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.

https://d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net/imageAssetProxy.v1/LoTVh-MXRrqE1YfjFwa6VA_84ea0180d9af4f58ae003ec3df328fa2_Screenshot-2021-03-02-at-11.36.43-PM.png?expiry=1624147200000&hmac=zVH8GLRLG-Mw2cTVwBOMMPgBYUmZdBY60Y_EFfeLpPg

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. 
ucd

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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May 1, 2021

Using Putty generated private keys with Guacamole

If you’re trying to use a private key with Guacamole to connect to your server but it doesn’t work, chances are you’re using one of the keys generated with Puttygen. Guacamole only accepts RSA compliant keys, so you’d want to do that.

image
Opens your PPK with Puttygen again, and go to Convesions > Export OpenSSH key (the first option).
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Then open the content of that new file with a text editor, copy and paste it into Guacamole private key field and it should work.
April 19, 2021

I’ve been hacked: The danger of DMZ

For those following my post the last couple of weeks, you’d know I’ve been obsessed with building up my home server system, so much so that I made the grave mistake of exposing my computer to the world wide web through the use of DMZ (De-Militarized Zone).

Long story shot.

I’ve been hacked.

And $3,000 was stolen from my wife’s MasterCard.

What’s done is done, I’m here to tell you about what exactly what went down, how the attacker did it and how you can avoid the same mistake I did.

Let’s get started

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April 15, 2021

Integrating Jellyfin with Heimdall: just what the heck is the ‘Password (secret token)’?

So you’re probably in the process of integrating Jellyfin with Heimdall, and you’re stumped by this little field in the Add application screen in Heimdall:

image 4

Just what the heck are we supposed to put in there? Neither the username nor password of my Jellyfin account works here, just what the heck is this ‘Password (Secret token)’ thing that Heimdall is asking for?

The more tech savvy among you probably have already figured it out, but if you’re an idiot like me, you’re gonna waste a few rage inducing hours searching for it on the Internet to no avail, nobody on the Interweb seems to know what it is. Well I figured it out, and I’m gonna tell you.

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