My User Experience

User Experience....this is a requirement? What does this even mean - user experience? I cringed at the thought of taking the class. I knew it was a requirement, however I had no idea what to expect. I had this idea in my head it was going to be boring and a lot of textbook work with a lot of busy work. I truly had no idea - so my mind filled in the blanks!

I have taken my fair share of courses throughout my college experience and this by far has been my favorite class to date! Learning to navigate and use the online program Figma has been so fulfilling and exciting. I found myself staying up late at night working and practicing different techniques until I could master it. I have never been so eager to do homework for a class as I have been with this class. All the projects built on top of each other preparing me for the final project - Create an App. This app is not fully created and would have a lot more pages to be complete. However I created 13 pages as I was really enjoying the process. We in total only had to have 7 pages. If you are interested click here to view my final project. You can take a look at what you could create if you took this class!

There were some fine details most people may not even realize happened behind the scenes. For example, one night I spent hours working and reworking my "Create an Account Page - see right. What seems like simple boxes to enter your name is so much more. I learned to create variants where if a user hovered over the text box it would highlight indicating "hey something happens here" to the user. I had it stop highlighting when you stop hovering. I then in the same variant added another step to where if the user clicks in the text box it would remove the text so the user could begin to type. These little tiny additions while to the user may not even register as we do it, all add up! I think the user if they did not see these types of interactions would notice something off, but otherwise would not be noticeable. Having this just created a more seamless approach for the user.

In the same way I had a hamburger menu created. If the user clicked on while not signed in there would be a menu that had some different options than the menu after being logged in. Creating these unique pages and allowing them to interact correctly was quite a process. I watched previous tutorials from class again and found others on YouTube to help me really embrace the full experience.

Some things I might have done differently was just in the beginning of the class allowed myself a little more time to complete the projects. I started last minute and did not fully give myself the full amount of time I needed. After the beginning though I was hooked and was working on the project early so I could do a lot more and really dig in. I feel like I would use this a lot for web developing or creating apps. Overall this class exceeded my expectations(no I am not saying this to just get a good grade lol). I hope anyone who takes the class in the future will enjoy it as much as I did.