July 2, 2021

Overcoming impostor syndrome

Have you ever felt like you aren’t quite good enough, even though you actually are? Feeling like you aren’t good enough to do a certain job or mingle with certain people happens to more people than you might think. In fact, feeling this way is so common that it even has a name: impostor syndrome.

Impostor syndrome is the belief that you’re unskilled, inferior to others, or bad at your job, despite your successes. We’ve all felt impostor syndrome at some point in our lives. If you’re feeling impostor syndrome, you’re certainly not alone!

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Effects of impostor syndrome

Impostor syndrome can cause anxiety and low confidence that can stop you from becoming the most successful version of yourself. Impostor syndrome can manifest in many ways, and each person’s experience is unique. You might have seen or personally experienced impostor syndrome in situations like: 

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June 28, 2021

What is a retrospective?

If you operate in an Agile/Scrum work pipeline, at the end of each sprint you’ll be asked to participate in a ‘retrospective’ meeting (or ‘retro’, for short).

A retrospective is a collaborative critique of the design sprint. The goal of a retrospective is to make sure everyone who took part in the sprint has the chance to give feedback and think about opportunities for improvement. 

The key questions to ask during a retrospective are: 

  1. What went well? 
  2. What can be improved? 

Answering these questions will help you work better as a team and as an individual. Make sure everyone feels empowered to share their experiences, and that personal identifiers, like race or gender, don’t prevent members from being honest. Before the retrospective begins, tell the group that any feedback provided will be used to reflect on the experience and improve the process for the next sprint. 

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June 24, 2021

Designing for Multiple Platforms: The Four Cs Principle

Successfully designing across platforms means providing users with a good experience, no matter what platform they use! As a UX designer, your job is to make sure that your designs account for and take full advantage of the unique features of each platform. When preparing to design across platforms, it’s helpful to keep in mind the four Cs: consistency, continuity, context, and complementary.  

Graphic from the point of view of someone looking at their hands on a laptop. They are holding a phone and wearing a watch.

Consistency: Most companies have specific design guidelines that need to be followed in order to stay consistent with their brand identity, which refers to the visual appearance and voice of a company. When designing a product, it’s essential to stay true to the company’s brand guidelines in order to maintain consistency across platforms and drive brand awareness. Maintaining a consistent design helps improve the user experience and build trust, because users can expect the design to feel familiar across platforms and products.

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June 24, 2021

My UX Design Toolbox

Just like carpenters rely on different tools for different tasks, so do UX designers. Start adding some tools to your digital toolbox and explore a few of the most popular programs that you might use as an entry-level UX designer.

A person with long hair stands in front of toolbox holding a laptop. Text above reads wireframing and prototyping tools

Early in your UX design career, you’ll likely spend a lot of time creating wireframes and prototypes.

  • A wireframe is an outline or a sketch of a product or a screen. Wireframes help designers figure out how a page is arranged, where each piece of a product fits in with the others, and how users will likely interact with the product.
  • A prototype is an early model of a product that demonstrates functionality.

You’ll learn much more about wireframes and prototypes, and create your own, as you progress through this certificate program. 

There are tons of digital tools available to help you design wireframes and prototypes. The most popular tools among them are Figma and Adobe XD due to their availability:

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June 17, 2021

Common UX Design Frameworks (part 2): Lean UX and Double Diamond

Following the previous post, today we’ll be talking about 2 more UX Design frameworks.

Lean UX 

The Lean UX process focuses on reducing wasted time and resources, and producing a workable product as soon as possible. The process is iterative, meaning the team continues to update and make revisions to the product as they gather user research and stakeholder feedback.

The Lean UX process is broken into three steps: 

Think. Explore the problems that users are experiencing and consider how you could solve them with your design. This step is all about gathering research, so you can form a clear idea of who the product is for and how it will help them.  

Make. Start designing the product by creating sketches, wireframes, and prototypes. You’ll also create a minimum viable product, or MVP for short, which is a simple prototype of your designs that you can test with the target audience. Be prepared to go back and update your prototype as you gather feedback!

Check. Find out how users respond to your design and gather feedback from project stakeholders. Make adjustments to your designs accordingly, and repeat the three steps again, if necessary.

