Tee the UX Designer

In this high-paced digitalized environment, UI/UX trends are ever-changing. This change is the only constant thing in this design world. This may sound like a cliche, but it’s true. Users all around the world visit hundreds of websites every day, and if you want to draw their attention, you need to be extra creative with your website design. For web designers, staying up to date and relevant to the latest UX/UI Design trends is necessary for survival in the industry.

To see what we mean,

Check Out The 10 Latest UX/UI Design Trends Coming In 2021

1. Minimalism

Minimalism is already taking over 2021 and comes among the latest UI trends going to set its ground. Every time, while browsing the website, we come across many advertisements; there are constant notifications and alerts. Also, the user gets to interact with many interfaces loaded with information. 

To avoid such a heavy burden, the designers keep finding new ways to make simpler graphic elements. The best example of minimalism is Hair & Body Care brand Ray; they created an elegant and simple web design following this trend. 

2. Simplified UX design

If you are working with a reputed web designing company in India, you will get to know that designers are now focused on creating simple interfaces so that the user does not need to perform any extra action. One of the latest UX trends is simplified registration, for example; if the user wants to log in to the Marketplace account, he/she just needs to enter the phone number. Password is no longer the requirement.

Recently,  Apple has followed this UX trend to make the custom button for avoiding extra registration steps. With the click of this button, the users can choose whether they want their website to see the email or not.

3. Voice user interface

Voice user interface has become the latest UX trend with its widespread adoption. With the VUI(voice user interface) term, it is pretty clear that the design does not need to be visual to work well. 

VUI is an internal interface that has to do more with the data synthesis and context rather than the design. Designers all around the world are trying to keep up with the latest trend to share an incredible User experience by providing them with a voice interface.

For example, Google translator; helps to translate a word or sentence into another language. A user can simply click on the button, start recording the voice, and it will translate your speech into your preferred language. 

4. Glass Morphism

In the previous year, neo-morphism was widely used by web designers. It represents the amalgamation of two common approaches for creating the user interface. In 2021, web designers are going to practice glass-morphism.

Now, gradients are becoming lighter, but getting much more complex. The thing is that previously, web designers preferred to use only two or three colours in the line of the gradient. But now, this colour count can be increased up to 10, and overlay can also be used. 

These gradients offer temperamental outbursts because of their colourfulness. This is the reason why many designers prefer to use them. The SaaS company Stripe has successfully implemented this popular UI Trend on their website where you can see the blurred background with multiple colours. 

5. Unique 2D illustrations

Illustrations are always on the top as they were last year. Although, they are less generic now. Nowadays, web designers like to experiment with unusual proportions, angles, and storylines. They prefer to use bright, muted, or vice-versa pistol colours to create fancy illustrations for the biggest stir than ever. Companies like Magnet Co know how to give a distinctive look to the website with these unique illustrations, and you can do the same for yours. 

6. Mobile-first approach

Most of the search queries are made using smartphone devices. People prefer to use their phone to find the restaurant for dinner, book movie tickets, Magnet book cab, browse travel marketplaces for trips and so on. Thus, a website needs to look good on the desktop version as well as the smartphone version. This is the reason why the mobile-first approach has become one of the popular UI/UX trends to share a better customer experience. An application like Dorsia has implemented this latest trend in its travel application. 

7. Icons

An icon works as the most efficient tool for having visual communication with the users. Simple minimalistic icons are considered to be the powerful UX trend because of their ability to convey meaning using fewer words. Most businesses especially emphasize icons. While designing a website, you must choose small icons of same size and dimension for the same family. This will help you to display the skill level and let you focus on the website integrity. 

You can find this latest UI trend on the Vegan Badun Adventures website

8. Prioritising Accessibility

This year is all focused on accessibility prioritisation. Accessibility is a practice to create digital services accessible to users with special needs, impairments, and disabilities. Here, the target is the users who need a little more attention than others like the users with hearing impairment, dyslexia, all the old age users. In 2021, many business brands may perform an accessibility audit to ensure that their digital services are serving all the users well.

9. Typography

If you are a web designer, you probably know how important it is to go for the right font for a product, website, or application. This is the reason by experiments with fonts has become a remarkable UI/UX trend in the market. Now, the designers prefer to use typography to highlight the important features of the website and convey the right information to the customer.

