7 principles of design, attitude to design trends, UX-designer portfolio, ...

The best ideas of two weeks of the Telegram-channel TheDesignTimes.

UX Designer Portfolio

The main task of the UX designer is to understand the problem and design the optimal solution. Therefore, any of your case must begin with the task.

In the middle of the project, try to transfer your thinking process. Describe how you conducted the survey, what audience you counted on and why you chose it. It will be useful to add sketches of interfaces or text files.

In the final, the person who is looking at your case should have an understanding that you were able to solve the task set at the beginning.
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Dribbble and Behance - not the best option for creating a portfolio of UX-designer. Therefore, pay attention to the text platform, where you can better describe the process. Among them, I note the Medium, VC.ru, Habr.

The ideal option is your separate site. You can make it using popular platforms WP, Tumblr. I advise you to pay attention to the product Semplice, made by Tobias van Schneider. This is a WordPress theme with a very convenient visual editor.

Design project cost estimate

The easiest way to calculate the cost of a project is to think about how many hours it will take for you and multiply this amount by your bid. Designer's rate usually ranges from $ 500 per hour. Based on this, you can calculate the cost of the project.

At first you can make mistakes in planning, but in the future you will more accurately determine the time costs and will be able to use a fixed price list for various services.

For example, you can evaluate the design of the main page in 5000‚, and for each subsequent take on 2000. The same with the mobile app. The study of the visual style you can rate at 5000, and for each screen of the application to take an additional 2000Ђ.

But there is another point. When your client is big, money is not as important to him as confidence in the quality of your work. Therefore, if you have great authority in the industry, you can increase the cost of the project several times. Yes, it takes years to achieve this level, but this is definitely worth striving for.

Release Testing

One of the most important tasks of a modern designer is to control the realization of your ideas into reality. Many people do not think about it, because they live only in their own world, far from reality, where design is a business tool, and not a way to satisfy the ego, gaining more likes.

Programmers work sprints for 1-2 weeks. After the completion of each sprint, a release will take place and new developments will “roll out” into the product. In order for the product to implement all your ideas in the right form, you need to test it regularly.

Someone will say that testers should perform this work, but testers can never fully understand the idea of ​​a designer, so if you care about the success of a company, then you need to do it yourself.

The easiest way to do this is to review the list of developer innovations and test each of them in turn. All found defects collect in the separate list and transfer to the person responsible for the product.

Straight line product development

For several years of grocery work, I have developed a philosophy that I regularly use. I called it the “straight line”.

It lies in the fact that in the course of the project, all team members will receive ideas on adding new functions or modifying existing ones.

Often, this is a temporary nonsense, which greatly slows down the development of the project. If you visualize this thought, it turns out that the emerging ideas reject the development of the project from a straight line, which is why the achievement of the goal (the final release) is moving away.

Therefore, it is very important to ensure that the original plan is implemented. And, if a new idea arises in the team, and you are not sure of its suitability, then it is better to postpone this idea and do what was planned.

Design Trends

In all of our beautiful profession, most of all I wonder about the intermittent hype around design trends. This happens towards the end of the year or at the beginning of a new one. But even more surprisingly, many follow them.

Design trends most often relate to the visual, but how can you pre-define the visual of the entire industry if every business needs its own visual style?

Design trends are good fun for dribble players, but almost useless in the real world. If the client can sell the design, arguing it with a temporary fashion, then real people using your product would not care about trends, since they only need to solve their problems and it’s good if it doesn’t take long.

7 fundamental principles of design

Last week, I re-read Donald Norman’s book Designing Habituals. I publish from it an excerpt in which the author shares the universal principles of design.

1. Visibility. The user understands what actions are possible and in what state the device / system is at the moment.
2. Feedback The user has all the time full information about the results of actions and the current state of the product or service. After performing the action, it is easy to understand what the new state of the device is.
3. Conceptual model. The design represents all the information necessary to make a good conceptual model of the system. It provides insight and gives the user a sense of control. The conceptual model provides greater visibility and simplifies the assessment of results.
4. Opportunities. The ability determines which actions are possible. The product has the right features that allow you to perform the desired actions.
5. Meaningful. The signifier informs us where the action should be carried out. Effective use of signifiers guarantees visibility, and also allows you to convey to the user feedback and make it understandable.
6. Projection. The link between the regulators and the actions they perform is built on the principle of creating good projections and strengthened, as far as possible, by the correct spatial planning and temporal correlation.
7. Limitations. Providing physical, logical, semantic, and cultural constraints guides user actions and simplifies product understanding.