Project Brief

This was a task given by the design team at Razorpay as a screening test for their summer internship program. I’ll be walking you through the case study, explaining how I came up with a solution for the problem.

Task Description

A lot of people depend on food delivery services for their meals. During an open-ended research, it was revealed that a lot of regular users feel that while there are a lot of options for them to order from, there’s a gap between when people have time to order food vs when they actually want food on their table.

The product team wants to solve for this disconnect by building a feature to schedule orders and extend it to create weekly and monthly subscriptions.

+Should you stick to one place or not?

All designers want to move off the ladder, but spoiler alert, it isn’t a defined checklist.

Realistically, the difference between a junior designer and a middleweight designer and a senior designer is that one of the main differences is experience, and moving up the ladder takes a little bit of time, and it’s not something you can do overnight one to two years.

It is something that can take roughly five to ten years to make your way up the ladder to reach a senior level.

But let’s say you’re ready to have a conversation with your boss, and you want to move up the ladder. How do you know when you’re ready. But before we do that, let’s look at the differences between the responsibilities of a junior designer, a middleweight designer, and a senior designer.

How to Present UX Design Concepts Effectively

So, you’ve finished your design and now you’ve been asked to present it to the team. You want to do justice for the work you put into your design, but you’re not entirely sure how to present it effectively. What do you do?

Well to start, try to remember some of the presentations you’ve had the opportunity to watch over the years. Specifically, try to remember one that was really good at articulating a concept effectively and one that you left the presentation debating whether you fully understood what the presenter was trying to say.

To better understand why the first may have worked, whereas the second did not, let’s take a look at how to present UX design concepts effectively.

Sketch is a thing of the past. Competition for the best tool for UX designers is now between Figma and Adobe XD. While XD is trying to push features fast, Figma is light years ahead when it comes to collaboration. This is magnified when you use both tools and notice the difference between them. I’ve worked with all three in a professional capacity. The devil is in the details.

Creating foundations is essential for preserving the future

Today, I was attending Config, a live event from Figma. There was a talk that really sparked my interest: We should be replaceable: how we can build timeless design systems by Au Pleguezuelo, Senior Systems Designer at Github.

As product designers, and especially in a company environment, there is always work in progress and different things being worked on from various people. When those people leave — whether temporarily or permanently — that environment, the design system should live on for those that stay and those who come.

When working on a design system, some principles should be considered to ensure that this happens smoothly.

If you already know CSS, then you are at an advantage when it comes to learning Webflow.

You see, Webflow might look like Sketch or Figma but behind a very thin veil of GUI, Webflow is CSS and HTML. For this reason, a developer can learn Webflow faster than a designer — 100% guaranteed.

Essentially WebFlow is CSS with dropdowns.

position: relative, fixed, sticky, absolute

Look familiar?

This was a design challenge. The exercise took me roughly 8 hours to finish, including the documentation of this case study.

Task 📝

Design an app where a teacher can view the list of children assigned to them. The children will be attending multiple lectures each day. The teacher needs to check-in and out them on each of the lectures.

Other points:

1. A child can be absent/sick for a particular day.
2. The children can have different lectures. It’s not necessary that all children will have same lectures.
3. Handle those lectures which are checked in but not checked out.

Deliverables:

• User Story
• Visual Design
• Prototype
• Documentation

Quick tips to build UX skills

User experience is really about human experience, and a UX designer’s most powerful tool is the ability to tune in to how something feels to use in the real world, under real conditions.

This is easier said than done when we spend our days focused on analyzing user flows and making recommendations about the tiniest details. That is the work.

However, when this is all you do, it can be easy to lose sense of the bigger picture. There is a danger of missing the forest for the trees.

Do you really not have room to label that?

People have been confused by unlabeled pictograms for over 10,000 years. I am not the first person to write a version of this article. However, despite 2021 being several thousand years after the invention of written language, modern applications are still swarming with naked, unlabeled symbols.

Resume fixes to help land your first junior position

If your resume is over a page, it’s too long.

When it comes to creating the best resume and portfolio template it can be hard to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. You can search online for resume templates, portfolio templates, buy them or create your own. It can be overwhelming.

Since starting in this industry, my resume has undergone several changes. Most designers never truly stop working on their resumes. Recreating it to match your portfolio and career level is only natural.

Here are some things you want to take into consideration when working on the next iterations of your resume:

In this case study, I am going to innovate with the design process and unravel my decisions and thinking for a better understanding of my motivations.

