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User Experience

During User Experience course, we have made a research about professional stakeholders. I interviewed my friend, who works as a doctor in Germany. To be honest, before the research, I thought we could not really find something unusual. During the research, there were many things I could not come up with myself about this stakeholders. Making research and thinking how it can be applied in design was cool!

PS. Exam was hard tho.

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Multi Device Design

I found this course extremely challenging at the beginning, first of all because I have never used any prototyping tool before. After a small research about different software, I choose Adobe XD and spent some time doing tutorials. 

The course covered 3C framework and different platforms design guidelines that was helpful for next courses.

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Cognetive Psychology

I would say it was my favorite course in this module. Learning about processes behind people’s vision, thinking and doing was super interesting. I fully read the given book and it was so nice to know why all usual things happen with us.

We made a presentation about gamification and found many nice frameworks of this topic as well.

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Big IA

The course was a bit confusing at the beginning, but then it became more interesting.

I was focusing on redesign of Amsterdam Central Station Metro as I found it being so inconvenient and not inclusive for people.

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Seductive Interaction Design

During this course we learned different persuasive principles and how to apply them. 

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HCI Mastery

During the course I learned how to use microinteractions and how to doсument them. The challenging part was to find a right microinteraction tool for Windows. I tried Proto.io but it was buggy. I borrowed Mac and used Principle and I liked it a lot! 

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5 Steps To Change Your Note-Taking

In May I attended a meetup organized by HvA. The speaker was Eva-Lotta Lamm, UX designer with many years of experience in companies like Google and Skype, and her topic was sketching. During this meeting she told about herself and about sketching in her life. Aaaand, it was super inspiring! 

Workshop was sooo nicely organized, that following her instruction and sketching went really smoothly. I did not have a sketchbook with me, so I worked in A6 notebook. Anyway, I am pretty proud of my result during this 1,5 hours. Of course, it is not perfect sketching, but I was quite surprize how nice and not hard it was. After the meeting, I started documenting lectures and other meetup that way and it was fun!

Here is what I got:

I used TinyScanner app to make it look scanned.

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BCG and MediaMonks

BCG

During the Berlin trip we have visited BCG digital ventures company. There was a small briefing about the company and the products they do. I definitely liked the company and it would be a nice experience to work with them. Here are some reasons why:

The teams are created based on projects. So, in each team there are people with different occupations. I think it is an efficient way of work, however, it is still good to collaborate and discuss your ideas with other designers\developers\who ever else you are.

The location of the office was in a heart of Berlin and the office itself was nice. 

During out visit, it was mentioned that every employee can present his own idea and there is chance BCG would like to invest some money in this project. I think it is really cool opportunity for creative people with plenty ideas.

MediaMonks

MediaMonks was the second company we have visited. I liked it a bit less, but the presentation of their projects and way of working was nice anyway.

Their location is in Hilversum, that is a bit far from Amsterdam. Although, it is less that an hour by train, you can not travel by bike there.

During out trip through the office, I though it would be a bit messy to work there as this open space looked too crowded and loud. It was also a bit confusing that people did not sit together within one project, se if you are a designer you need to go to another floor to meet a developer.

 The presentation about their user research for Jumbo and the way they developed a site for Weber was very inspirational. It seems they have quite cool and big clients.

The food in the canteen looked really cool. That what I liked the most :)

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Wall of shame

Skype

10 years ago, Skype was really popular, everyone used it and liked it. Currently, after Skype was bought by Microsoft, the application has started having problems with connection, with security (Skype does not use encryption at all), any one can block your account in there and you can not fix it.

Outlook Mail

One more Microsoft product that is very inconvenient to use. Potentially it is nice site, but lags and bugs make user experience not the strongest part of this product.

Check-in/Check-out system with GVB buses and trams

In my opinion, this system is not user-friendly at any mean of transport. However, user suffers the most with busses and trams, as the card scanners are only inside and there is always a big problem to checkout in a hurry, especially in crowded Amsterdam.

