I work as a full-time UX/UI designer and currently manage six different projects. One would think I am constantly training my creative skills, while in reality most of these hours are spent finding doable solutions within time and budget restraints, writing documentation, working with numbers, convincing the clients, and communicating with the team.

So, what’s missing for me, is creative play-time where I can think freely and try out new things, in a risk-free, sometimes purpose-less way.

I have a routine for that in my free time as a painter, where I fill one page of a 365-day notebook with whatever technique I want to try out that day. Having the restraint of space and materials I can use (it’s a rather thin paper), I come up with different ideas, that I can later use in bigger paintings.

In that notebook, I am not afraid to “mess up” one page, because what matters is just to fill the page. And after a week or two, I start seeing how each of the small steps brought me to where I am today. Such a fulfilling activity!

So, now I want to find a way to practice something similar in a digital way, find my “digital notebook” and maybe some topic, some restraint, that will allow me to actually do that small step every day, something that is easy to do daily. My end goal would be a collection of UX/UI solutions, that I could look into when searching for creative ideas with a client project.

Research

As always, I started with a little research on what has already been done out there and gathering my insights in this document. I hate nothing more than just reading something without instantly applying it or at least creating something “I can hold in my hands” after.

Some official “challenges” I found:

• I discovered this great UX Writing newsletter that sends you a short exercise for 14 days. The task is to come up with a Headline, Body, and Button for a specific topic with a limited set of characters. Not sure if UX writing in English is very helpful for my job in an Austrian UX Design Studio, but I wanted to save it as an option for later.
• This page offers a list of 100 UX challenges, that can be used to create small prototypes:
• Super retro-looking page with a “random prompt generator for whiteboard design practice”
• Also, here is a great website with UX tools, it could be helpful to check each of them daily, or once a week, to learn something new
• I also found this “100 days UI challenge”, which has been done by so many designers already (Dribbble, Collect UI) but also criticized a lot.
• There’s also this Sketching for UX exercise that I have done about four years ago, but sketching is not what I’m looking for this time.

Daily exercise ideas based on this Quora discussion + brainstorming:

• Learn a new feature of the tools you are using — Sketch, Figma, Illustrator, UXpin, InVision, Photoshop etc.
• Observe daily situations where you found a good user experience or a bad one & note them down
• Reflect on the designs, meetings, interactions at the end of each day — in a form of a log for example
• Save a good new website into the bookmarks every day (or a couple of times a week)
• Notice sites you hate — and how you’d do them differently
• Take one existing page and copy it — to learn new patterns you haven’t used before
• Take one existing page and while keeping the content the same, create 3–10 very different looking UI’s with them, just to expand the visual possibilities

Some overall abstract things to do daily (they don’t fit for me in this case because I need more visual design tasks):

• consider different ways to approach problems and challenges, e.g. always try out three ideas before settling on one
• understand human and social behavior, psychology
• watch others interact with an existing site
• read research (for example Nielsen & Norman)

After reading all of that I discovered, that what I am looking for is rather a daily UI challenge — I want to expand my available visual portfolio, have a reference for the look & feel of something, because that’s where I feel I’m lacking most at the moment.

And while this article here suggests, that there’s now an “obsession about how things look over how they work”, I think that we at Liechtenecker work very well on how things work (fixing user pain points). With this exercise, I want to push the boundaries of what is possible visually (the sparkle, the feel, and the extra things you didn’t expect as a user).

What I settle for

Daily UI Challenge

“For every minute you spend reading design articles, spend 10 minutes actually designing.” — Erik D. Kennecy

One thing I will try to do daily is the UI Design Challenge I already signed up for.

Since I want to explore different ideas, I will pick one exercise and work on it for a whole week.

I will firstly rely on research, and find pages that do that thing well, analyze what exactly makes it so good and copy parts of it. I will also check out what other designers have done, to discover what is missing in the UI’s out there.

I will also be creating different states (hover, active, empty, error, warning, success, disabled, active, or pending states) and the whole experience after that one page.

And last but not least, I will try different looks & feels for the same content, try different branding, typography, styles, just to strengthen my creative muscles a little.

I think it will be a great challenge to get better in graphic design (which I’m looking for), and partly in product design (a great exercise for something I work on most of my work time already).

Friday Challenge

There’s no good UI without a concept behind it, so I am thinking of sticking to these 17 exercises in the next weeks. I will give myself a time limit of 2h each Friday to come up with a solution and some visible deliverables I could share online.

Day one, take on, action!

My digital notebook is now a Figma-File where I created one page for the Daily UI Challenge, and one for the Friday UX Exercises.

The first task of the UI Exercise said

Create a sign up page, modal, form, or app screen related to signing up for something. It could be for a volunteer event, contest registration, a giveaway, or anything you can image.

Here’s my first take on that (in German UI). The next step will be to design the process of steps 2 and 3. Try to include social network signup options and the option to signup using the phone. I’ll try out different styles and branding as well.

I hope this routine will work out — and I am also happy to hear your opinions and tips if you have successfully implemented some daily UX/UI routine apart from your project work.

Last thought: I was strongly influenced by the book here called Atomic Habits by James Clear. So I am pretty sure that doing a small, tiny step each day makes some gigantic progress after a while. Strong recommendation!

Take care, Natalia