A reflection on my first three UX projects: what I’ve learnt from the journey

Hey, it’s Halyn here! I’m glad you found my post. I’d love to share some lessons I learnt from my first three UX (User Experience) projects. I hope this reflection on my UX learning process will offer some invaluable insight for anyone already on, or just thinking about taking a similar journey. Yes –that’s you :)

Why did I start my UX projects?

As a part of the Google UX Certificate — which I completed in December, yay! –we were required to complete three UX projects from concept to design. It was an enjoyable experience and I did learn a lot! Sometimes, I realised the unexpected difficulties encountered along the way actually affected me a lot. In this post, I’ll talk about what I have learnt from the experience. In terms of the UX Design Certificate course, I’ll write another post to review its different aspects. Okay, let’s get started!

Find a user’s true desire by what they do, not just what they say

The first thing I learnt is that users might not really know what their inner desires are. For instance, in my second project, I was designing a website about gaming. When I interviewed a user, she told me she only wants to play games which take long hours because it means the games are worth the money she spends. However, as the interview continued, she mentioned she usually only spends 5–10 hours on a game. Compared to the other interviewees who spend 100–150 hours on a game, this interviewee does not care about time as much as she thinks. And this is what an effective UX researcher should find out.

Learn from the other designers

I have literally no experience in visual design. This left me struggling with UI (User Interface) design in the beginning. When I followed the ‘normal design process’: drawing wireframes on paper and selecting sections to keep, I had totally no idea what to draw, because I had no ‘samples to hand.

In my second project, I changed my strategy. I visited plenty of great websites and took notes about their positive and negative qualities and their layouts, before duplicating their pages on paper, as a form of practice.

Moreover, I saved some good colour schemes when I was browsing Instagram or Pinterest, and applied them to my own work. It helped me find inspiration and saved a lot of potentially wasted time on unworkable ideas.

Here you can see the sample pages from my first, second and third project.

I’m sure you would agree, the design works better on the second and third :)

Don’t be shy to ask questions

Sometimes people feel embarrassed to ask questions. As we grow up and gain more work experience, we might feel uncomfortable to ask questions regarding knowledge. However, asking questions is an essential part of growth and development. An important thing to remember is that a real expert never laughs at others, especially someone willing to learn.

Some friends of mine working in this industry for years are very willing to give feedback. When I get stuck, I always go to them to seek help. I must admit, it made me feel a bit uncomfortable at first. One thing is that I find my questions dumb; another thing is that I feel bad for taking up too much time of their time.

It turns out their reactions were totally different from what I expected. They were more than happy to assist me with the start of my UX journey. All I received was a warm welcome and some invaluable feedback. Some of them also accepted my ‘skill exchange proposal: I learn UX from them, and in return they learn marketing from me. We literally created a great study club!

To some extent, forget about your past experience and focus on the users

As someone who has more than four years of experience in marketing and start-ups, my mindset has seen me focus on ‘achieving goals’ and ‘increasing sales’. This ‘internal noise’ affected me a lot in the beginning. For instance, when I designed my first work: a wedding venue preview app, I left a blank for advertisement. It’s true, I couldn’t manage to stop myself from thinking about their business model all the way through the design process.

Of course, the business side of things is important. However, if we think about it too much during the early UX stage, we might create something not optimised for the users, but only for commercial purposes. I’ve found that it’s good practise to make this a secondary concern and focus on the UX process first and foremost–this was especially important when I was still new to this field.

Nonetheless, design something that fit the business purpose

Although this sounds contradictory to what I’ve just told you, it’s important to consider the business goal as well.

Through the UX process, I realised that although business goals and UX are seemingly contrasting, they are actually the ‘best combo’ for good design, especially when I want to design a service that can actually work. When I told my interviewees my goal, they gave me more valuable feedback on the business model and service, not only the interface. It helped me a lot, from looking at the big picture all the way to the small details.

To summarise the two contrasting points of view:

For sure, we could make the design fit our business goals: like letting users easily find the ‘add to cart’ button or allowing the users easily discover discount items. Nevertheless, it should not affect the general user experience. Take my own work as an example: I simply included ‘ads’ but didn’t think about providing meaningful information for the users. With the benefit of hindsight, now knowing there definitely would be ads, I could have introduced them as ‘recommended items’ or something else more relevant, instead of merely putting commercial ads there.

Stay up to date and keep learning

No matter which industry you are in, it’s always important to be receptive to new knowledge and keep learning. Although the Google UX course already provided plenty of resources, I still like to find new resources and see what others are doing. Most importantly, if we only learn from one source, we will always be left with a blind spot. Take the Google UX course as an example, we learnt about some great tools like ‘design sprints’ and ‘crazy 8’, but they aren’t the only tools required to complete a UX project.

It’s always good to have more tools at your disposal and more options to choose from, in order to select something that fits both yourself and the project in the best way, right?

Finally, thanks for reading!

The six points I’ve listed above are things I’ve learnt from my own journey. As someone new to UX, it’s just a start–but a great start– and I’ll continue this amazing UX journey. If you’ve got any questions or have some of your own knowledge to share, please feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think!

If you’d like to collaborate, talk about the service or design, or perhaps just want to say hello, hit me up at halynchangtw@gmail.com or connect via LinkedIn.