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Designers, what does trouble you in your journey of designing real-life projects?

over 5 years ago from , https://oykun.com

Hey all,

Lately, I have been rapidly evolving https://uijar.com, as I learn more about how to build things with Ruby on Rails :D, to be more than an inspiration source, but a useful place with a great community of designers

One of the challenges I used to have was finding real-life project examples so I have started curating https://uijar.com

One other challenge was getting constructive feedback for my WIP designs, so I'm building that feature. I will start giving private beta access soon.

I wanted to hear what other things troubles you in your journey of designing real-life projects so that I could (hopefully) come up with solutions under UI Jar

Thank you!

24 comments

  • Andrew Richardson, over 5 years ago

    Designer/Dev communication about animation is pretty hard ATM. Traditional design tools cannot communicate this well and prototyping every micro interaction can be incredibly time consuming.

    11 points
    • Oykun YilmazOykun Yilmaz, over 5 years ago

      Yes I agree. For now, I find it most efficient to tweak with engineers unless I'm given access to codes to do it myself.

      1 point
      • Andrew Richardson, over 5 years ago

        Yeah it seems best if I see stuff that can be improved to just do a codepen showing exactly the properties/timing/delay and how it should work. I have quite a bit of front end knowledge so I can do this but I'm sure it's pretty rough for those that don't have as much front end knowledge.

        0 points
    • Andrew C, over 5 years ago

      Yeah this. I want them beziers in my shit.

      Haiku has been pretty great at this so far, but has a bit of a steep learning curve. Honestly the most successful animations I've done were just coded by me in a sandbox HTML file and demoed to my squad.

      1 point
    • Razlan HanafiahRazlan Hanafiah, over 5 years ago

      I agree. Nowadays I find it easier to have a walkthrough meeting (online or physical, doesn't matter) with the devs on every animation and interaction involved in the design. It also helps a lot when the dev has a good design sense.

      1 point
  • Jonathan ShariatJonathan Shariat, over 5 years ago

    Working with a copywriter has been difficult. They need to edit the text and I need to work in my sketch files. So either they have to "telephone" updates to me and then I have to update (wasted time), or there are file conflicts when we both edit Sketch files.

    Abstract and other versioning software aren't cutting it either as they compare page lvl changes not layer lvl changes. So we have decide if we want to keep my UI changes or their copy changes. Useless until they get more granular.

    8 points
    • Oykun YilmazOykun Yilmaz, over 5 years ago

      ah I hear you. I passed that on to developers though :D I ask copyrighters to contact developers to update in the code as it takes less time for them, plus when they give me to update the designs, all I actually do is passing the same copy on to developers, so I'm not really needed in there :D

      4 points
    • joe andersonjoe anderson, over 5 years ago

      Curious how Figma's real time capabilities could help here if you were hypothetically using them. I imagine changing some text like headlines and subheadlines impacts the design so that would suck though. But maybe they can comment, and change paragraphs of text that don't impact the design as much?

      1 point
      • Jonathan ShariatJonathan Shariat, over 5 years ago

        It does but the only caveat to that is often times its hard to see whats changed so if they move something on accident or delete a screen, etc its hard to moderate that. Has that changed in Figma? (Its been a while since I checked it out)

        2 points
      • Oykun YilmazOykun Yilmaz, over 5 years ago

        Figma would certainly help, only for some who has at least basic knowledge about design though since editing directly in the source file by someone who doesn't know what he is doing can cause problems.

        0 points
    • Marc Olivier LapierreMarc Olivier Lapierre, over 5 years ago

      This is my biggest issue currently. It gets so complicated very quickly. I'm working on a project right now where there's a UX (me), a copywriter and a UI designer. We're on a tight schedule so we're all working in parallel and sometimes on the same pages. The amount of Sketch files and PNG that we send through Slack each day is ridiculous.

