

SO!

Third week, huh?

What can I say about that? The project that we worked on focused on adding a new feature to a pre-existent app - in our case, my team and I worked on implementing a feature that let users get info about concerts and events in Shazam. 

We struggled a bit to get the engines running at the beginning: my teammates and I have quite a different approach to work, which is something that didn’t happen during Week #1 with my previous teammates, so this time around I was quite disoriented – like “Okay guys, where do we begin with?”

Luckily, by the end of the week we managed to do everything that we were supposed to and came up with a good prototype and an overall coherent process. Working in a team means finding compromises and meet everyone in the middle: some teams felt happier with their experience than us, but that’s okay. I want to think of this experience as an advantage: I had to deal with a situation where things weren’t quite going as planned and the mood wasn’t always chill and cool, there were some uncomfortable things that we had to deal with during our meetings and sometimes we couldn’t really find an easy way out of disagreements, but we managed to deliver our prototype and presentation, and in the end that’s what matters.

Nonetheless, I learnt a lot from this experience. Team work is a huge part of this bootcamp - and it’s going to be a huge part of my job as well - so it’s important to know how to rein in a situation that’s getting out of hand and stick the landing.

That’s all folks, read you soon!

Brina.

[sabrina-arcella]

“See with one eye, feel with the other”

Today our resourceful teachers recommended us a beautiful article entitled “Learning to See” where we got to delve deeper into the mindset of a designer and their perception of the world.

About perception, a relatable thing that Anaïs Nin said is “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”, and that’s true. Skilled and expert designers learn how to see things through the eyes of their users, but it takes time and practice and empathy and open-mindedness to acknowledge different point of views, take them into account and build something starting from other people’s needs, not from our personal taste and ideas.

But what does Paul Klee mean when he says “see more with one eye, feel with the other”?

To “see more” means being able of grasping a level of reality that might be intangible to anyone else, finding little details that others tend to overlook. It is “ultimately a matter of trained taste, or what German speakers call Fingerspitzengefühl”, literally “finger-tip-feeling”. 

A beautiful illustration that the article provided to depict this concept is this portrait of the typographer Jan Tschichold.

At the same time, designers should be mindful of this:  “Tools need to work for those who use them.”

A beautiful, sophisticated product that doesn’t work as it should is not a good product. A product based on designers’ assumptions is biased and therefore not useful for those who’re eventually going to use it.

Designer should never completely lose their ability to see things as a customer would: training our eyes to be sharper and detect small details doesn’t mean getting rid of our experience as users.

Once we learn how to find the right balance between the two, that’s when we start building products that are as useful as they are aesthetically delightful. 

I’ll end this post by recommending the article - whether you are a senior, junior, aspiring designer or not, I can assure you that it will be worthy of your time! - and leaving you with the quote that encloses its core message:

“Without critical feedback and the modesty to accept all opinions on our work as a perfectly valid, different view no matter who, how or what, we lose our freaky key ability, which is not just to see more, but to see more with one eye, and feel with the other.”

[sabrina-arcella]

[sabrina-arcella]

[sabrina-arcella]

Week 2

Another week went by and I can honestly say that I’m thrilled.

We had our first individual project in which we had to create a Habit Tracking app from scratch, going through all the different design stages (Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver) and I couldn’t be more proud of myself.

Have I realized a perfect project with no flaws whatsoever? Ugh, heck no, I’m far away from that!

Do I still have a lot to learn? You betcha!

“Then WHY do you feel so proud of yourself, Brina? Get off your high horse and be realistic!”

Okay, that’s fair, but here’s why I couldn’t be happier than I am right now:

I really put the time in for this project.

I focused on a topic that is so, so dear to me.

I did my best to get good, valuable data out of my research.

I let my users tell a story about themselves during my interviews, I made them feel like they could share the intimate, raw reality of their personality, they trusted me to take their insights into account and use them wisely to guide my work.

