UI/UX Design from the other side.

There are probably thousands of articles, different guidelines and recommendations on how to improve the UX as well as practices, but do we really use them? In this article I am going to talk about UX from the other side, not what you are presenting to your boss or client, but the workplace you organize for yourself and people who will continue working on it.

Let’s review top 5 pains and solutions of working on someone’s else work. I would like to begin with any kind of digital design areas like Web or UI

1. Organizing your work files, layers
2. Creating notes, follow-up’s
3. Providing guidelines
4. Creating assets and other project-related required files
5. Supporting your work files

Example of artboard and folder structure that we use in my agency

Organizing your work files

This is a must for every single project, seriously, it should be obvious but since I’ve begun my career as designer/developer/ceo, I’ve came to conclusion that even some of middle-to-senior skilled people don’t pay attention to it, resulting 800+ layers (or files) without single folder or group.

Another past project layers/grouping using artboards sample.

The benefits

Easy to navigate and do edits with pixel-perfect paddings/margins.

If you’re working with artboards, you can create copy and by simply dragging the folder/file to another artboard — it will automatically position the element at the appropriate place saving you few seconds on each edit.

It’s re-usable and comfortable to work with.

Perks
The person, who will work on your files will immediately understand the structure and you’ll have nobody to talk with/explain and may feel lonely.

I bet if you’re designer, you had at least once such experience.

Sometimes clients do not know what they want, but what if this is because you did not provide them the good and quality product?
When it comes to medium to large scale of the projects with tight deadlines, I am sure everyone — even you, the reader, did some mistakes.

Just like writting, making successful startup or doing anything else, the key is — idea, strategy and only after that, the realization.

You may spend extra hour, or even week to use or create your own ‘structure-appearance’-style, but in the future it will save you weeks or even months.

Creating notes & follow-up’s
Have you ever needed to do some updates/changes to the projects that you’ve completed 2–3 month ago, or even older? Well, I did.

Providing guidelines
Sometimes there might be misunderstanding between you with client or developers team, don’t rush to do the changes. Your ideas and creativeness can be even better, feel free to explain them.

Here’s an example of our recent on-going project.

“Well competitions will be available for all users so like list for any user to see even if they are not signed up”

Quick guideline, that explained the logic for the behavior of the App.

That is PERFECT
Just what I envisioned, but BETTER
- Alexander Hall, AlwaysHighLevel CEO

Creating assets and other project-related files
Why? Because you’re responsive to do that! Do the servers just place the food at the corner of the table when you order it? That’s all about experience, the UX of working after and/or with you.

Nowadays technologies allow you to generate assets and all neccessary files within minutes, but save hours for less experienced developer to work with.

Supporting your work files
Just go ahead and open some project you’ve been working on 6+ month ago, and do tiny modification (add UI element) or create additional screen to it.

After that is done, please answer yourself a couple of questions:

• What do you think of the design, you’ve made?
• How long did it take, for you to recognize the structure and get ready to work with it?
• How could you improve it?

P.S.
Thank you for your time, I hope that my article was useful to you.

If you have any suggestions or feedbacks, please send me an email at sergey@goodevs.com