10. Air Gesture Control

Air Gesture Control is another latest UI/UX going to dominate the web industry this year. This trend plays a significant role in improving the User experience. With multiple gesture control mechanisms, few movements in the air will make things work on your smartphone device. 

Isn’t that amazing?

This Is It! 

These are some latest UI/UX trends that are going to dominate the world in 2021. Make sure that you follow all the trends while designing a website to reach out to millions of targeted customers out there.

2/2 on your website but I did not find anything that answered my question, but I do really love your portfolio!

What courses should you take in school for UX/UI?

First of all, I can’t exactly recommend university courses because I did not study design or art-related subjects. I don’t even know what kind of courses are offered in design. But you definitely do not need to study design in university to work in UX or UI. 1/3 of my former colleagues didn’t.

I studied psychology, and that became really beneficial for UX. I know more theories that could explain people’s needs and behaviors (important in designing UX) than my colleagues who studied design. Although, they also have skills I didn’t (or had to learn on my own) like composition and typography. But I’d say that aesthetic/artistic skills are much easier to learn on your own than psychology.

If you know all of these and know how to combine them, you’d have a huge advantage over most designers:

Psychology, as mentioned above, particularly cognition, perception, and behaviors

Design thinking i.e. using empathy for your users to solve their problems through design (it’s a bit more complex than you might think, so study more about it). Take a course in it if available. More and more art, and even business, schools are offering this now. Although, it’s also very easy to learn on your own (tons of resources on this on the internet).

Branding (in the marketing sense) would also be beneficial, or just read the book called The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier.

Basic coding (at least HTML & CSS). I learned this by messing around with website templates you can buy on ThemeForest. You can take an online course on Team Treehouse or Code Academy.

Basic business principles. The easiest way probably to read 101 Things I Learned in Business School and google more info on topics that book mentioned.

Design theories, e.g. color theory, Gestalt principles, golden ratio, dynamic composition, layout, typography, etc.

Researching. You will have to do research (or guide research) as a UX designer. Learn how to do a competitive audit and user research.

An understanding that design is problem-solving for the users and the business first, and aesthetics dead last. There’s very little place for personal taste in design.

As for resources to self-study, I wrote a long blog post on it. Check this out first if you haven’t seen it already: How to Become a UX/UI Designer - A Comprehensive Guide. Follow the link at the bottom of that post to see the full article that includes resources. I also have a few other design-related posts on my design blog.

Thanks for the question!

First, I want to say there’s no shame in having difficulty learning computer science. When I took my first programming course, I understood nothing. It was at least a year before I thought I had any grasp over anything programming. My pal over at @delightedcrow told this story of his professor explaining just this: “When you start studying a new subject you’ve never been exposed to, it’s like jumping into a pool of new knowledge. When you first jump in after never setting foot into the pool, it’s going to be cold. Very cold. This is where people have trouble continuing because they were shocked by how cold it was and don’t want to jump back in. Instead, you need to take a small step and get comfortable with that before taking another.” With that said, when you learn a concept, try to code something outside of the examples you’re given using it to try to wrap your head around it. I don’t know who said it, but one motto I go by is “Code to learn, don’t learn to code.” I took an intro to Java course and learned a bit, but I got to where I am today because I wanted to see what I was able to do with the language and challenged myself to write larger and more complex programs.

There’s also nothing wrong with asking for help. I know some people think they should be embarrassed because they didn’t understand the material, so they don’t want to ask for help to avoid looking stupid. In reality, we’ve all been that person who struggled, and now that we’re in a better place, we want to help. If you ever have a program you’ve been struggling with and it doesn’t work no matter what you type or how many times you bang your head against your keyboard, ask for help. There are communities of programmers, like Stack Overflow and r/learnprogramming, that will be more than happy to help given that you’ve already scratched your head long enough.

I knew that I liked coding when I started studying computer science, but I didn’t know what I wanted to end up coding. It took me about three years of studying it to figure out what I even like. I don’t know if you’ve given this any thought, and it’s okay if you don’t know yet, but having an idea of what you want to do with coding helps. Here’s a few paths for you to consider:

Do you want to design websites? Learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Do you want to work with databases? Learn SQL (rather MySQL or NoSQL) and PHP

Do you like analyzing data and numbers? Learn Python and R

Do you enjoy statistics? Learn SAS and R

Do you enjoy mathematics? Learn Mathematica and MATLAB

Do you want to want to develop mobile apps? Learn Android (Java) and Swift.

