Taking a break from our not so regularly scheduled programming to pop in with this post.

A few weeks ago I started taking a course that I have wanted to take for the last year. It’s an introductory course to UI/UX. I’m not only learning a lot and noticing that what I have learned on my own over the last year and a half is clicking, but I’m really enjoying it. Presenting my ideas and work has always been nerve wracking for me. I have dreaded presentations since I was in elementary school, but I find it’s less stressful in a room of maybe ten people than it is in a room of twenty or more.

The course lasts six weeks and I’m currently on the fourth week. During the last class, we’re supposed to present a redesign of an existing app/website or create our own to present to the instructor and fellow classmates. It took a bit of thought but I’ve decided to redesign the Green Thumb app.

This was made in May 2018 and I have learned quite a lot since then. I have also decided that this is an opportunity to be able to go further than three screens and really start to flesh out the project. My homework for Week #3 was to create two user personas for the Green Thumb app, and while we were given some templates to use, there was also the option to create our own.

Voila. I never said sketching was a talent of mine.

Now despite getting all of this out of the way as well as writing out characteristics for both personas, I still found myself swamped Saturday afternoon in terms of the design. That was when I realized that I’m going to have to shift around a few of my other responsibilities in order to put forward all of my effort with this project. I don’t want to just slap things together. I want to be proud of the work that I produce, and so if that requires me to make a few adjustments, then I’ll do it.

User Persona #1 - Taylor Franklin - Green Thumb App

User Persona #2 - Rodrigo Flores - Green Thumb App

I am my own worst critic, and so even though I submitted my assignment fifteen minutes before the cutoff time, I still knew that I could have done more to make it up to my standards. I did beat myself up about it, questioning if I could have given away another shift at work to be able to spend another night to complete it before that Saturday rolled around, or if I should have just powered through on Friday even though I came home from work at 7AM, got cleaned up, and was back in Toronto after 9AM for a book signing/author talk. I barely slept, was in bed very early that night, and then headed out early Saturday morning for class.

But then it hit me that I will never be 100% satisfied with any work that I produce. Never. There will be times when I’m 95% satisfied, but there will always be something that I feel can be tweaked or replaced. I’m not saying that comforted me completely, but I guess it reminded me that how I feel is normal.

You’ll be seeing more of the process of the app redesign over the next couple of weeks as well as the finished project which shall be unveiled in the middle of April.

Now onto the next phase: storyboarding…