Wandering to Inspiration, pt. IV
Part four in a series about the journey to build something, starting from the moment inspiration struck
UX Academy. UXTraining.com. EdX. SuperHi. Coursera. Skillshare. CareerFoundry. General Assembly.
There are a lot of courses that teach UX design. But not all courses are equal, and a lot of UX knowledge requires active reading of industry developments and constantly learning new things. Spending thousands of dollars on an introductory course on a tight budget was out of the question for me.
Eventually, I found an option that offered some unique elements that made my decision to enroll easy. DesignLab’s Design 101 provides fundamental content critical for any UX designer, plus a major project, and a mentor to help contextualize your experience and guide you through the course. It was not free, and at $400 a big step up from Coursera or Udemy one-offs, but nowhere near the thousands required to enroll in long-term courses. At four weeks, it felt like a ideal toe-dip into this big, new world. And I couldn’t wait to start!
The course is broken into four weeks, each week covering 2–3 subject areas, like color theory or layout and composition. For each subject area, there is reading to do and a task, either large or small, where you will apply that knowledge. Most of the coursework ties into the larger project which is the focal point for the course. In my Design 101 cohort, we were given the option of designing a mobile music player or a landing page about a destination. After considering ideas for both, I found the latter more open and interesting, so I chose to design a site about a destination — although it ended up being less about a single place and more about how to get there.
As the course eases students into the design process, the project helps focus your mind as you learn about choosing typography or setting up a photographic library. In that way, you have a way to contextualize what you are reading. So while I learned that a split complementary color palette enables a unique and varied grouping of colors with high contrast, I considered whether using one will be effective for my website. That line of thinking is deliberate, and one of my favorite aspects of Designlab’s Design 101 course.
What also makes the course fun is that each successive week advances in complexity — which logically should be the case — as you are learning your way to producing a final project in the fourth week. In this way, you go from roughly sketching logo ideas to choosing a color palette, building an icon library, and then a style tile. The style tile depicts our (hopefully) cohesive collection of: text in size, weight and color; vectorized logos in various sizes; buttons; input fields and errors. I can’t tell you how excited I was to see my style tile at this stage. This isn’t even the final version! It’s just that at this moment, I felt like I was actually designing something. How cool is that?
All of this knowledge fed into my final design project: a website to help electric car owners find charging stations along a particular route. While there were a couple of sites that already did this, there were elements I found lacking that were significant enough to make my version novel. Two brief examples: Plugshare requires you to create an account to map out a route; ChargeHub doesn’t offer any kind of route-planning. That said, there are aspects of these sites that makes them incredibly useful, but for the exercise, I felt there were gaps in the market I could address.
What was really fun about this project was applying the knowledge I acquired through the course to skills I’ve honed throughout my career, like empathy, user-driven development, and designing novel solutions to complex problems. A feature borne from this marriage is the ability to add stops along your route, based on a distance tolerance the user specifies, that are of interest. Often, a charging station may not be convenient to your route. Adding in points of interest to make a deviation for charging along the way — especially in areas where charging stations are not plentiful — adds a fun element to something that can be a bit boring. If you’re on a long road trip and are unfamiliar with what is between Paducah and Coeur d’Alene, Charged Route can help you find things to eat and do to make your journey more fun! Small additions like this made me feel like an actual designer while working on this project.
Ultimately, I am proud of what I accomplished in my quick four weeks as a student in Designlab’s Design 101. It pushed me to take an intellectual curiosity and learn about it while applying it in new and exciting ways. My goal was to go from 0 to 1 in my journey as a designer, and I accomplished that. This begs the question: how can I apply this new power to my original idea to build a mood-tracking app? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see…
