Post-UXDi GA Life
It has now been a week since I completed General Assembly's UXDi, but there is still plenty to do!
Workshop Topics
Even though we're officially done, we were encouraged to come back for a few workshops this week!
- Interviews
- Negotiations
- Imposter Syndrome
Creating a GA Profile
We sent in our GA profiles for publishing, and now you can see mine here!
Portfolio Work
You may notice that you are now reading my blog at rachelmsweet.com. This is so that I can integrate my blog with my portfolio so that anyone checking out my portfolio can easily access my blog. This also means that if you are interested in checking out my case studies, you can find them here, under "Case Studies"!
Non-GA Activity
UX Book Club: Just Enough Research by Erika Hall
On Sunday, I went to my second UX book club meeting, which is hosted at GA by Julia DeBari, a Senior UX Designer at Epsilon. We had a great discussion about user research techniques and ways to get buy-in from other people in your company.
My Takeaways:
- Remember to take your biases into account. Try externalizing them by writing down your biases and posting them on the wall as a reminder.
- You will create a false sense of security if you produce items such as journey maps or personas without the research to back it up.
- To get buy-in for research, try telling a story of the importance of research in a previous case study.
- To get buy-in for testing throughout the design process, try making a comparison to tasting food while cooking. If you don't taste until the end, the food will be much more difficult to fix if there is a problem.
About Face by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher Noessel
I've been reading this book on and off for the last several weeks and I finally finished! About Face is an insightful and well-written book that covers many aspects of the UX process. As the book progresses, the content increases in granularity, starting with general UX concepts and eventually diving into details of interaction design.
My Takeaways:
- "One of the most significant ways in which computers can assist human beings is presenting complex data and operations in a simple, easily understandable form."
- As designers, we need to support 3 Types of user goals:
- Life Goals - Who the user wants to be
- End Goals - What the user wants to do
- Experience Goals - How the user wants to feel
- Design solutions should be ethical, purposeful, pragmatic, and elegant.
- Software should behave like a considerate human being (Chapter 8, "Digital Etiquette", was probably my favorite chapter).
- Focus on making products powerful and easy to use for perpetual intermediate users.
- No matter how cool your interface is, less of it would be better.
recommended podcast episode
The Big Web Show, Episode 139 - Every Time We Touch with Josh Clark
Josh Clark wrote Designing for Touch, which is in the A Book Apart series. Designing for Touch is getting added to my reading list. He provided some great insights in one podcast interview, so I'm sure there is a lot more to discover in his book!
My Takeaways:
- Education should be cooked into design, not bolted on later.
- Game designers provide great examples of how to provide environmental cues just at the moment they are needed.
- Not only do we have to design for how pixels look, but also how they feel.
- Skeumorphic design creates new opportunities to create digital objects that feel like physical objects.
- Digital interfaces are becoming physical and physical objects are finding a digital presence. Smartphones are letting us bring these worlds together.
- We need to teach digital designers to behave like industrial designers and vice versa.
- "We need to lean into the way that our brains work and expect them to work with this illusion of physicality on the screen."
2 days of jury duty
Not related, just thought you should know. At least there was wi-fi.