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Intro to UX & Info Session

SPRING 2022

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Meghna

Co-President

Shirley

Co-President

Renee

VP Operations

Urvi

VP Education

Michelle

Brand Director

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What is Design Interactive?

Our mission

Our goal is to bring design education on campus through hands-on project work and industry-led workshops to help students break into the user experience design field.

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WHERE WE’VE GONE

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What do we provide?

Open Workshops

Projects

Community

Shirley

We understand that UX opportunities are hard to come by, so we’re here to prepare our members and the Davis Design community through workshops, projects, and our DI community

Open workshops

We host open workshops throughout the quarter. In the past we’ve held essential learning workshops such as Intro to User Research, and How to Build a UX Portfolio,
We also host advanced learning workshops such as Advanced Figma Deep Dive where we when in depth on how to use Figma and build prototypes and How to Recruit for Design Roles walking you through the interview process to hopefully land that big tech design internship you’ve been eyeing
We also host panels with UX industry professionals or with past UX interns. And bigger events like designathons
You can check out davisdi.org/events to check out what events we have, and also subscribe to our newsletter for updates! We also post slides and recordings to our workshops if you can’t make it to the event.

Our projects

We provide a platform for our designers as they step into human-centered design and ux by allowing them to work on hands-on projects in teams. These projects range from client to exploratory work
I’ll dive into this in a moment

Community

Last but not least, we also provide a design community. As designers, it’s important to connect with people, to share so that we can learn and grow together. We all come from different experience levels from beginner designers to more experienced designers, but there’s always so much to learn. We’re here to share resources, ask and answer questions, and also just as a place to make new friends

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Our Cohort Structure

Fellows

A community of UCD students passionate about design and human-centered problem-solving. Fellows will have access to curated educational UX resources, office hours with DI alumni, and our official discord server.

Associates

These are teams of experienced designers focused on solving exploratory, out-of-the-box problems or providing innovative solutions for real-world clients.

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Past Projects

Past areas of work: redesigns, consumer social products, social justice, transportation, communication

Previous clients: Japa, Professor Tom Maiorana

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Spring 2022 Recruitment

Intro to UX + Info Session

Applications Open

Application Workshop

Cohort Applications Due

Fellow Applications Due

3/30

4/4

4/6

4/13

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Applications Open!

tinyurl.com/di-spring22-app

Both cohort and fellow apps open today!

Cohort Apps Due: Wednesday, April 6 @ 11:59PM

Fellow Apps Due: Wednesday, April 13 @ 11:59PM

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Cohort Application

Due: Wednesday, April 6 @ 11:59PM

Design Challenge
Written Application

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Fellow Application

Due: Wednesday, April 13 @ 11:59PM

Written Application

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Need help getting started?

Office Hours • by appointment via Calendly

Come meet with board members to get help on your application or to just talk about design! �Sign up through our application:�tinyurl.com/di-spring22-app

�Application Workshop • Apr 4 @ 7PM, Wellman 230

We’ll guide you through our design challenge and application for Spring 2022!�RSVP our Facebook event page:�tinyurl.com/di-spring22-fb

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Questions?

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Intro to UX

SPRING 2022

di.

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What is UI/UX?

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UI Makes Interfaces Beautiful

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UX Makes Interfaces Useful

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UI = User Interface UX = User Experience

Michelle

Here’s a cute little visual that demonstrates this concept of UI/UX
Obviously see that the UI of the ketchup on the left is great

It’s cute, the look of this glass bottle is more appealing aesthetically
But if we look at it from a UX / user experience, perspective, it’s not the most easy to use and control:

sometimes you have the bang the bottom of the ketchup bottle to try and get the last bits of ketchup to come out, and if it’s full then you may pour out way too much ketchup than you want

On the other hand, the one on the left is not as pretty, but it has much better functionality:

You can squeeze the bottle to better control how much ketchup comes out, and the way it sits normally on its lid helps the ketchup collect

So in UI/UX, we’re really countering the belief that many people and even design students have: which is that design is about making things pretty - it’s really not
In school we think a lot about visuals, but we forget the UX, which is asking: how do we make design useful?

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Investing in user experience will help create valuable products that solves problems for users and helps them reach their goals, thus positively impacting business.

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Source: movingworlds.org

Empathize

Learn about who you’re designing for.

Define

Define the problem. What are the user needs?

Ideate

Brainstorm ideas and create solutions

Prototype

How do these ideas work? Build a representation of your idea(s).

Test

Test your ideas and get feedback.

