Ashley_Huang - UX & UI (Level 2) Pathway

Certificates Summer 2021 Certificates UX & UI (CA) 2021
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1

Week 2

Technical:

  • Learning about BI tools

Tools:

  • Trello

  • Miro

Soft Skills:

  • Interviewing people
  • Teaching people about new tools and the stemaway website

3 Achievement Highlights:

  • Getting to meet with my team

  • Interviewing a BI Mentor

  • Creating and implementing Trello

Upcoming Goals:

  • Revise interview questions to make them better suited for what we want

  • Implement user research into design ideas, and how to cater to BI people

  • Team icebreakers/games

2

Week 3

Technical:

  • Journey Mapping: Although I am already familiar with personas from prior training, journey mapping was something new to me and felt like a natural extension of personas because you take the user through a hypothetical scenario and get to get into the user’s head.

  • Chenchen gave us a presentation on how to use Figma to creat slideshows, and I actually didn’t know that you could make slides with Figma, but it gives you a lot more flexibility and you can also use smartanimate to make it all mesh together well.

  • Learning about Figma and playing around with the tools

  • Learning how to create presentations in Figma

Tools:

  • Getting more efficient with Figma and using the grouping tool to create masters
  • Using Figma to practice making slides and using it well so you can work smarter and not harder.
  • Trello
  • Miro *Figma

Soft Skills:

  • Interviewing people
  • Learning how to problem solve when learning a new tool

Achievement Highlights:

  • Having fun with Figma, and having our leads give us lessons on Figma
  • Going to the round table discussion where we thought about what one would do in a made-up scenario (related to UX) because it was fun to analyze and think about a real world situation.
  • Creating cute journey maps and seeing the other team members drawings
  • Creating a Persona Template
  • Discovering another aspect of Figma!

Upcoming Goals:

  • Connect with the Bioinformatics Team and have a meeting
  • Practice Figma
4

Week 4

Technical:

  • Storyboards and Flowcharts: This was the start of ideation and prototyping, and a step above the data collection we had been doing. They can be as indepth or as simple you want
  • Storyboards are a visual way to represent your product as you can see the characters using the product and see their reactions and emotions
  • Flowcharts are more technical and can show several possibilities and are faster to do than storyboards

Tools:

  • Excalidraw
  • Figma

Achievement Highlights:

  • Connecting with Roman from the BI team

    • We had an interview and we got more insight on the what BI people want from a product. I got to learn about what BI team was working on, which was mostly just practice with data so far, and challenges that they faced
    • As a bonus, we also coordinated how to connect with the BI team, as we knew we were supposed to collaborate but hadn’t yet established a method yet.
    • We clarified what each team wanted to do for each other and made new connections and had them join our server
5

Week 5

Technical:

  • Learned a lot about techniques for design, which helpful because design can feel kind of broad because there isn’t a perfect way to go about designing something and it does require creativity, but having some set guidelines and suggestions is a good start and helps you improve the overall quality.
  • Wireflows and Wireframes: Wireframes feed into wireflows, and taking on the wireframe helps you focus on the structure, and then the wireflow meshes it all together and you can think about the actual process. Breaking it up like this helps with not feeling overwhelmed

Tools:

  • Excalidraw
  • Figma

Achievement Highlights:

  • The round table with Max this week was super interesting and we talked about our different cultures and backgrounds, and how this would affect design and inclusivity. For example, Steffi mentioned how a way that companies can reach a wider audience is to increase the language options for the site, and how you can unlock a new potential. It was also just great to hear about other participants cultures and how they are similar and different to my background.
  • We continued connection with the BI team, and we got suggestions from them and help about how typical softwares look while we did the wireflows and frames. They also explained some terminology which helped us understand BI better in general, since it is something unfamiliar to many.
  • I have used Balsamiq before to wireframe, but Excalidraw was a new tool for me
6

Week 6

**Technical:

  • Creating interactions and learning about that function of Figma so you can actually make the prototype interactive and immersive, as if it were an actual program. It is tricky to think about all the interactions you actually have with a site that I haven’t really even thought about before, and it helps me appreciate all the features in web design. Thinkin about the most efficient way to put it together is a mental workout, because you want to make a good prototype, but you also dont want to get confused and unorganized with all the pages and connections

Tools: Figma

Achievement Highlights:

  • With Chenchen and Shourya, we created a feedback form for the UI teams. Creating the form was actually very interesting because I saw myself using tips about interviewing and data collection for UX to write the questions, for example, not having questions that are too broad and having a certain order that is logical for the questions.
7

Week 7 Technical:

  • There were critques on the hi-fi, and truth be told they were things I would not have noticed without the mentors help. Team 3’s prototype was really good and it gave us an idea of what level of fidelity we should aim for.

  • Design principles, heuristics, etc.

Tools:

Figma

Achievement Highlights:

  • Usability Testing
  • Refining prototype
  • Researching about Figma overlays, which helps save time when adding popups, since you can add it as a small box to the side of a page instead of a whole new page.
8

Week 8

Technical:

  • This week focused on presentations. Shourya gave us examples of what UX case studies and presentations which helped us. Including more graphics and negative space helps a presentation feel more approachable and easily understandable, than just text heavy slides. Additionally, including images of the prototype and the process behind it showcases the work really well.
  • Max gave us a good article on presenting, which was helpful for presenting in general, and not limited to just UX

Tools:

Figma

Achievement Highlights:

  • Week 8 was definitely a highlight and getting to look at the cumulative efforts of the teams was incredible! As project manager, I am so proud of the teams and their dedication, and I am so impressed by how talented everyone is!!
  • I was a presenter for Team 2, and I have never done a more formal presentation like this, and I was really pleased by Anthony and Keegan’s comments on our presentation, as they gave good feedback and liked how we picked just the highlights of the internships.