Journey of a UX Designer

Documentation of feelings, practices, and skills learned during this season of life.

[uxdesignerjourney]

LOVING the new UX + UI for Southwest! 

1. The hero image (LH side) emphasizes the current Southwest promotion while retaining the most important user actions: booking, check-ins, flight status, and change flight.

2. When you click on the departure city field, a beautiful pop-up displays noting which airport you may want (including ones nearby).

3. When you input the departure and return dates, they show the date range of your stay. In the above image, blue denotes a departure date, green denotes an arrival date.

Love how clean and organized this space is! Good job SW!

[uxdesignerjourney]

reporting for duty.

can you believe it? its been almost a year since i’ve completed my immersive program. here I am as a UX/UI Designer at a finance startup in DTMV. i remember the surreal feeling. the first few weeks i was in disbelief that i had my complete career change and i was officially--a designer.

from here on out i’ll focus my posts on inspiring UX/UI designs as well as experiments and research! excited to document my journey as a UX designer ;). check me out at for interesting UX tidbits + blog recommendations! https://twitter.com/tiffpraj

this is only the beginning.

[mayahan]

Creative DIY Christmas Trees

[uxdesignerjourney]

Awesome? I think so!

[uxdesignerjourney]

User Research.

There's so much to be said about user research. Fresh out of my immersive program I came into my current company (startup) as a UX/UI designer. We learned ideal design methodologies and I was ready to start implementing my knowledge to real life problems. As happy as I am to be a UX focused designer, I decided to step up as a user research champion. My goal is to lay down a best practices protocol and to really understand who are users are beyond the data. After this I want to jump back into UX/UI with fresh eyes ready to design or redesign products! Given that, I've focused much of my time refining best ways to ask questions (without leading the user). The RIGHT questions are what we need. How can we be effective with the time we have with our users either in person or online? I do believe great designs come from great research: did you meet both business and user goals? Are you designing based on user actions or what they said was a preference? There is much to be learned but I am excited to pave this way of research and customer discovery for our startup. If you have any tips, please comment or drop a line :).

[maxchiu]

Bite-Sized UX Research

By Steve Baty

Published: May 7, 2008

It’s not uncommon for projects to lack the time, money, or resources to conduct ideal user research activities. There are many reasons why this occurs:

Sometimes we’re brought onto a project late.

Perhaps we’re...

[uxdesignerjourney]

Great read on user research. Will do a mini- follow-up post on why I find it important or relevant for right now.

[uxdesignerjourney]

I love the approach Erik took with these UI design tips. I know I need to work on my VD. I will be starting from here :) There needs to be more hours in the day!

[uxdesignerjourney]

Digging how FB has notified their users of the update in terms and policies: non-obtrusive, yet still allows the user to find more information if necessary. Curious to see why they put it in alerts vs. anchoring at top of newsfeed.

[uxdesignerjourney]

The best part of SlickDeal's item page are the REMIND ME LATER and BUY NOW buttons. Those are the two actionable items a user wants when reaching this page (me thinks!).

[uxdesignerjourney]

Great read :)

[franciaksandoval]

User Experience Design Process [INFOGRAPHIC] -: User Experience Design Process [INFOGRAPHIC] - http://dlvr.it/7J8K53

[kristencstewart]

Yes, good, yes.

[uxmyths]

Myth #26: Usability testing = focus groups

When it comes to collecting feedback from users, usability tests and focus groups are often confused although their goals are completely different.

Focus groups assess what users say: a number of people gather in order to discuss their feelings, attitudes and thoughts on a given topic to reveal their motivations and preferences.

Usability testing, on the other hand, is about observing how people actually use a product, by assigning key tasks to users and analyzing their performance and experience.

Read More

[uxdesignerjourney]

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. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass

[nilamzawath]

10 Basic tips about responsive design

[uxdesignerjourney]

Great tips on responsive design! Beneficial since we are starting to interact with sites through mobile. So how do we design for this space?

[thehipperelement]

My mission this month is to get more designers (or aspiring designers) started in User Experience design. The best place to start any education is at the beginning:

What is UX?

Everything has a user experience. Our job is not to create the user experience. It is our job to make it...

[uxdesignerjourney]

What is UX? And How do you do it?

[dentdaze]

50 Ways to Get a Job That Makes Good

An interactive site that gives you all the steps you need to take to find a job that makes money and does good.

Recommended and will be saving this for future references.

[uxdesignerjourney]

Quick Job Search Tip: Be outward-facing. Grow your presence on various social media sites including - tumblr, LinkedIn, and twitter. Write an article, form connections, and post/re-post up interesting articles or job postings. Be present!

[uxstateofmind]

Which test should you do?