#ironhack

Well, reading the title, it's pretty clear what our project was about this week. Of course, it's about coding or at least the beginning of it!

Though this week wasn't as hectic as the previous one was, I gotta admit that the coding part was a challenge I did not expect to go through. I knew that it wasn't my forté. So, you are diving into design thinking along the research process so intensely, and on top of that, you add technical skills on Figma then you think that coding would be easy peasy since you just gotta a d d c o d e s and that's it! But no, ma'am.

It actually became more complex than that, and somehow, I'm kinda glad it did because it made me realise that we need to empathise with the whole team when working on a product and speak the same language, even though we use different terminologies. 

My colleague was just great support, and thanks to him, I was able to see my skills shine. I truly believe I can become what I have always wanted to be. ✨

This week has been a frustrating week. It has not been the most pleasant but it has been a challenge that I have faced and in the end I have managed to overcome.

I have allowed myself to go into crisis with the project, to cry, to stress, to see no way out at the end of the tunnel but... it was part of the process as a designer. The biggest challenge has been to get into a sector (construction) that doesn't motivate me but that, thanks to Nevan's wise advice, I have found a way to make it interesting and motivating for me.

Week two is done!! It feels like we´ve been doing the bootcamp for two months rather than two weeks. 

This week’s project was extremely fun because we actually started doing more design like things. Adding the feature to the WhatsApp app was really challenging and interesting to do. First off it really impressed me how many different flows or ways of implementing the new feature I could do.  When doing the paper prototypes, it really helped me understand how the user interacts with the app and how they would think the feature would be added. I thought I had to do every single one of their routs to get to the point so by the times de crits arrived thankfully Nevan told me to just focus on one flow.  Doing the hi-fidelity prototype was fun, understanding WhatsApp iconography and design language was super interesting. The whole time I was trying hard to make the feature to go unnoticed as much as possible so that it wouldn’t stand out. I couldn’t have gone through this week without everyone in the bootcamp. We are starting to become a family and it’s nice to have everyone there to cheer you up, help you out or just to have some fun.  To quote Troye Bolton “This could be the start of something new” :P

The first week at Ironhack UX/UI design has been the most stressful week of my whole education life. 

The week was about learning the basics of HTML and CSS and prepare a presentation with a  team mate. 

Working on a project that I have not practiced at all before and a new class mate I´ve just met was challenging but overall it thought me a lot. 

It is important for a product designer to know how the coding works which helps you to understand the developer side and know your limit when you desing the product. 

I´m super excited to start 2nd week and work on a new project that will teach me new skills for my new career path.

If you read until here, sending you my love.

After a week learning the basics of HTML and CSS, I must say I respect and admire developers. Thank God or whatever it is up there that they exist and we can work with them to bring our ideas to life.

I’d also like to thank Rio, my partner in code and trusted pastanaga bullida, who has been the most clever and supportive teammate ever. I don’t know who is reading this but HIRE HIM. Rating: 5/5. Would definitely recommend.

The evening before the presentation was slightly chaotic but we even managed to hide some easter eggs on our webpage, so that turned out pretty well after all! I’m proud of the work we’ve done, I never thought we’d be able to make a decent responsive page from scratch in less than 5 days. That’s a win! 💪

All in all, this first week has been intense. Beginnings always are, but believe me when I say this one definitely was. Oh, that homework. I’d like to say sorry to all those unanswered messages since Monday. I promise I’ll get back to you someday.

Anyway, these people are great. Everyone in class seems to have an interesting story to share about how they ended here in Ironhack, and I can’t wait to live this experience with them (beers included).

For this 4th week of the Bootcamp, we are tasked with designing an e-learning app to be launched both on iOS and Android systems. In order to understand the difference between Google's Material Design and Apple's Human-Centered Design, I had to do some research and analyze both design standards. Here you will find the top 5 guidelines that affect my ongoing project the most:

Tab Bar

Bottom navigation bars allow movement between primary destinations in an app, displaying three to five destinations at the bottom of a screen. Different platforms have different rules and they need to be taken into consideration. Tabs usually appear at the top of the screen on Android and the bottom of the screen on iOS. This has been changing since Android 10 introduced gesture navigation, getting closer to what Apple's iOS has been doing for a long time and leaving behind that classic bottom navigation control that left us fiscally a few years ago. Open any Google services app and you will see a clear example of this change.