Human-centered design process

Urvi

What is human-centered design? �Human-centered design is a design framework that considers human perspectives when you’re designing

In ux design, we’re looking at human needs when designing, so we’ll use this human-centered design framework

In the industry use this structure to guide their process. They try to:

Empathize, Learn who you’re designing for.
This part of the process would include researching and identifying common pain points
Define, After empathizing with your end user and identifying pain points, designers will define problems based on what the users need.
Since you’re also typically working in a business context, you’ll also define what business goals you’re helping to accomplish by solving these problems, which might be (increase revenue or getting more people to use the product??)
Ideate - Then, designers will move into exploring different solutions.
It’s important to be intentional with why you are making design decisions here because your goal is to help solve a problem, so revisit what your data revealed about your users and incorporate those insights into your designs.
Prototype – In order to see if your designs will work, we’ll need some kind of sketch or a digital mockup.
In this part of the process, we want to make our ideas tangible and come to life
Test – Now that we have something that we can get in front of real people, testing your ideas will determine if it actually solves your users’ pain points.
The feedback you get from this stage will help you refine your designs, and depending on your timeline you may go through multiple rounds of testing!

This seems like a linear checklist of things you need to do, but in reality…

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What it might look like instead….

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Our Sprint Process

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How do I break into UX?

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Shirley

It turns out, to break into the UX industry, there’s not only UI/UX designers, there are so many different opportunities that can be catered to your specific interests

If you love working on visual design and identity, branding, and graphics, you could become a UI or Visual designer

If you like doing research and analyzing data, you could become a UX researcher who providing actionable and meaningful data-driven insights to improve products and drive business goals

Or, If you love writing, you could become a UX copywriter, who writes copy that moves digital users towards accomplishing a goal in an intuitive way

Thus, there’s a wonderfully large range of roles to explore!

All these roles play an important part in the UX industry, and they all collaborate with each other and across other teams.

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Build up skills in these areas.

These are skills critical to UX.

Urvi

To build your UX design foundation, these are three areas that you would want to focus on.

You’d want to Improve your visual design skills: by studying design trends, and practice using different design programs. A great place to start is by studying visual design examples, such as viewing other designers’ work on behance or dribbble

Next Be curious and analytical. Start asking questions, and start asking why? Acting on curiosity helps inspire creativity and also helps you understand who you’re designing for

Last but not least Synthesize different perspectives. The most important aspect of doing research, is then being able to synthesize your findings. You can better empathize with your users to understand their goals, desires, and limitations. Then you can find trends, themes, and different areas of opportunity for discovery and improvement

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Take advantage

of classes here on campus!

Some great cross-major classes.

DES 16 Graphic Design & Computer Tech

DES 40C Design for Aesthetics & Experience

DES 112 UI/UX Design

DES 115 Letterforms + Typography

DES 116 Visual Communications

DES 117 Interactive Media I

DES 149 Information Design

DES 151 Type in Motion

DES 157 Interactive Media II

DES 159 Design for Understanding

DES 166 Human Centered Design

DES 167 Prototyping: From Objects to Systems

ECS 164 Human-Computer Interaction

ECS 162 Web Programming

PSC 100 Intro to Cognitive Psychology

UWP 104C Journalism�

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Create stuff.

Document your process.

Build a portfolio of your work.

A good portfolio encompasses all three of these components:

UX Methodology

01

Product Thinking

02

Visual Design

03

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Questions?

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Intro to UX + Info Session

Applications Open

Application Workshop

Cohort Applications Due

Fellow Applications Due

3/30

4/4

4/6

4/13

Want tips on our application process?

Application Workshop

We’ll guide you through our design challenge and application for Spring 2022!

RSVP the Facebook event page @ �tinyurl.com/di-spring22-fb

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tinyurl.com/di-spring22-app

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Stay for a group photo before we leave!

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di.

Thank you!

For updates and more information:

Instagram & Facebook: @davisdesigninteractive

Website: davisdi.org

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What’s the difference between the Fellowship & Cohort?
If I was already an associate, can I be an associate again?

We ask that prior associates re-apply, this application will be sent via the cohort channel in Slack by tomorrow

How many teams this quarter?

5 teams with 4 each ideally AKA 20 new members

Why don’t you have clients?

We decided that we think projects are more successful when they’re something the associates are passionate about and thus we are hoping to generate ideas using the cohort’s interests & needs
We will discuss more project details in the first cohort meeting

When do Fellows get to work on a design challenge? How much support do they get?

Tentatively we are planning to release the challenge in Week 3 and give you until Week 9 to submit, but we will update on the Fellowship channel on Slack
Support will look like following the sprint guide we provide in the Design Challenge, where we outline our suggestions for the process you follow. We will also hosting in-person office hours and work-sessions where the board will be available to support you and your group.

Do fellows have their own presentation day?

So, we are planning for a day in Week 9 or 10 for fellows to get to partake in a gallery walk to share about the work they did with audience members

How much experience do I need to be a fellow v cohort

Interest & enthusiasm is all we need to join the fellowship
Cohort: some basic to intermediate ui/ux design understanding is what we’re looking for

Why are we moving from Discord?

Easier to manage and monitor group members on Slack

Time commitment for cohort vs fellows?

Cohort: 4-6 hrs, treat like a 3 unit class you will be meeting with your group and PM on a weekly cadence