And for God’s sake, I committed to deliver.

The most beautiful thing about this experience was hearing my testers say things like “You did such a good job”, “When is the app going to be ready?”, “If you won’t develop it, I will”.

Knowing that I did something valuable for my users, that I made them feel seen, that I made them feel like the concept that they were helping me to create was moulded having their needs in mind is the best feeling ever.

Surely I made some mistakes in the overall process, but I loved it. I had to redo some things in order to fix those mistakes, but I loved it. My roadblocks slowed me down, so much that I went to sleep at 4.30 am the night before the presentation. And I absolutely, friggin’ loved it. *

Honestly, I’m at a loss for words. 

Usually I’d be putting GIFs every two sentences to make things funny and goofy and chill, but right now I can only think about how much this project meant to me. I’m finally starting to understand who I am, and who I want to be. I feel like I did something good for people, even with a simple survey, a sketch or a prototype, because they always KNEW that I was thinking about them in each step of the way.

I heard them, and they heard me. It doesn’t get any better than that. 

* Full disclosure: this doesn’t mean that I don’t aim at improving myself so that this kind of things don’t happen too frequently, but this challenge was hard and I feel like I managed to fight back with the right weapons.

[sabrina-arcella]

Our first “crits”!

Today my fellow colleagues and I had our first critique sessions, aka “crits”, and honestly I liked everything about it!

We were divided in groups of five, and I was the last one to present during my session.

I listened carefully to what my colleagues said during their presentation, I wanted to give real, objective, useful feedback on their work, because I honestly think that that’s the best gift that you can ever give to a designer, especially during the development of a project. 

However, I was a bit concerned because I didn’t want to hurt anyone, I tried to use the right words and explain the reason behind my statements, but honestly I don’t know if I managed to be tactful - I think so, but fingers crossed!

The real downside of these critique sessions is that, even though you know that what you’re saying is for the listener’s benefit, you can never predict how they’re going to react, but I tried as much as possible not to overthink about this and be straight, because I really want us to improve as designers, and if my feedback can prove insightful for anyone, than I think that the juice is worth the squeeze, so I was like “HERE YOU HAVE IT, THIS IS WHAT I THINK! DO WHAT YOU WANT WITH IT”!

My favourite thing (of course) was receiving feedback for my project. I put a lot of effort into the research and define phase, and I really wanted to know if there was anything that I missed or that I got wrong so that I could iterate more and have a solid foundation for the development.

Good news: what I have so far is good, both teachers and colleagues said they thought I was in a good shape, so that’s something!

Even better news: they pointed out something that I could improve, AND THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!

Even though the project is going to take some extra time because of some changes that I had to make, I don’t regret a single thing, I feel like I’m doing a good job overall and, if I’m not, I can’t wait to learn why and how I can improve!

That’s all for now,

Brina out!

[sabrina-arcella]

My first week at Ironhack

So this first week went out pretty fast! That’s good, it means that I'm really enjoying it after all, because everyone knows that time flies when you’re doing something that you like!

My classmates are funny and friendly and every day feels like we’re getting closer and closer, even during these challenging times when being close seems pretty hard. I do suffer from a mild FOMO, since most of my classmates are attending the course in Barcelona while I’m here, in my room, talking to a screen for 10+ hours a day. I wish I could be there with them and meet them in person, but at the end of the day what really matters is that we’re still there to support each other during this journey and that we spend some quality time together when we can.

On the other hand, if I were there, it’d be kinda hard to hide the fact that I can’t snap my fingers* and that I’m faking the whole time, so that’s something! 

Nobody tell ‘em, pls!

My teachers are great, and even though I’m still not getting lollipops out of these serenades that I’m making for them, I’m happy to say that I feel that I’m being taught valuable skills by a competent staff who really knows what they’re talking about, and I don’t mean just in terms of technical stuff - and trust me, they really know the ins and outs of user experience and interface design, even though they stay humble and never stop questioning themselves.

