My First Week of 100 Days of UX
7 Days of Learning makes one week, otherwise makes one weak.🙂
Day 001 was Getting and Knowing UX
✨ I Learned what is UX as a Process and not just the definition and also got to know about the different tools used by UX professionals.
😇 User-Centred Design is an iterative process; through various attempts, tests and progressive research, we convert our assumptions into concrete design decisions.
UX Design as a process broadly has 6 stages :
- Understand: As a UX Designer, you have to understand the problems and solutions from the perspective of both the User and the Brand.
- Research: Practices like 1:1 interviews, Surveys and Testing can help concrete the assumptions and make better design decisions.
- Analyze: After collecting the Research data, the next step is to layout visually with the help of User Personas and User Journey Maps. These help in a better understanding of the user pain points and how to structure the design.
- Design: The fun stage :) here Make use of Site maps, user flows but the most valuable is Wireframe, it is a low fidelity representation of the product and conveys the overall direction and description of the User Interface.
- Launch: Collaborating with the Engineering team with proper check-ins and feedback.
- Analyse(again): After the launch keep an eye on user reviews and how the users were responding to the product and did you solve all the pain points which the user faces.
Read more: Day 001 Learnings Thread ( Twitter)
Day 002, Dived into Case Studies of Big Tech Companies.
Reading is an essential part of a UX Designer/Researcher and what’s better than reading and learning from Case Studies of popular Big Tech Companies from Growth Design.
I chose TikTok’s Case study; due to 2 Reasons:
1️⃣. They were the first to make the short-form content popular and consumable.
2️⃣. Almost all the Video Platforms (and even Spotify) are now taking inspiration from it in some way or the other.
Here are my key takeaways from it:
💡 The MOST important action of TikTok’s onboarding is to Just Swipe and no extra effort. The more you swipe, the more likely you are to keep swiping. and Their end goal is to get you to swipe without even thinking about it (habit).
🤯 TikTok uses, what’s known as IP Sniffing For the Personalisation of content to match it with people around you. (without requesting your location access)
😒 TikTok pushes a video in the feed to subtly remind you to take a pause/break. But so they really care? No, it’s False empathy.
👉🏻 The Below attached Screenshot explains why:
Read more: Day 002 Learnings Thread ( Twitter)
Day 003, Analysed how the big companies evolve their user experience over time.
Resonating with my Day 001 learning and understanding that how User Experience evolves over time through iterative processes for the better.
I went through the timelines of Uber, Vimeo and Spotify. But I chose to analyse Shazam due to 2 Reasons:
1️⃣. It began with just one thing and still does that only, but perfectly.
2️⃣. Apple now owns it for a whopping $400 million, which makes it exciting xD.
🥳 Let’s go back to 1999, the very year Shazam was sounded.
Before the era of Smartphones and Music Streaming, also just before the dot com bubble. They started their service with the support of SMS, wherein they used to text back the end-user the name of the song and the artist.
💡In 2006, Shazam found its logo (the current one) and redesigned the website to include music reviews.
✨In 2007, Shazam defined itself as the ultimate way to discover the newest tracks, bands and albums powered by the world’s leading music recognition technology.
🤯 But it was not until 2014 that Shazam found its complete Brand identity; its brand colour and font.
👉🏻 In September 2014, Apple integrated Shazam with Siri.
😇 Apple was indeed interested in Shazam’s Tech.
Fast Forward to 2018, and this was when Apple announced it would be acquiring Shazam for a reported $400 million.
I also tried to Design the current Shazam App screen; Here is my attempt:
Read more: Day 003 Learnings Thread ( Twitter)
Day 004, Learned About the Various Laws of User Experience.
Laws in any Domain give us the much important framework/Guidelines to support our choices in Decision Making and the same goes for UX.
1. Hick’s Law
💡 Hick’s Law is a very logical idea that states that The more choices you present your users with, the longer it will take them to reach a decision.
😅 We experience this phenomenon almost Daily; let it be choosing an ice cream flavour at Baskin Robbins or picking an attire from your wardrobe.
2. Jakob’s Law
👉🏻 Jakob’s Law is a very necessary law; this is what I felt after knowing it;
🤯 This law breaks the mental model that 2 companies who provide the same services ( are competitors) copy each other UX or UI.
3. Fitts’s Law
😇 Fitts’s law is a Law that every UI and UX Designer should definitely know; this will help in designing better experiences by utilising the space in a more efficient manner.
🙌🏻 Example the Subscribe button on YouTube or the Quantity selection options in Swiggy and Zomato.
Read more: Day 004 Learnings Thread ( Twitter)
Here is my Iteration and Observation of these laws in Fresh to Home Application:
Day 005, Learned about Customer Journey Map.
A customer journey map is nothing but a map of the journey a customer takes.
It empathises with users and highlights their feelings and challenges over their journey through a scenario targeted towards a Goal / Expectation.
This is the User Persona I Made to work upon the User Journey Map, Keeping the details in mind of a specific user.
Movie Recommendations are something that we feel scarcity of on a regular basis, whenever we ask that friend either he gives a BS Movie or he belongs to a different genre. A Similar Problem was faced by Rudie ( User Persona) so he checked out this App Friendspire.
Below is his User Journey Map:
Read more: Day 005 Learnings Thread ( Twitter)
DAY 006, Learnt about User Personas and their Importance in User Research.
User Experience centres on the idea that we must design products around people, rather than teaching people how to use products: user-centred design (UCD), not technology-centred design. an excerpt from nngroup article on User Personas.
User Personas are fictional but targeted users, wherein we include their behaviour, influences, pain points from about a product or service that falls under the same space as ours.
User Personas help us to empathise with the users better and make better products in return.
Here is the User Persona I created by talking to a friend of mine about her experience of buying make-up Products online.
Read more: Day 006 Learnings Thread ( Twitter)
This was my learning from the very first week of 100 Days of UX, I am really enthusiastic about the Product Design Domain and want to explore it to its very depth.
Attitude matters, not the magnitude, FIN!
Follow me on Twitter for more insights on my learning process and let’s connect.