Do you want to work on artificial intelligence? Learn Lisp or Prolog.

Do you want to make games? Learn Unity (C#) and C++

Do you want to make applications for the computer? Learn Java and C#

Do you like working with hardware? Learn Assembly and C.

Like I said, you don’t have to know what you want to do now, and you definitely don’t have to do all of them, but if you have an idea of what you want to do with coding, these are some languages to look into. There’s also no shame in trying one of these paths and figuring out that it’s not for you. While I currently only do two of these paths, I’ve dipped my foot into eight of them. One of my professors told me that most people spend their undergraduate degree in computer science figuring out what they don’t like so they can go to industry or grad school doing what they do like. If you know what you want to do, you can cater your studying more towards that and it would be more enjoyable.

Finally, study with the techniques that help you learn. I personally don’t like reading computer science books, but that’s not how I learn. When I learn something, I need to code an example of it to truly know how it works. Are you a visual learner? Watch a YouTube playlist on the language or topic you want to learn or take an online course on a site like edx. Do you want to follow an interactive tutorial where you learn step-by-step and do examples along the way? Try an online program like codecademy and sololearn. Do you like to test your knowledge on what you’ve learned? Take coding challenges on coderbyte and codechef. Do whatever you think will help you understand.

This is a series of posts highlighting things I did or dwelled on to get me to where I am today as a UX Designer.

This was one of the main reasons I started this blog. One of the things I did to become a UX Designer was reading through countless blogs and articles about UX. What spoke to me most were the blog posts. They were down to earth, real people talking about their experience, or lack thereof, and how they got into their careers. Basically, I wanted to use this blog to pay it forward to the UX community. Everybody’s experience was different, so I wanted to share mine. So here we go. 

I’d say the first thing I realized about my UX career was that I had a passion for it. Although I didn’t know exactly what it was at the time. To be honest, when first I heard of UX I just thought it sounded like a dope ass name for a job (I mean “UX Designer” still sounds dope as hell lol). Then I really looked into it. To simplify it to the bare essence that helped me understand it, I saw it as helping people through design. 

If you know me, then you know that I love helping people. I was in customer service for the first few years of my post-grad life, and was really good at it. No I was not a fake, kiss-up. I genuinely did my best to help people. Especially when it came to selling them the right shoe at Nike. The way I looked at it, I was using UX design/testing to solve their problem. 

I was passionate in what I did, and I only recently realized over the past two years that it was a part of UX design. So my advice is to make sure you’re passionate about this career(or any career you decide to take). I’m not going to tell you that if you enjoy what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s not true for me. If it’s “work” there’s a stigma for me that makes me wish I was off lol. However, I can tell you that I enjoy the work I do. Time flies when I’m working, I’m not depressed on the job, I’m not wishing I was doing another line of work, etc. I truly enjoy what I do because I’m passionate about it. It drives me everyday. 

How to Become a UX/UI Designer - A Comprehensive Guide

I’ll just do a comprehensive guide on this :D

Is UX/UI designing right for you?

You’ll love User Experience Design if…

1. You love analyzing & solving problems

As a UX designer, your job is to deliver the most effective way to solve users’ problems and achieve business goals through design.

To accomplish this, you must understand:

The business: The nature of your client’s business and what they want to achieve.

The users: Who are they? What do they need to solve their problems?

The overlap: How can you provide a user experience that aligns users’ needs with the business goals?

When you have insights into these key factors, you can translate them into an optimized, implementable design solution. It can be anything from an improved user flow or information architecture, more focused messaging, or new features.

2. You love psychology (cognition & behaviors) — To design for usability, you need to understand how different types of users behave, think and process information.

3. You love researching — It’s a huge advantage to know what the competitors (of your clients) are doing and what works for them. Stay on top of trends among your target users and what’s new in the design & tech world. These insights will help you make design decisions.

4. You value functionality and efficiency as much as aesthetics — Sometimes you must sacrifice beauty, but if it boosts sales by 20%, so be it. A good designer can balance the best of both worlds.

