“Don’t eat the elephant.” It’s a catchy, cautionary phrase meant to counsel anyone taking on a big project or goal. The answer to the question, “how do you eat an elephant?” is…one bite at a time. A few months ago I decided to take on an elephant-sized goal and change careers. The story of how and why I arrived at this goal is long, and deserves a separate post. This post is about how I took one giant bite out of that goal by attending DevMountain’s UX/UI Immersive in Salt Lake City Utah.
User Experience Design, or UX, is a difficult field to pin down. It has something to do with design, that’s clear. It also has something to do with “users’ and their experiences. It’s said that everyone is a user, and everything is an experience. It’s no wonder defining UX is the first challenge aspiring designers face.
Here’s a helpful formula:
UX= Business Goals + Customer Goals + User Interface + Backend Process
If that’s not entirely clear, here’s a helpful diagram:
Got it yet?
Yeah, me neither. Hang in there and follow me through week one as I try to teach you what I’ve learned so far, giving you a glimpse inside the bootcamp life as we go.
This week we covered techniques for staying focused and being productive. QUICK, look up The 80/20 Rule, Rule of 5, Ivy Lee Method, Pomodoro Technique, Timeboxing, and Ultradian Rythyms. Now you’re ready to be productive.
As we rocket forward into the world of UX, we need to stay organized. Sign up for Trello. Screw you Taco. Create boards, make lists, and add cards. Now we’re ready.
Next we need to stay connected. Use Slack, that’s where it’s at. Now everyone can talk to everyone and we’ll always know what’s going on where, when, and why. Also, cat gifs.
If you’re going to be a designer you’re going to have to sketch. Yes, sketch. Like with pen and paper so you can get your ideas out. Yes it’s messy. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that ideas get on paper, all of them, but try to make them pretty, cuz people judge. Use the 10 X 10 Method: State your design challenge, generate 10 or more concepts, sketch those concepts, produce 10 detailed variations of your concept, iterate and refine. Low fidelity, then high fidelity.
Finally, start thinking about your portfolio. We’re gonna do a lot of things and stuff needs somewhere to go…like a portfolio. (If mine is empty, it’s because I’m still in bootcamp — send coffee)
Are you tired yet? I hope not because that’s just Day 01.
One bite at a time, remember? Also, “drinking from a fire hose” is a phrase I heard a lot this week. Attending a bootcamp is like a year of college packed into 3 months. It’s a weeks worth of information packed it into a day. And Day 01 is done, only 92 more to go.
The rest of the week we covered the foundations of UX and the godfathers of the field, Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen along with other dope design guys. (And girls).
At the base of UX and related fields is a concept called “Human Centered Design.” Basically we have to remember that at the end of the day we are designing for humans with specific goals, frustrations, and motivations so we need to understand what they are. Unless we are designing for cats. Then we use Cat Centered Design.
The final two days of Week 01 were about creating “personas” — amalgamations of real people that help everyone working on a project understand who they are creating the website, widget, etc for. Don’t. forget. The User. The user is who we (the UX designers) speak for.
Less interesting but equally important is the Creative Brief which outlines all the things that are important to the project we’re helping create. This needs to be done at the beginning of any new project. It’s the roadmap. It points to the destination, describes the reason for our journey, and how we’ll know when we arrive. Like I said, that’s important.
Aside from drinking from fire hoses and eating elephants (metaphorically), I met the 20 new cohort members/classmates/aspiring designers that I’ll be taking this 13 week journey with, five of whom are my new rommates.
DevMountain’s free housing was and is an attractive selling point. The housing is decent. And it’s free. Back home in Portland I live with my girlfriend and our dog in a great apartment near Overlook Park. My best girl, my best dog, and my bed are now 700 miles away. Leaving them and our life together to live with strangers in a strange place for three months is an added challenge to the already challenging bootcamp experience.
But it’s Super Bowl Sunday today and I’m looking forward to taking a mental break before the start of Week 02. Maintaining my health, sanity, and relationship are integral to my success here. I am more excited than ever to dive deeper into UX, work on my first group project/case study, and explore Salt Lake City. Join me next week for a recap of what goes down at UX Bootcamp: Week 02
