Bootcamp Report #2: All Aboard The UX Design Train!
Episode 2 of my UX/UI Design journey at Ironhack bootcamp in Paris
After a first week full of learnings, practice, and fun, here is a summary of what I’ve discovered and learned during Week 2. Fasten your seatbelt, it’s going to be epic!
Day 6 : Boost your creativity
I arrived fresh and bright on Monday morning, to start learning about the impact of UX design on business, i.e how it can increase customer acquisition, retention and conversion. The AARRR (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) principles gave us a framework to study UX at different levels in the funnel. We then moved to the Ideation phase (after empathising with the users and defining the problem), and we learned a few tools to come up with as many ideas as possible in short time: Crazy 8s (1 idea per minute, for 8min), Round Robins (build up on others’ ideas), worst idea (start with a bad idea, to flip it). We applied all these techniques to our Bio C’Bon case, and agreed with my group on the idea of a fruit and vegetable basket. We finished the day with tools to define the problem (How Might We statements) and User stories, which help have a user perspective on the different tasks/features to be included on our website/app.
This day has been filled with new concepts and practice! It was very interesting to see how many ideas we can generate in a limited amount of time. However, I found it quite difficult to stay at a concept level in the ideation phase, and avoid being in the feature creep zone. User stories (common in Agile environments) also definitely helped visualise what the necessary steps would be to give our user access to our service.
Day 7 : Be the architect of your ideas
This day was all about information architecture: its definition, components, and applications in UX. We used these principles on the Bio C’Bon case by working on card sorting, a site map and the user flow of our new feature.
I really got into the psychological aspect of information architecture, putting myself in the user’s shoes, and imagine how he would apprehend each page of the website/app. Card sorting was interesting, although I struggled at first to define what we wanted to test in terms of categories: are we testing the features, the content, the product itself? The sitemap and user flow are also complex exercises, especially for a website. It definitely shows that as a UX designer, you have to be structured. These are mandatory steps before jumping into wireframes that we were gonna build the next day.
Day 8 : Heuristics and prototypes
We started the day by learning heuristics, aka learning how to judge the usability of a website according to 10 principles. We continued the day with the interface design of our new Bio C’Panier feature: Crazy 8s and Round Robins to ideate on how the different pages would look like, before building the actual paper prototype. We also had an intro to the Ironhack career service, with the tasks we’ll have to do during the bootcamp: building student cards, CVs… etc Exciting!
After that day, I can finally start giving rational reasons why I don’t like a website or an app! We started assessing the usability of the Five Guys website! During the ideation phase of the Interface Design, I was still impressed by how creative we can be when strict time constraints are set! Building the paper prototype was also super exciting, seeing our ideas getting shape and form. I definitely need to improve my skills and speed building these prototypes. I tend to get attached and focused on details when building it, which is really time consuming! Lastly, the career service overview helped me think of the next steps I will have to follow to become a UX designer.
Day 9 : Testing and presenting
The first half of the day was dedicated to testing our prototypes with our users. The aim was to identify patterns in tester’s reactions, so that we could modify our prototype accordingly. We then spent the afternoon preparing our Bio C’Bon presentation for the next day!
There are a few things I learned that day: when testing a prototype, we should never modify it after each test… And that’s exactly what we did! The idea here is to first identify patterns from all the tests we make, and only then modify the prototype accordingly. Lesson learned! In regards to the final Bio C’Bon presentation, we had to define the key information to be included on the slides, as we knew it would only last 6min. Each group member started working on their part, to then rehearse before the Big Day.
Day 10 : Presentation and new brief
Friday, Big Day! All groups presented the work they had done over the past 2 weeks, with projects for Monoprix, Maison du Whisky, Naturalia… and of course Bio C’Bon! All presentations were very interesting, showing different creative ideas with key insights from user research. After all the presentations were finished, we had a session where everyone shared their CV and received feedback from the class. We finished the day with a new brief for an individual project: creating a wellness app in a week! Challenge accepted!
I’ve learned a few things during that day : presentations are all about story telling and backing up our insights with data! During the CV session, I took notes of all the elements that needed to be improved, and I’m planning to rebuild my CV using Indesign. In regards to the new wellness brief, I decided to design a service that would help people quit smoking. There are already a lot of apps out there, but they are all quite similar, so I wanted to dig deeper and see what the smokers really needed in order to quit! More details to come about this next week!
My key take aways from this 2nd week
As you can see, this 2nd week has been as intense as Week 1. The ride is still fun with new things to learn on UX and on myself:
- Flexibility: Over the past 2 weeks, I learned that flexibility was key for a UX designer. He must have the ability to get a lot of ideas, tests, research on paper, and then immediately step back to analyse everything, and identify the most actionable patterns.
- Storytelling: A UX designer must use storytelling (backed with data) to convince people about the ideas he wants to implement. As this is all about user-centric design, people must feel they could relate to what the designer has thought about. This storytelling can be done through presentations, articles, conversations etc…
Week 3 starts tomorrow, and will be focused on our individual Wellness project! I’ll give you more details about it next Sunday. Stay tuned!
Thanks for reading this 2nd Bootcamp Report! Feel free to clap, applaud and leave comments if you liked this article!
