Feb 11, 2019
UI Week 4 Ironhack — U and I
The week focusing on the User Interface part (UI)
In this post I go over the benefits of being part of a group, visiting a company and the design challenge.
Taking a step back
The solo week is just over, and I was really longing for the weekend. Although this weekend was not to chill or lay back it was mostly focused on reading next weeks materials and work on a ad hoc design challenge.
Standing together
What I really enjoy of this journey is the social community of Ironhack, not only is working in a team something I really enjoy doing but also just hanging out during lunch and even in weekends. This makes me feel like I’m back in school again. What also helps here that we are all in the same boat. We’re all working our asses off to master the skills that are asked of a junior UX/UI designer. Thereby most of us are also insecure how we going to find a job. I sometimes question myself will I ever be good enough etc.. And at those moments being part of this Ironhack community is what really helps me to keep myself motivated, and to keep pushing myself to get better. Most of all it helps me to trust in what I’m doing and that if we work hard we will all found our place.
Spectating the professional field
We as UX/UI students and the Web development students from Ironhack Amsterdam were invited by ING to see how they work and get some more information. Although I found the visit super interesting and I loved to see such a well performing especially company, especially on IT I did miss some UX insights. The presentation and information was rather general, which was still interesting and we got to see a lot of where the teams work and what they use. However for me the most important question was: “What does a day of a UX designer at ING looks like, and (if so) how does this differ between certain department and levels”. But this question remains unanswered for now.
Design challenge
As soon as we started to work on our UI for the first project we were given a side project, a Design challenge. This challenge was about redesigning your Alarm phone’s natural alarm clock. This was a vague task and this was also the point of the task. The more vague it is the better you can highlight your strengths and also the things you need to work on more.
Below you can see my redesign of the alarm clock. I did spend a lot of time on the UI cause as this is not my strongest point I really want to improve on this.
Looking back this design challenge was done pretty rapidly, and now I see many things that could have been improved. Although working on it from scratch I’m not dissatisfied with the result.
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What’s up now
Last week we worked hard on the design system, I think I have seen more buttons in life in one week than the average person in his entire life, but.. I learned a lot regarding design systems. and this week everything is coming to its place. Now we are finalizing our Lo-fidelity wireframes and transforming these into Hi fidelity (making them look pretty) and this is really nice too do! I figured that I’m more of a perfectionist than I first thought I was.
I just can’t wait to finalize the first project and start adding the puzzle pieces to my portfolio!
Back to work now.
Thank you so much for reading!
Kind regards,
Maarten van Hoogdalem
Check out my other stories if you’re interested in the Ironhack journey.
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