5. You are attentive to details — There are more components to a website or app than its primary features. You must make sure to cover all scenarios that users may need, even rare ones, like error messages, forgot password popups, on-boarding, etc. You don’t want users to get stuck in limbo somewhere, become frustrated, and quit forever. This comes with experience and from studying other people’s products.

You’ll love User Interface Design if…

1. You love to communicate visually

As a UI designer, your job is to design the best way to visually communicate a clear message at first glance. You’re not just a “pretty-maker.”

Your design’s purpose is to communicate:

The brand: What is the brand image? Fun & young, sophisticated & classy, or formal & reliable? How is it different from the competitors?

The goal: What can users accomplish on this website or app? What is the most important call to action? Is it to sign up, subscribe to a newsletter, or buy something?

2. You love psychology (perception) — You have a huge advantage as a designer when you understand how visual elements affect people’s perception. How does certain colors, typography, or layout make people think and feel? You can guide users to take the actions you want, or even increase their perception of the product’s value.

3. You love consistency—A website or app is much more memorable and easy to use when the design is consistent. Pick a visual style that fits and stick with it. The same elements should be linked the same function (e.g. everything related to signing up is orange).

4. You are adaptable — Aesthetic is subjective. And your clients know more about their business than you do. What is beautiful to you may get a huge backlash from their users. You should make recommendations based on your expertise as a designer, but it is ultimately your clients’ business, and they have the final say.

Continue to the next sections on design resources, how to get started as a UX/UI designer, and tips on becoming a better one.

I moved the full post to my design blog on Medium and rewrote it to be 100x better. Here’s the [link right to the post].

Follow me on Medium if you want more design & design career tips!

10 Design Resources for Web Designers

Designing an entire website on your own can often be a herculean task. However, you can make your job a lot easier by using some of the best graphic design tools that the Internet has to offer. These include:

1.Color Supply

Color Supply is a minimalistic and simple app that helps you find complementary colors in the groups of 2,3, and 4. All you have to do is select the colors that you are interested in and it will list the various shades of these colors that go along with each other. You can also change the number of colors in the group on the fly with the arrow buttons.

2.Pexels

A website can’t look attractive unless it has high-quality images. The problem is that many of the online resources that offer stock photos don’t have a good variety of high-resolution and professional-looking images. This is why it’s highly recommended that you check out Pexels.com. It’s one of the few websites on the Internet that offers nothing but top-notch photos mainly because each individual photo is hand-picked by the Pexels team. Plus, they tag all the photos so that you can easily find the images that you are looking for.

3. Webdesigner News

Webdesigner News doesn’t directly help you with the graphic design work, but it’s an excellent source of information that can keep you up to date with the new trends in the web design industry.  You can read about new apps and software, case studies, tutorials, and a lot more. In fact, you won’t need to read any other blog ever again as it will bring all the important stories under one roof for you.

in the past, i had to prepare for several exams by self-studying for long hours at home, so over the years i’ve learned the best ways to adapt to this situation, which i now present in this little infographic. i hope it can ease some of the pressure! 💜

Hi, there! I’m Lala! Today I am sharing my WFH routine. Some things to keep in mind are that I only work 4 hours a day and my pomodoros tend to be longer. Usually it’s 25 minutes, but for me 25 minutes is too little, I tend to work better in 45-minute pomodoros. I hope this can be of info to you guys, it really has helped get my shit together. 

Prepare: Get your materials and lay the foundation for the brainstorming session by defining the specific problem or question you want to attack

Generate Ideas: Generate a free flow of ideas that will lead to innovative solutions to a given problem, emphasizing quantity over quality and deferring judgement

Put Ideas in Buckets: After the generating phase ends, group your ideas into clusters or “buckets” according to common features so they’re organized and themes can emerge

Generate Action Steps: Decide which ideas or groups of ideas are worth pursuing and create specific actions to do so

Act: Prototype it. Any idea can be tested for worthiness, not just a physical product. If you’re accomplishing something, carry out your action steps

Analyze: What resulted from your actions? What new data do you have about your problem or question? It’s time to reflect on your initial action steps

Brainstorm Again: Using your new data, start the process over until you’ve defeated your problem or answered your question