You get emailed 3 interface design concepts that you are to sketch every day.
Why am I doing this?
I need to sketch more. It’s a skill I seem intimidated by, and therefore tend to avoid. But forcing myself to do it once a day, or in this case, 3 times a day, I am hoping to build confidence in my sketching abilities.
It’s fun. It’s low investment and it takes me back to my drawing abilities of my youth.
It’s a challenge. And I am always up for a challenge.
It’s not time consuming. I like that it’s lightweight and not a high commitment. I am hoping that such a small commitment can be handled with ease.
I want to be able to have more instinctive design solutions. Perhaps having to draw an idea on the spot will help me develop this design gut instinct.
Why not? It need to push myself in the area of interaction design, so this is a great start.
Want to join me in this challenge? Just sign up for Krisztina Szerovay’s weekly newsletter and daily UX sketching prompts at her website: https://sketchingforux.com. I will post my sketches here from time to time to show my progress. I hope to get stronger in my concepts as the days go by.
Back in 2015 I pushed myself to learn a little something extra about User Experience for 100 days. Granted, I did skip a few days, but for the most part I was pretty consecutive. I got over 100 entries of quotes, laws, terms, principles, lists and more.
The practice was simple: keep a User Experience-focused journal and write down things that you learn. Force yourself to seek out some information every day. And keep a record of your findings.
As I am re-reading them today, some of the things have been forgotten. So I decided it would be good practice for me to resist and share some of the UX tips, tidbits and terms I am rediscovering. My new series called “UX Tidbits” will be in addition to my regular writings and insights. Please enjoy the new series of “UX Tidbits” and let me know what you think.
First, I learned that it is very difficult to write one entry on exactly every single day. So yes I did cheat a bit and write more than one entry a day to play catch-up on days that I missed. Don’t kill me.
Second, though many of the principles I was already familiar with, it was good for me to write them down and work harder at committing them to memory and learning.
Third, its rather nice to have all of these little lessons, from lists, the definitions to UX quotes all in one small UX journal.
Finally, now that my experimental deadline has been successfully met, I plan on continuing to full out my UX journal of learning. My notebook is less than half full, so there are plenty of other pages I can fill with valuable UX lessons and content.
I have taken on a new task. I am challenging myself to keep a little notebook of items I learn for 100 days. The toughest thing will be remembering to enter an item every day. I sure hope I don’t miss a day. But if I do, then I will force myself to carry one until I get all 100 days — or until my notebook gets full. Whichever happens first. I encourage you to take the same challenge. Maybe it’s a notebook of doodles, or a notebook of learning a new word every day. Encourage yourself to take a moment every day to learn.
Jennifer Blatz explores the world of UX through words and imagery
