We're made it through Week 3 and Project 2! I was pretty stressed out in the middle of this week because we were finishing our project and preparing for presentations, but everyone seemed to do well! I was very impressed with my classmates' presentations and I am looking forward to working with a couple of them on our group project that is coming up next week.
Topics Covered This Week
- Forms
- Prototyping
- Invision
- Content Strategy
- Usability Evaluation Techniques
- UX Careers
Skills Practiced This Week
- Wireframing (Sketch)
- Prototyping (Invision)
- Usability Walkthroughs
- Presenting
Highlights
- Invision - is awesome tool to making clickable prototypes. Once you have some wireframes created, learn how to use it! (Or you can use some of their prepopulated wireframes if you just want to play around with Invision.)
- Career Panel - During lunch on Wednesday, three recent UXDi grads came to give us career advice. It was good to have the opportunity for Q&A with some students that had success finding jobs after GA.
- Project 2 Presentations - While they were stress-inducing for most, our presentations were very insightful for everyone.
- Presentation Practice - Learning how to articulate design decisions and communicate is a critical skill as a UX Designer, so getting this practice was really valuable.
- Learning from other Presenters - There was so much opportunity to learn what to do, what no to do, and how many different ways there are to present the same kind of information.
- Instructor Feedback - Each student was provided with really great insights that I will be taking with me throughout my career!
Lowlights
- Stress - The end of the project brought some stress with it. This is to be expected, and I'm glad that GA pushes us and gives us some practice working on a time-sensitive project. I'm glad I'm done, but I'm also glad I had to go through this process.
I'm trying to think of some more lowlights to share, but I am really enjoying my time at GA! I can't believe 3 weeks have already gone by!
Project 2
Checking out my Project 2 Retrospective will tell you more about the ins and outs of Project 2 than I am going to share right here, but we basically had to design a prototype for an e-commerce website for a brick and mortar toy store. Our instructors pretended they were the stakeholders of the company so that we could interview them about their business needs, and they provided us with some personas that we could base their users' needs off of.
Throughout this project, we further exercised skills from Project 1, and continued to add to our toolkit. We learned how to create wireframes with Sketch and clickable prototypes with Invision. We were introduced to techniques used in Information Architecture and practiced sketching user flows and system maps.
Best Pieces of Career Advice of the Week:
- Be ready to describe your skills on a high level (ex: communication, collaboration, problem solving) and on a more granular level (ex: Sketch, Invision, card sorting)
- Your portfolio is how you'll create your first impression and get your foot in the door.
- Your contact information should be easy to find.
- UX Nights with Cascade is a highly recommended Meetup by UXDi grads
- Find your Unique Selling Proposition: What makes you unique and different and how does this relate to your employer?
Highlights from my Notes
Forms
"Forms suck." -Luke W.
But they don't have to! Check out The $300 Million Button article.
Prototypes
It's cheaper to build, get feedback, and iterate now than to rebuild later!
The type of prototype you should make will depend on the questions you want to answer, but Invision is a great tool to create a clickable prototype.
Content Strategy
Content drives everything!
Content strategists need to consider
- WHAT topics and formats?
- WHY does anyone care?
- HOW are we going to deliver the message?
- WHERE will we get content? Syndicated content?
- WHEN will pages be published/updated?
- WHO is responsible? Who will maintain it over time?
Usability Evaluations & Walkthroughs
Use Early & Often. Powerful for early feedback.
"Our job is to tell people their babies are ugly." -our instructor, Susan
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