      I still haven't found a productive way to collaborate. We spend so much time going back and forth interrupting each other that it even gets hard to just concentrate and do the work. I started to use Figma for my personal projects and I'm slowly drifting away from Sketch. I think I could probably make this work with Figma since we'd all be working on the same file in real time. Maybe having a "Copy" artboard for the copywriter next to the "Design" one could work. It would also be easier to see what changed since they'd be right next to each other. But it involves switching the whole team to Figma, which is no easy task...

      I think InVision Studio aims to fix some of those issues but I just can't see myself switching my whole workflow there. We use it for clients and presentations but I've had so many issues that I don't think I can trust it anymore.

      4 points
    • Andrew Richardson, over 5 years ago

      One of the big reasons I've switched to Figma. Copy editing is really really easy when they can simply leave a comment on what they want changed, or you can give them edit access if you are confident in their ability to not move things around and edit the copy.

      0 points
    • Jon MyersJon Myers, over 5 years ago

      Yes, particularly if the copywriter is paid by the word or feels the need to exaggerate their wit with run-on sentence headlines and walls of text.

      0 points
  • Marcel M., over 5 years ago

    When it comes to feedback, it's really hard to find the sweet spot.

    If you ask the users (people that are supposed to actually use your product, not your friends) they will nit-pick on little things (button naming, colors,personal preference) and refuse to understand the idea of "click dummies", "iterative design" or "early prototypes" so it's really hard to get constructive feedback (I would call it emotional feedback).

    If you ask your designer friends (or design people in general) they will smash the clap button because that's what they're supposed to do when someone throws colorful pixel at them :D

    Try to find people that have a background in UX. They can give you the feedback you need (involves empathy, listening, knowledge about user needs)!

    2 points
  • Benjamin ValmontBenjamin Valmont, over 5 years ago

    Selling UX to non-technical management and company that wants quick wins and deliverables yesterday. It's impossible.

    1 point
  • Marcel van Werkhoven, over 5 years ago

    Managing expectations and clients.

    This is the biggest hurdle in the entire design/agency business and the only part of the process that can't be automated, sped up or improved. Just some general things that always go wrong: - They underestimate the time it takes to create (good) content - They only come up with decent feedback when the project is well near finished and then want a complete overhaul - They never understand what it is they should give feedback on

    Me: "We need design feedback on the website we send you 2 weeks ago so we can plan the next steps" Client: "I wanted to call you but I didn't have the time to figure it out. Also I'm not sure what joke you are pulling but this is the wrong website" Me: "Ah, yes we've been busy as well. Wrong website, how so?" Client: "Why is there Italian text on my site? There must've been a mix-up with another project." Me: "Italian?" Client: "Yes, Lorum Ipsum" Me: "Oh, that's all placeholder text."

    This is what I'm spending most of my time on right now. Creating a process that clients understand.

    This is also the most confusing thing for our interns. Like, when we create a mock-up with visuals when the project hasn't even entered the wireframe phase yet. Just to make some stakeholders happy, who don't understand what a wireframe is and will otherwise find someone who will design 'in color' as that would save time.

    0 points
  • Jon MyersJon Myers, over 5 years ago

    Designing with (real) data can be a challenge on many projects.

    For example, getting clean, consistent data for prototyping.

    0 points
    • Oykun YilmazOykun Yilmaz, over 5 years ago

      Yes, I often talk to the relevant team member (mostly the people who are in touch with customers) from the day 1 to get real-life use cases and example data. It is like a requirement to kick off designs.

      0 points
  • Oliver Swig, over 5 years ago

    What did u say u are working on?

    0 points
  • Account deleted over 5 years ago

    what exactly do u mean with 'real life' bud? Published projects? Commercial projects? Side projects? Non-digital projects?

    0 points
  • Matt C, over 5 years ago

    Designing enterprise apps, you inevitably run into the issue of having massive amounts of configurations. There's nothing you can do about it - if a customer wants to pay a million dollars to add a bunch of scope exclusive to their business you have to do it.

    It might be nice to see more project showcases on how designers deal with that problem. I'm all the time debating internally when to break something into a separate app vs trying to find the lowest common denominator for an interaction.

    0 points