What I love about them is that they live in today’s world, they give us realistic expectations about the challenges that we’ll have to face during and after the bootcamp, they’re not just providing us theoretical and practical tools to use for our future careers, they are also reshaping our mindset in order to be able to face some tough realities that we’ll have to come to terms with during our journey so that we won’t feel overwhelmed or, at least, we are prepared and won’t make our feelings take advantage of ourselves.

For that, I can’t thank them enough.

I handed off my first team project today, and it felt good. 

I’m very proud of all the work that my teammates and I did, and I think that we came up with a pretty good project: of course there are lessons to be learned, things to be improved, but we’re here to learn and I can only appreciate all the feedback that we’re receiving. 

The most valuable things that I’ve been learning so far that are real life-savers: 

- I need be more time efficient, and setting timers and deadlines for each step of the way is a really really really good practice for divergent people like me who won’t stop asking themselves “Yeah, but how about doing that THIS way, instead?” or “Yeah, but what if I take a little more time to fine-tune this little thing here?”; - I need to be in control of my emotions and prevent them from taking the best of me: as I said, everything is strictly time-boxed in this bootcamp, so I can’t afford spiraling, I literally don’t have time for that; - I shouldn’t feel bad if something I made is not as spot on as I expected it to be: this should be kinda intuitive since it’s only week one and I have no expertise whatsoever in the field, but I know that I tend to get attached to the things I make as if they were my children. Moreover, I'm very likely to put a lot of pressure on myself and start demanding unrealistic things for me to achieve. My goal is to be even more stubborn than my wrong habits and to replace them with some new ones that allow for self-growth.

Note to myself: next time you end up thinking “I could have done better”, try to rephrase that thought and tell yourself “Next time, I’m going to do better!”.

Now I’ve got some more homework to do, so I’ll get going. Next stop: my first individual project!

See ya!

* Snapping our fingers is something that we do instead of applauding people during our meeting to honour the Addams Family theme song (we also like to call ourselves “the Addams Family”).

[sabrina-arcella]

Ironhack: Day One

Today was the first day of my UX/UI bootcamp, and I’m super hyped!

My classmates are super fun and interesting, they all come from different places and have different backgrounds, so it was nice to get to hear from all of them and getting to know each other, knowing that we’re all in this together (High School Musical fans, I didn’t mean to trigger!)

Our teachers are the real deal: they are friendly, funny, resourceful and they are likely to send lollipops to students who say pretty things about them in their Tumblr posts! Am I rite? ;)

I loved everything that I’ve been doing today with them: working in pairs, learning during lectures, engaging in open conversations about Design Thinking methods, as well as chatting and goofing around from time to time, just for the sake of a heartfelt laugh in good company.

I can’t wait for tomorrow to come!

[sabrina-arcella]

Hello everyone!

My name is Sabrina Arcella, I’m 24 years old and I’m italian.  My interest for UX/UI Design is pretty recent: my boyfriend, who’s an aspiring web developer - and who probably knew more about me than I did at the time - introduced me to it in a moment that I was struggling with insecurities and uncertainty about my future, because I didn’t know which educational path to follow, since I was unable to acknowledge my skills and understand what I was good at.

But when he told me about UX/UI Design, it was love at first sight!

I finally felt like I found what I was looking for, I wasn’t lost anymore, and when I found out about Ironhack and its UX/UI bootcamp I just KNEW that I had to try it, so I applied for the scholarship that Ironhack offered in collaboration with The Sims. I couldn’t believe it when I received the admission email, my heart was pounding!

What I liked most about it was the idea of bringing innovative and useful solutions to everyday issues by engaging with people, listening to their experiences and seeing things through their eyes, in order to have a solid foundation to build new and valuable creations.

Empathy, purpose and creativity: everything that I care about the most is all there, and I can’t wait to start this journey alongside my classmates and teachers!