The story that led to Innovation

A doctor in a medical hospital was taking a break and sipping coffee. An emergency case arrived, it was a woman having a very high fever and agitation.

Without the proper knowledge of the patient’s medical history, the doctor administered painkillers and sedatives. And due to the lack of disclosure of information that the patient was taking anti-depressant drugs, there was a contradictory reaction to the patient’s health and she died due to cardiac arrest.

Since I started working at Square, my manager and I have discussed whether or not I want to transition into management or not,

We have regular career trajectory/growth conversations and this was an early area of discussion. Right now, I am an Individual Contributor (IC), and pivoting to manager means I would go on a different track.

At first, the idea excited me.

Leading people is a huge responsibility and with practice (and many failures) I believe it is something I could excel at.

However, I’m still early in my career and don’t want to give up building things this early on. Not to say managers don’t play an important role, quite the opposite.

The more I thought about it, the less exciting it got.

What is Lead Market?

LeadMarket is India’s Largest Marketplace of pre-qualified leads for Insurance, Mutual Funds, Loans, Real Estate and Stocks. The customer can enjoy the option to buy and manage the leads of their choice of financial products and real estate they deal with. Leads are generated through our parent company — IndianMoney.com, registered under Suvision Holdings Private Limited.

User scenario is a key element on way of UX designer thinking. For design process, at least one time, user scenarios are thought to create empathy and take an action based on user needs by defining what/why users do and the context in which design is used. So it is really useful for design professionals.

When I think benefits and necessity of user scenario for my profession, a question showed up! Are there any other professions that need scenarios?
In daily life, there is a huge potential to meet suffering experiences in any area (not just designed product) and as UX designer, when I meet this kind of experiences, I really think about why it is happening. So I feel need to answer above question and I will try to analysis some examples.

Over the past couple of years, the rise of the no-code movement has started to change the landscape of tech. Designers can now build powerful apps and webs that can scale for any organization — without writing any code. Let’s take a deeper dive into no-code software and no-code tools.

The ability to learn new things and adopt new technologies, while progressing with your work accordingly, is a crucial skill for any designer, especially freelancers. With our lives and every business strategy increasingly dictated by screens, webs, and, basically, the Internet, the importance of digital design and coding is soaring. Fortunately, there’s a whole world of no-code tools allowing designers to make a leap into creating software.

This story takes place a few months ago, I found myself in the middle of an exploration meeting trying to understand some high-level requirements for a new feature. It was an interesting discussion about potential changes to our product and revamping one of our main modules. Ideas were flowing, everyone on the table was being creative, and the original idea started to get more complex and included a bigger scope.

When it comes to leadership, there is no one-size-fits-all. And we all have our interpretations of what leadership is. However, there are some common misunderstandings about leadership that prevent people from being effective leaders. Here are six myths I think we should watch out for.

Myth 1: Leaders have to be the best at the craft.

This applies more to managers than individual contributor (IC) leaders. At this point, our job has changed: it is to deliver results through others, rather than getting the work done by ourselves. We will have talented designers who can craft work-class designs much better than us. Just like athletic coaches, we need to have expert knowledge and be competent enough to guide others to do the job, but we can not perform better than the athletes if we are on the sports field.

In one of our recent digital design articles, we (albeit jokingly) described an abstract bad designer who likes to reinvent everything from scratch and spend time on similar meaningless activities. Building design systems is exactly something that helps to unify the design components into one meaningful entity, streamline the process of design and development, and thus save everybody’s time.

Design is creation. The universe has been created based on diversity. Diversity of species, colors, genes, planets,…No matter how small, all have an important role to play.

Greater diversity ensures natural sustainability for all life forms. For example, the more distantly related a child’s parents are, the more likely they’ll be to possess advantageous genetic traits.

Another example is diversity at teams. Diverse people bring a diversity of experiences, ideas, and finally innovation.

When we understand that diversity is essential, we will find another reality. We need to have empathy to be able to include diversity in our design and life.

Improving on Customer Relationship Management using Service Design — A UX Design case study

In our current time and age, food delivery has become the norm. Companies like GrabFood, Deliveroo and foodpanda are dominating the Southeast Asia markets. Ride-hailing giant Grab alone contributed to nearly half of Southeast Asia’s food delivery gross merchandize value in 2020, hitting US$5.9 billion.

The Hunch

Whenever people around me talk about their food delivery experiences, there is one popular and recurring user problem that everyone faces (myself included):

“It is absolutely impossible to find help on the app when we are facing problems with our delivery! Is this on purpose?”