UX Design Meetup – in a nutshell

The UX Design Meetup took place on 24th January 2021 at the Xord Basecamp, Expedite Design and Sheikh Izhan took an initiative and conducted a UX Design Meetup for all the amazing UX people in the town in which designers got a chance to know each other better and learned from the experiences of each other. 

It’s always a great idea to learn from each other, we don’t want anyone to miss out on the knowledge, hence writing this blog post so that everyone can take benefit from what the amazing designers discussed in the meetup. 

The key takeaways

A number of topics were discussed in the meetup on which designers shared their valuable knowledge and thoughts. I tried to extract outcomes from those discussions, hoping that it will benefit you in some way! 

UX processes in a company:

This topic was about the UX processes that a company follows.

• The standard UX phases (Understand, Research, Sketch, Prototype, Evaluate) are being followed by most of the companies in one form or another. 
• The design process is all about how YOU shape it. You can always mould your processes according to the project and business requirements. 
• Google design sprint is a five-day process that is being implemented in some companies that are designing products. It is helpful in knowing whether the product is sustainable or not.
• It is noticed that the Product and Service design phases are mostly not the same.

UX beginners , where to start? 

Most of the newbies in this field have no idea about where to start learnings from, here are some tips for the newbies who want to start their career in UX design.

To start off your career in the field of UI/UX, first, identify your goal, start your journey if you think you are really passionate about the field, and then follow these steps: 

• Plan your 5-year goal.
• Find a mentor.
• Become social with the people in your field.
• Learn how to market yourself. 
• Learn about the UX framework and UX cycle.
• Read books related to the UI/UX. 
• Get yourself enrolled in different online courses.
• You are an influencer, start creating content. Share with your audience whatever you create and get feedback from the experts.

Designer and developer, an unmatched love story

Ah, this was one of those topics that put a smile (the smile with hidden pain ) on every designer’s face, because this topic was something that most designers could relate to. 

Some outcomes from the discussion are: 

• The designer should have empathy for the developer but not to the extent that it compromises the usability of the design.
• It’s good if a designer has basic know-how of development, especially of the styling languages so that they can tell about the libraries that will be used by the developer so as to make the developer’s life easy. 
• It’s a better approach to let the designer and developer sit in different workspaces so that the developer cannot influence the design decisions, which in turn compromises the design. 
• Don’t expect the developer that he will take care of the minor details like margins, paddings, font sizes, and font-weight, etc. Provide him all these details in a design-release document or with some handoff tools like Zeplin. Style guides can become really handy in such a case.

UX Testing

• The most important pillar of UX is usability testing, it helps you in knowing where your product stands and how a user will perceive it.
• Your design is nothing without user testing.
• Design QA is a step to review the coded version of the design to make sure that it is developed according to the provided design specifications.
• The Design QA is a crucial step and it should not be skipped. There can be many ways of doing the design QA, you can either document all the inconsistencies or conduct a meeting with the developer.

Dribbblable Trends

• Dribbble trends like Neumorphism, Glassmorphism, Skeuomorphism are not development friendly in most cases. 
• The overly used animations that we mostly see on portfolio sites are not feasible in real-world applications, they are just eye-candies that are usually far away from solving real-world problems. 

Personal projects

We all know the importance of unsolicited projects and how important a role they play while you are trying to land in a company.

Some key points regarding the personal projects are: 

• For personal projects, you can pick out any real-world application and perform its UI/UX audit and publish your case study on it. 
• Use real-world applications as much as you can and ask people about the problems that they face and try to solve those problems through your design solutions and research. 
• Most designers don’t get enough time to do personal projects in order to maintain their portfolio, but if you manage to take out 1-2 hours per 2 days a week, make one schedule and stick to it, you can surely manage to do it! Note that, setting a deadline for personal projects is equally important.

UI/UX interviews

If you aspire to join a certain company, the best way to prepare before appearing in their hiring interviews is to learn the UX processes that they follow in their company. Also, customizing your profile and portfolio and making it as relevant as the company’s requirements will be highly effective.

Long story short

So these were some of the highlights from the meetup. It won’t be wrong to say that this meetup was a success, designers from different firms (VentureDive, Folio3, Airlift, 10pearls, Two Dots, and many more) joined and shared their valuable thoughts and knowledge with each other. 

It’s always a great idea to network with the people in your field, you get to learn a lot of things.
Looking forward to more meetups like this, it will surely help in building a stronger UX community. 

Special thanks to Arif Samad, Arif Kamal, Umair Ali Khatri, Tabish Rafiq, Adnan Khan, and Sohaib Khan for providing their valuable insights to all the community members!

Join Expedite’s UX community here.

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