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These steps are meant to be repeated as many times as needed, until your team reaches the desired final product. The Lean UX process encourages productivity and collaboration. Lean UX teams are typically cross-functional, which means you’ll be working alongside team members like engineers and UX researchers.

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June 16, 2021

Common UX Design Frameworks (part 1): Design Thinking Process and the Five Elements approach

There’s many UX Design Frameworks out there, most common among them are Design Thinking Process and the Five Elements.

Design thinking process 

Design thinking is a user-centered approach to problem-solving. It helps designers create solutions that address a real user problem and are functional and affordable. There are five phases in the design thinking process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. If these sounds familiar that’s because it is based on one of the core principles of UX design which is the Product Design Cycle which I’ve mentioned in an earlier post.

Each phase of the framework answers a specific question. 

Icons that represent the design thinking process - empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

During the empathize phase, the goal is to understand users’ needs and how users think and feel. This involves a lot of user research, such as conducting surveys, interviews, and observation sessions, so you can get a clear picture of who your users are and the challenges they are facing.

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June 16, 2021

What is UCD? The User-Centered Design Process

UCD is one of the term that gets thrown around alot recently, with businesses putting more emphasis on UX in their products. But just because it’s used a lot, doesn’t mean everybody fully understands what that is.

User-centered design process

Each phase of the user-centered design process focuses on users and their needs. It’s an iterative process, which means that designers go back to certain phases, again and again, to refine their designs and create the best possible product for their intended users.

At the core of the user-centered design process is a deep empathy for the user. It’s not just about what a product does for a user, it’s about how the experience of interacting with the design makes the user feel. 

Here are the key steps in the user-centered design process: 

  • Understand how the user experiences the product. You want to know how users will engage with your design, as well as the environment or context in which they’ll experience the product. Understanding this requires a lot of research, like observing users in action and conducting interviews, which we’ll explore more later.
  • Specify the user’s needs. Based on your research, figure out which user problems are the most important to solve. 
  • Design solutions. Come up with lots of ideas for designs that can address the user problems you’ve identified. Then, start to actually design those ideas! 
  • Evaluate the solutions you designed against the user’s needs. Ask yourself, does the design I created solve the user’s problem? To answer this question, you should test the product you designed with real people and collect feedback. 
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Notice how the arrows in the diagram indicate circular movement. This illustrates the iterative quality of the user-centered design process. Designers go back to earlier phases of the process to refine and make corrections to their designs. With the user-centered design process, you’re always working to improve the user’s experience and address the problems that users are facing!

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June 14, 2021

Entry-level UX designers, what do they do exactly?

As you start out on your path to becoming a UX designer, you’re probably curious about the actual work your new career might involve. In this reading, you can explore the different responsibilities that entry-level UX designers commonly take on during a project. You’ll also review the differences between generalist, specialist, and T-shaped UX designers.

Responsibilities of an entry-level UX designer

As an entry-level UX designer, you’ll have a lot of exciting opportunities to gain experience. When you first start out, you’ll probably take on a lot of different roles and responsibilities. 

graphic of a person using a laptop, with various icons surrounding them indicating UX design skills
Icons include user research (a tablet with magnifying glass over it) Information architecture (a series of 3 colored, numbered bars) Wireframing (a graphic of a wireframe) Protoyping (a graphic of a desktop monitor with protoype of mobile device on screen) Visual design (a mobile phone next to paint swatches) Effective communication (a graphic of two people talking)
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June 14, 2021

The Product Design Process (or Cycle, to be exact)

Every new product, whether it’s an app or a physical object, follows a specific set of steps that take it from the first spark of an idea to the release of the final product. This is called the product design cycle, and it has five stages: brainstorm, define, design, test, and launch. Depending on where you work, the exact names of each stage might be a little different, but the overall process is generally the same.

graphic showing the product development lifecycle (represented by a circle)

In this reading, you’ll explore the product design cycle and how UX design fits into each stage. As you might have guessed, UX designers are most engaged during the design stage of the product design cycle, but they work closely with team members — like researchers, product managers, and engineers — throughout the entire life cycle. 

As a product moves through the development life cycle, the team might need to spend longer working in one stage than in others, or repeat certain stages based on feedback. The success of each stage depends on the previous stage’s completion, so it’s important to do them in order. 

Check out each of the five stages of the product design cycle!

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