#uxdisummer2015

Yay! It’s presentation day! 

I’m not ACTUALLY bleeding from the work I did this weekend to complete this presentation (although at several points of the project, paper cuts were a potential health hazard), but it feels like I should have. 

Last week, we covered the process of UX product creation and testing, which was fascinating and what I imagined it to be. While I felt like I was comprehending the material, I still had to wonder if I just wasn’t fully grasping the concepts. Doing the process is how I best learn. You just don’t know it until you get there.

However, I am concerned that I’m either slacking or still uninformed. Last week came and went and I believe I was worried that I was suffering from what they call the Dunning-Kruger effect, where an unskilled individual mistakes their abilities to be higher than accurate. Basically, an overconfidence. Unfortunately, as part of the term, you can’t tell what is accurate so for the meantime I’m just going to try to “fake it until you make it.” 

This project was massive and I got caught up a lot in it since I had a hard time keeping a direction since I felt pulled in all different.  Many ups and downs but essentially I put put out something with which I’m pretty happy.

Future UXDI-ers reading this: Don’t give up, and if things are rough be sure to just talk to your classmates.  Chances are they are feeling the same way and just knowing that and talking through your issues with your process will help put things back into perspective.

On to the STUFF!

I’m an Architect and an IT graduate, who currently lives in the Forest hills, Queens. I am starting to take the next steps to enhance my career into the world of UX design by enrolling in the full-time immersive UXDI program at General Assembly and this blog is where I intend to chronicle my educational and professional experiences (super exciting, right?).

Having worked as an architect for about three years, my daily job consisted of understanding client/project requirements, analyzing client’s needs and their culture, interpreting their lifestyle and coming up with simple yet functional designs to make their dreams come true.

This week we learned a bit about Omnigraffle and Sketch, as well as about open and closed card sorting... boy did we learn about card sorting.  It was actually pretty fun, but a lot more time-consuming than you’d think.

All this is leading into Project 2: Create an e-commerce website for a given brand.  I got New York Costumes, which I had never heard of before, nor had I been to the actual store.  Their site actually doesn’t even have any way to purchase items online; the link to shop online takes you to another website and company altogether!  As well, the items we got for card sorting were ...interesting to say the least!

Pictures and more after the bump.

Day 3 of 10 weeks UXD immersive. 

Today is the first time in 3 days I’ve felt relaxed. Ideating, sketching and prototyping is definitely my thing. I just immersed and went with the flow. Love it! The only thing to work on: I need to stop over-prettifying. Yes, it’s exiting to sketch nicely, but if it eats my precious time, than I just need to drop it. Simplify. Use STOPWATCH. Say “no” to perfectionism. Today we were taught some awesome tricks on how to turn rough and quick hand-drawing into a powerful designer tool. We did some sketching exercises and I was surprised how quickly I can sketch when put into strict time frames. Here are some of the sketches that were performed in just 1-2 mins each.

Later we discussed different prototyping methods and techniques, and went into details with paper prototyping (this is what we are supposed to do for our 1st project).

During workshop hours we should have been working on the following:

- Sketching in order to explore how data, which we got from affinity mapping, can be transformed into our future app features.

- Creating simple paper prototype of the app and make sure it’s ready for testing.