I feel like doing these daily articles might be too much because my days are full of back-to-back meetings and work time, but at the same time, I learn so much every day that I feel like I need a place to put them. I’ll have to set aside time to maybe put all these links in Notion instead rather than have them scattered in multiple blog posts.
Flashy animation and motion sickness
Animations are inaccessible – especially flashy ones. The proposed solution for animated websites was to have the option to toggle animation, but I am not sure if that’s better for user experience especially if you have to search for the option (and might not even know it exists).
Funny sign design mistakes
I found these so amusing!
SVG favicons (CSS)
I’m not a web developer, but still thought this was cool.
Apple’s “hold and accept” button
There was an article about this, but I first heard about it through a meme when people were complaining about the bad design. I guess you really don’t notice good design.
UI inspiration breakdown
This article broke down some popular UI designs on Dribble and how they’re actually good UX.
Some highlights:
- Having a search bar in the thumb area (middle of the screen) makes it easier to reach
- Illustrations capture attention
- Having a dot under the text label to show it’s active is good for colour-blind people
- Showing both icons and text is good in case people don’t understand the icons (at least show text when it’s in active state)
Dogfooding
Sometimes dogfooding is good, where you test products within your own company first.
UX design with a non-profit
Today, I got lots of cool information from my mentor.
We were going to do a design sprint for the non-profit’s description and tagline.
We were going to ask the team how they would describe the non-profit to family members, and which description gets them most excited.
Then, we’d figure out which words and phrases pop up most often and are most important.
After, we’d send the keywords through Google to see which words are more popular, then go back to alpha testers to give them a few different versions of taglines and description combinations to vote for a favourite.
This was so user-centered and I loved how we’d keep in touch with alpha testers. This ensured our alpha testers would become beta testers, and then become power users and be the most engaged.
I was also encouraged not to listen to my mentor so much and make my own decisions with another member of the team. It was surprising but I liked it.
Compliments
My mentor also told me that I had a lot of empathy, which is really rare in design even among experienced designers. She said that I always aim to serve value to the users, and she saw that through tasks I had like user journey mapping.
We discussed my future with the non-profit, and possibly becoming part of the product team.
Product is more holistic. Product managers would be on kind of the same level as product designers where managers would be telling designers about business goals, analytics, and company goals, while designers would advocate for the user.
UX designers, on the other hand, might focus on a specific feature and work on wireframes for that.
I think I like having a more holistic view, and I already have some insight into the product so I said I’d try it out.
Process and next steps
My mentor also mentioned scoring every feature we have on a weighted decision matrix and then having that on a short- versus long-term roadmap.
In terms of prioritization, we couldn’t launch beta until all pages were redesigned, so it didn’t matter which ones I looked at first.
We talked about design process too. I was encouraged to do research, and I thought this would be the first step to my design process too. However, I realized that my instinct is to do a braindump of ideas and brainstorm everything, then research (moodboard on Pinterest and adding my own notes), then brainstorm again after having the new information and inspiration.
Events
I signed up for so many events and programs because I love opportunities. After going to an event today, I realized someone intentionally explained a metaphor/common saying. This was key for accessibility because some people may not understand the phrase.
Common Creativist 