Daily UI Challenge: 001
Earlier this week, a co-worker introduced me to the Daily UI Design Challenge, which sends you a UI design prompt every Monday through Friday for 100 days. I've been wanting to brush up on my visual design skills, as well as continue to get experience with Sketch, so I decided it could be an interesting challenge to set myself to. The prompts are pretty straightforward: day one was simply, "Design a sign up page, modal, form, app screen, etc." I created my Sketch file and dove right in. I decided I wanted to design a mobile screen, and actually, while I was at it, maybe I should just try and create a whole mobile app. Surely, over 100 days, the prompts would allow me to flesh out all the pages my app would need.
Here's the sign up page I created for day one:
My app is called "Let's Travel", and it's a social travel-planning app, and honestly, that's all I know about it at this point. I assume I'll hammer out the details as I go.
However, because I've spent the last four years doing UX design, as soon as I started laying out the page, I had at least a dozen questions about how this single page fit into the overall user experience of my fictional mobile app:
Should I allow my users to sign up using social accounts (Google, Facebook, etc.)? In fact, would that be a preferable default option than forcing them to create yet another account?
Is this the first page my users see after they've downloaded and opened my app? Or, is there content available without logging in?
Why have they downloaded my app in the first place? What do they already know about the app, and are they already bought into the value that it can bring them?
I wrestled with the fact that if I wanted the answers to these questions, I would either have to devote a whole lot more time to this challenge than I'd originally planned, or make up the answers myself. Ultimately, I decided that in addition to using the Daily UI exercises to brush up on my visual design skills, I would use them as an opportunity to write about my own UX design process, something I've also been meaning to do for awhile.
So, that's what you'll find here for the next 20 weeks (is that actually what 100 weekdays is? yikes!): pretty pictures and some thoughts about how the stitched-together experience of those pictures could be useful and usable.