Action Buttons

Action Buttons are those that communicate actions that users can take. They are typically placed throughout the UI. Buttons should easily discoverable and indicate that they can trigger an action, and both that action and the button's state should be clear. A button’s position and size should scale in relation to its container.

To communicate the key actions of an app Material Design on Android uses Floating Action Buttons, consisting of an icon (sometimes labeled as in Gmail), that floats on top of the main content. On the other hand, the majority of apps on iOS place action buttons on the top title bar. . The text on buttons in Material Design is usually all uppercase. Sometimes we find uppercase button text in native iOS apps too, but most often we find title case.

Touch targets and grids

According to Google's Material Design Guidline, touch targets are the parts of the screen that respond to user input. They extend beyond the visual bounds of an element. Both iOS and Android have slightly different guidelines for touch targets (44px @1x for iOS and 48dp/48px @1x for Android). Material Design Guidelines also suggest aligning all elements to an 8dp square baseline grid.

Typography

Historically Apple has used Helvetica Neue, however, in 2015 shifted to Helvetica-inspired San Francisco. Apple restricts the usage of the typeface and only licenses it to registered third-party developers only for the design and development of applications for Apple's platforms. Android on its side has been using Roboto, a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface family, as the standard system typeface since 2011 on Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich". The entire font family has been licensed under the Apache license. (Take note Apple!)

The basic size of both the texts are similar, but Material Design android vs iOS has a huge difference in font sizes and their layout. While iOS mainly uses bold type to build the text hierarchy, Android uses more white space between texts.

Side menu

The hamburger menu, or navigation drawer as officially named by Materia Design, helps you save precious screen space, becoming one of the most popular navigation patterns for small and medium screens and a core component on Android. The drawer panel allows you to hide the navigation beyond the left edge of the screen and reveal it only upon a user’s action. The main downside of the hamburger menu is its low discoverability, and it’s not recommended as the main navigation menu, being more suitable for secondary navigation options.

The fifth week of UI | UX design Bootcamp is coming to an end... and I feel proud because my project @enricabiondiux​ has rocked it!

During this week we collaborated as a pair to redesign the responsive web of the Yale School of Art.

The challenge we faced during these five days was by no means easy. Even though we had to redesign the website of a prestigious university, the base from which we started was messy and chaotic.

From the beginning, @Erica, we organised ourselves by writing a schedule to follow during the week, which we checked every day and updated when necessary. This helped us to finish the presentation a few hours before the show and to be able to rehearse it several times together, as we only had 6 minutes to present it.

During this week we also practiced tree testing and Benchmark, which helped us lay the groundwork and decide on the main points to discuss, improve and showcase.

The most fun part, though, was the style tyle, where we defined the colours to be used for our redesign, the typography and the words that defined what the Yale Art School site wanted to convey in our opinion.

But this week's project was not only to create something beautiful and functional that respected the Yale Art School website, but also to make this web site responsive. So we reproduced the screens for smaller screen devices like mobile phones, adapting images, icons, text and spaces. And 👂🏻hear  👂🏻hear: we also wrote some code in HTML and CSS.

It took us a few hours but the result was more than satisfactory. We learned how to write code, media query and even how to create shadows on buttons or make images smaller in proportion to the devices they are to be displayed on.

Each week at @ironhack is incredibly more fantastic and amazing than the last. With each passing day I find that I can do things that I would never have imagined just a month and a half ago 🤩.

However, this week has not only been incredible because of what we have achieved (in such a short time, let me tell you), but especially because of how I have been able to collaborate with my fellow student. Even though we come from different professional backgrounds and are very different as people, we quickly found a way to collaborate, support each other, compare ourself and not waste time, even if we didn't need to put in extra hours.