Weekly Recap #06: Insights & Incentives

Alex Tran
Alex Tran
Jul 24, 2017 · 6 min read

Normally my weekly recaps are posted on Friday, but due to a rather hectic schedule at work I was unable to meet that deadline. Formal apology to my dedicated readers. Seriously, I don’t know what I’d do without you all.

And I mean it. Every single reader I have. Every single reader who left my last weekly recap completely read…less. 🤔

let’s shoot for that 5+ reader mark, amirite

Before jumping in

“the tl; for your dr”

A few couple things happened this week, which is always nice. Probably the only downside is that I didn’t get to go to a design event…but alas, time didn’t permit. Hopefully though, if the cards are right and my future is bright, I’ll be heading towards Designers + Geeks’ next event, Story x Design which hopes to explore the storytelling aspect of…design. I’d hope the title of the event was self-explanatory enough.

Before I ramble, the highlights — drumroll, please — are as follows: Overwatch app design, Purp app walkthrough, and good ol’ podcasting. Enjoy the read, and as always (not really), be the Design Twitter you want to be.

So many symbols, so little time

“cheers love, the overrides are here”

Pretty much describes my workflow for this Overwatch app I’m trying to design. On the real, I’ve used Sketch for some time now and it’s only been fairly recent that I’ve started to use symbols. I don’t know why…maybe it was negligence. Probably.

symbol overrides are *literally* the best

But it’s seriously made the design process a lot easier. Especially since I feel like I’m creating my own styleguide with this app, reusing symbols and being able to quickly switch between states to show the potential functionality of the app makes it feel that much more accomplishable. Seriously beats having to copy/paste groups, not to mention batch editing (or really editing in general). Feels good knowing that I’m getting the hang of it.

I do admit, however, that I haven’t fully dedicated time to flushing out the wireframes and validating my designs with users yet. Y’know what though? This little side project was supposed to be just that: a side project. I didn’t aim to do this for the benefit of others (#selfish), I wanted to make something that I felt would help me out. Along the way I’d get the insight I needed, I told myself. Which I have been trying to do, so it’s not like I’m completely ignorant of the design process. 💁🏻

Moving into next week, I hope to get some animations started so I can get some constructive feedback on what works and what doesn’t. 👌🏻

The app that allows you to reach your goals…kinda

“…brain is evaluating…”

My productivity app has taken another slight break this week, at least in the realm of design iterations. Stepping out of Sketch and stepping into research, primarily conducting competitive analyses on existing productivity apps. It gave me a chance to do an in-depth walkthrough of an app I found called Purp.

Brain animation

Why so much special attention to this one app? Well turns out, Purp has this feature called Brain, which is supposed to be some kind of AI that helps suggest certain tasks that would be better completed at certain times. Super ironic because one of my old school projects introduced a feature that did (or tried to) pretty much the same thing. It was called Timekeeper, and although it never took off, it was my first real design project so…nostalgia struck.

I tried not to be too harsh~

Anyway, I ended reviewing the app and I wrote about it here. I’m not one for shameless plugs, but…I’m saying this one doesn’t count ’cause it’s my own. Yes, the title for this Recap is the same as that one. Whatever.

Up + Coming

“thoughts for your thoughts”

you could say my logo work needs…work

Finally figured out a decent name for my podcast, courtesy of my friends’ creative juices (not weird). Get it, though? Up and coming, as in we are up and coming junior designers who are trying to make it in the industry? But also, up and coming because we try to talk about up and coming things in design? Wow, so meta.

Anyway, I’m proud to say we finally got our first episode done: have a listen right here! 👏🏻 I have a lot of respect for those who have done it before (or still are) because boy, it’s hard. Hard in the sense that I found myself really having to think about what I was going to say instead of rambling like I always do. I mean, it’s not like I can’t edit my useless “uh”s and “um”s out after. But also, I felt like actively working on it helps me speak better. The whole thing ended up taking almost an hour, with 35 minutes or so of listenable content.

23 listens?? the love is real, y’all

Too lazy to listen to the whole thing yourself? Fair enough, I wouldn’t want to listen to me either. We just did our awkward introductions, a brief overview of what we wanted to talk about in this podcast, and more importantly: should designers code? I know. Leave it to us to basically start our first episode with what has been easily one of the more contentious topics in the design industry. Leave it to the junior designers with a collective industry experience of probably less than 5 years to hash this out. Obviously, our opinions should be highly regarded.

But on the real, I think it was a great discussion and hopefully provided a fresher perspective from people who are stuck in this mess of deciding whether or not learning code shoud be truly essential in the design process (especially if you’re not in Silicon Valley?).

We even surpassed our 5-listener benchmark! *cue applause* So I guess you could say we’re basically official now. And the good ol’ cherry on top of that sundae comes from this little gem of appreciation:

when the motivation is 2real

Funnily enough, I’ve been trying to schedule an Overwatch podcast episode with him. Hang onto your hats for that one, folks. It’ll be a doozy. And as for our second episode, expect to see it floating somewhere in the interwebs this week! We took our insights and self-critics to heart and worked to shorten our recording time and structure — ever so slightly — our conversation to answer this: what does the term “user experience” mean to you? Coming to your listening device soon~


And thus concludes the Weekly Recap. Thanks for reading, good sir/madam.

*tips hat*

Alex Tran

Written by

Alex Tran

Design-centered human • Solving problems @virtahealth & @irisapp • Proficient with coffee ☕️

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