TravelBird (and other Country = Language sites)

TravelBird is a nice startup with a nice idea. However, there is one big thing I really do not like in websites -- the language cannot be changed without changing country (unfortunately, there are many of them who use this approach, but that is the first I remember). So, to see deals from the Netherlands, I need to use translator. Then, there came another trouble. some text are integrated in the pictures and cannot be copied for translator.

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Wall of Fame

Telegram

Telegram is one of the most popular messengers today. The reason it is on the list is it’s realibility and ease to use. Before implementing a new feature, such as end-to-end encryption, they held an open competition for everyone who could hack this encryption method with a huge money prize. Telegram is available as desktop and mobile application that is really nice for communication. I would say the only disadvantage it had was lack of call, but it was implemented a week ago. My experience with Telegram is alway nice, because I know it is fast and reliable.

Pathé.nl

The Pathe cinema site is really nice one for buying tickets online. Only 6 clicks are needed to buy the needed tickets and the journey is very straightforward and smooth.

Nike+ Run Club

Nice and simple application for runners. Last summer, the application was completely changed, especially “my Coach” feature. That is really cool that the team is working on it and improving weak parts. Comparing to last year, current application has really nice running programmes and it shows all needed statistics of each run.

Slack

Slack is easy to use and it has many nice features and small elements. I especially like funny quotes when you waiting for the app to load.

Skyscanner

Skyscanner is a nice site for searching for flights. It has a nice interface and a perfect feature where you can search for “anywhere” and “anywhen” option. 

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A nice small article explaining why it is important for designers to understand code and for coders to understand design.

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InVision film

The film was interesting as I saw a bit of designer world from the leading companies designers’ point of view. And it was impressive to see how the things we use and see every day appeared. And that behind every tiny detail a huge amount of work.

“There are still a lot of products with bad design that still really useful.” If people do not have alternatives, they will use the product anyway. However, creating a good experience makes people use this product more and more.

I also noted from the film, that it is important to design with thinking about integration in the life and what will make people happy.

And, of course, do not design for yourself.

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Learning Goals Update

1. I started sketching a month ago and it was really challenging for me at the beginning. After a while, I became braver and even sketched directly with sharpie (without a pencil). That was a big step for me but, of cource, there are still a looot to improve.

3. During UX course, I read few nice articles about meaning and empathy. I did not work much on this learning goal yet, but I am looking forward to exploring about psychology more.

3. I started reading Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. This book is perfect to learn how to write flexible, modular and readable code, that can be used later by other developers without spending years on figuring out how to work with it.

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City of Details

During the trip to Berlin, I wanted to find some small attractive patterns and motifs.

Here are tiny parts of Berlin I got:

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Berlin Transport System

I was really impressed by transport infrastructure in Berlin. What I especially liked was completely unrestricted entrance to the bus/tram/train.

Only thing person need to remember is validating the ticket when it is used for the first time. For Berliners, who have a travel card, everything is even simpler —  just do not forget to take it with you! 

As a result, public transport is nicely integrated in the life of people there. Just go there, ride and show the ticket when an inspector asks (that happens rarely). In my opinion, it is psychologically easier as people have minimal extra efforts even when they use public transport by accident because of broken car.

No stress about thinking of check-out during whole ride in the bus neither about finding appropriate gates to check-in.

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Learning Goal 3

Best Practices of UX

I would like to expand my learning goals a bit out of User Experience Design scope to User Experience as a broader term. I believe, everything user interacts with, even indirectly, affects his or her experience. I would like to explore in more detail the best practises of client-side (frond-end) and server-side (back-end) development from the perspective of user experience.

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Learning Goal 2

Psychology

Understanding people’s motivation and behaviour is a useful skill for everyone. I am an enthusiastic follower of psychology blogs and channels, however, theoretical part, such as history of psychology, is missing in a such way of learning. During this half of the year, I am looking forward to gain structured knowledge of phycology and learn how to apply it.