General Assembly's UXDi Week 6

Hello all!  I am feeling very rested coming out of Week 6 at General Assembly, and ready to take on the last 4 weeks of this UXDi!  Week 6 was a an unusual week.  We haven't been working much on Project 4, and instead have been learning some additional skills to round out our knowledge base.  We ended the week with a Jamathon (Design Jam + Hackathon), which was a lot of fun and provided us with a way to start having discussions with developers during the design process.  

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Topics Covered This Week

  • Visual Design
  • Front End Development
  • Job Search Strategies
  • Conflict Management

 

 

Guest lectures

Visual Design with Josh Silverman

Josh Silverman was a very engaging lecturer and kept the whole day interesting while providing us with a lot of content about branding and visual design.

Key Takeaways:

  • Great Brand = Great UX
  • Design must have a purpose.
  • Consistency is essential for both branding and UX

 

Front End Web Development with Gilberto Medrano

We spent 6 hours learning some of the basics of front-end development with Gilberto Medrano. While the lecture was interesting, most of our time was focused on the history and big picture of computing.  I was hoping to dive a lot deeper into HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but I do understand that there was not enough time to accomplish much.  There are plenty of other resources to learn Front End Dev online, so I will just have to follow up with that in another 4 weeks.

Cool Resources:

  • This is a really fun way to learn how to select elements with CSS!
  • I had no idea that you can play around with the code of existing websites!  Right-click anything on a website, and select "Inspect Element".  See what kind of changes you can make (it might end up looking like a disaster, but you can just refresh the page and all is well again).
  • Unfortunately, this site was down during our lecture, but http://codepen.io/  was recommended as a good resource.

 

 

Job Search Strategies: Key Takeaways

  • Reach out to designers who have what you want.  Ask if they would be willing to chat for 30 minutes.  The intention here should be connecting with people, rather than finding a job.
  • Don't just apply to a job through the company's website.  Get in touch with someone in the department, or at least a recruiter.
    • Use Sellhack to find contact email addresses.
    • Explain why you wanted to talk to them.

 

 

Case Study Presentations

Previously, all of our presentations were under the premise that we were selling our designs to stakeholders.  This time, we each presented a case study as if we were in a job interview.  The presentations were completely different from previous presentations of the same designs, so this was a very helpful exercise to prepare us for the job search.

 

 

Jamathon: Best Day of UXDi Yet

We finished off the week with a Jamathon (Design Jam + Hackathon).  We were given a challenge at the beginning of the day, and got into groups of 3-4 students. Previous GA Web Development Immersive students joined us and rotated between groups to provide us with some developer perspective on our ideas.

We had the day to define a problem, research, brainstorm, iterate, and present our designs by 4pm.

My group had so much fun.  It was very exciting to work with new people to create something from nothing in the span of 6 hours.  More Hackathons/Design Jams/Jamathons are in my future!

 

 

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