My First Week into the Course Design101 by Senpai

Design101: Week 1

I’d like to start by defining the problem. You make a simple android application with some basic features and to know if it is good, you send it to some friends to review. Sadly, they hardly note anything wrong with the core of the codes and instead highlight a list of problems with the appearance, or rather interface. You go further and try to refine the interface. But it’s not that easy, you can’t fix that in one day, not when you don’t even know what to change. So deep down you know there is something wrong with the app’s appearance, you just don’t know what to remove and what to add. After several months of seeing several other app designs, you start to get the feel of what the appearance of an Android app should look like. That’s when you begin to adopt the design used in those apps. So now, you know the app, at least, looks better. But that’s not all, there is also the aspect of user experience.
At this point, you know you need to learn something new, something about designing that you could possibly employ into your app. Lucky you, you find a call for application where you’d be taught something about design and you’re like, “that’s it.” So that was basically my problem and that was how I got into the design101 course by thinksenpai.
Though I haven’t dedicated so much time to this course, thanks to the awkward situation I am in school, this first week has been enlightening. I sincerely hope I can find more time and keep up with the pace of the course.
Notwithstanding, this week has been my design week as I’ve taken bold steps into learning to design. I have no intention of stepping back. I’ve listened to two podcasts, watched several YouTube videos and read some interesting articles on design. They’ve clarified several misconceptions I’ve had and opened my mind. I’m now beginning to sense what good design is. That design is not just about how it appears but also the ease of usability and the fact that it must solve a problem.
Now I know that our sense of design is an extension of ourselves. Put simply by Anais Nin, “we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” And sadly, “we also don’t realize that we don’t see.”
Quite intriguing was a paragraph in one article that highlighted how doctors can see from X-rays what others can’t see, and I would extend that to include all imaging modalities from ultrasounds to CT scans, MRIs, to name a few. A lecturer once asked a section of my class to identify the pathology in an image. That day he made a remark, when we all got it wrong, that “our eyes were untrained,” so we “only looked but could not see.” Relating this to design, our eyes must learn to identify good design, a process I’d like to call “training the eyes specifically for design.” An addition to this is the importance of user feedback, which comes in understanding that this process of training the eyes cannot be unlearned once accomplished.
It is easy to look down on the relevance of giving ample time to create a good app design, especially when you’ve written a whole bunch of codes. Never again would I do that.
This is the very beginning of my journey into design and I intend to see this to the very end. Thank you, Senpai.