#uxprocess

Hello everyone, it’s been a while... and I think it’s time to talk about something.

Lately I’ve been analyzing cassino games such as roulette, and maybe you will ask me why? Well, for starters, the game is popular, and there are a lot of roulette apps. But some apps have UX issues:

1. A physical game with a lot of information can overwhelm users on mobile devices (Because of the limiting space of their mobile screens).

2. The game is not playable on one hand (mobile)

I’ve started playing the game and realized that there were empty spaces and need to very precise to touch the numbers on the screen, sometimes even forcing vision. So, I draw in the open spaces, and see if there was too much information that can hide in a menu.

Based on that, I did a quick wireframe to see how the space would be layout. Then building a quick prototype.

Then I realized that the color of the numbers could be in the complete square. And other minor adjustments. The next steps are testing, to valid my proposed solution to the issues.

Although I did not test for me, visually the access of information has improved and its more clear what things are and what you should do. But I you loved to know what’s your opinion, let me know what you think (please be constructive).

Wow... so the second week went by and I’m mentally exhausted and physically tired, but this is only the beginning so I gotta stay focused and know how to balance my life better. I barely have any social life and asking people to help me out with some surveys and interviews was reeeel challenge.

Week 2 meant working on an individual project with the objective of creating an app to track a habit or routine. I decided to work on a language app to help people make their learning easier because ain’t nobody got time to learn darling.

Must admit that I’m not fully content with the results, I tried to keep the prototype as simple as possible (along with my presentation) because I wanted everything to be focused on the usability rather than the interface but apparently nobody got it completely so I...failed...hard 💀My colleagues and teachers are dope tho and their support and comments are just what you need to hear as motivation.

I’ll def work on Figma skills and connecting my research to my ideas and hopefully I’ll get to the place I want to. I know I’m very harsh on myself but I’m very self-aware of my weakness and imma try hard to strengthen them.

Now, leaving all this negativity aside, I’m soooooo happy how this week turned out because I learned sooooo much and I’m dead ass ready for this new career change. I know that this is it and i’m gonna work my ass off to become the person i wanna be.

that’s it. bai

After a long, long & long slumber I finally woke up to join (for the third third time) the UX/UI cohort, since Covid-19 seems too annoying to disappear or give us a break. Thank god the weather is at our side, right??!!....

For this week, and after a quick intro on Monday to getting to know each other, we decided to start the project. My team was my up of Carla and Janine and our first goal was to fins a local small e-commerce business or organization to propose a redesign. After the options, our final choice was to redesign the “Tennis Club Premià de Dalt” website and mobile version. 

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The first step we decided to do was to analyze the current website to find some usability problems (which we found a lot) and to define some structure inconsistencies. After that analysis we proceeded to carry out the card sorting to observe what the user's browsing perceptions were and, thus, be able to establish a correct navigation criteria for the future redesign of the website. After all the results obtained, we decided to plan a redesign with much simpler and more logical navigation. The next step was to carry out the tree tests through which the users looked for specific information in the new redesign and, thus, to be able to draw final conclusions on whether the process that had been carried out had been correct or whether there were still some changes to be carried out.

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The second step was to focus on the layout and find a new style for the website. For that we decided to create an style-tyle where we decided the approach we were gonna follow to do the redesign of the brand. The most important thing was to do a 180º change on the branding, keeping it simple and staying away from the coldness of the dark colors. Since the club offers a lot of activities, we decided to focus on some brand attributes reflecting that. The most important was to be Family-friendly, it was a must for us. After that we chose a color palette that resembled those attributes and focused our attention on a communicative minimalist design.

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After that we centered our attention on the mobile version to see how things will translate to that. We made some clear rearrangements in terms of typography sizes and images display, but the overall feedback we got was really good. We were happy to see that the Family Friendly attribute was translating well across platforms and screens. 

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The next part was centered on the desirability test to see the perceptions of the users and their emotional or attitudinal responses to our prototype's visual designs. Thankfully for us, Family friendly (18/72) was the most chosen attributes of them all, followed by Lively, Appealing and then Inviting and fun. 

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The last part was the coding part where we had to program our home page and the responsive version for mobile using HTML/CSS. This was not our area of expertise so we could use the help of 2 students from Web/Dev. Thanks to them, we finally managed to get a pretty close website coding design from we have envisioned with our design. 

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We work very hard for this project, even though we had to sacrifice some sleep hours. We learn how to trust each others’ process so we could divide and conquer all the challenges Nevan is throwing at us. BRING EM’ ON!

Thanks To Janine and Carla for the great teamwork and be willing to learn and receive graphic design tips. And also, thanks to Sergi and Marina for the great effort they put helping us to do some coding.

I am happy to say that we have achieved 2/3 of the bootcamp already! I can’t believe how fast this 6 weeks went but at the same time I feel I have been doing it for 5 months at least as it has become my almost 100% life focus. This week was a different one, not only for the content we saw but because there was no project presentation. Yes, you are reading correctly, no Friday presentations 😱. The reason for this is that we are working on our final solo project and it is so challenging that we need more than a week to work on it so we will be delivering it next Thursday. Moreover the presentations will be different too as we will be doing them in front of a UX/UI professional and in front of our classmates as we generally do.  This week wasn’t easy as we were dealing with lots of steps and techniques when working on our project. I managed to conduct 10 very insightful interviews that provided me tons of data, so clustering it and defining patterns took me a lot of time. Can’t wait to see the final result!  We had a few design labs, held by Helena, one of our awesome TAs, who taught us very useful tips when working on Figma, I am already applying it in my mid-fi prototypes 🤓.

WEEK THREE meant group project and also developing a HI-FI prototype for the first time.

This week’s been a technical challenge (personally) because I haven’t practised enough on FIGMA and also because I felt like I was learning way too slow, so I had to catch up asap.

After having a session about my progress, I realised that it was not only the ‘production’ or ‘technical’ part the one I had to work on but also my rational thoughts when connecting research and design and WHY I had to make those changes. This is something I’ve always struggled with. Seeing it so obvious and tangible makes me happy to know that I can have the opportunity to change it and thrive personally and professionally.

Our work had flaws, as a group, we were aware of the fact that we need to organise our ideas more and we also knew that our planning and timing was a key factor to avoid the mistakes we made. We all agreed that we need to work on this, especially after seeing the critiques and how we knew our points to improve were the things we didn’t put much attention to in the beginning.

The group I was assigned with made this week so fun and lit, I got to know these two girls even more and we worked in an open and tolerant environment. We were all equal when doing tasks, accepted critiques openly with no resentment and disagree and agree in such good vibes, everything just developed organically. Teamwork is not an easy thing to achieve but u gotta be tolerant and open and just keep nourishing that.

WEEK ONE is over and being aware of how my confidence was going down throughout the week was pretty bad for me.

I guess that changing careers and actually projecting yourself in this new field can be exciting but intimidating at the same time. It’s not an easy step to do and lots of doubts come to mind. It’s not because this bootcamp is tough to carry out, but the fact of not knowing what’s gonna happen once I move to Berlin with this new career.

We learned how to interview and use affinity diagrams to gather all the users data and select the points we’ll be working on the sketches and then start low-fi wireframes (Figma). Test! Test! Test! or basically fail in order to apply those new changes and mould that idea more.

I’ve also learned so much from everyone in the team, they’re pretty sweet and so motivational, and so are Nevan (lead teacher) and Brina (teacher’s assistant). All of them are a big part of this supportive team.

Let’s see how the 2nd week of this intense bootcamp goes…👽