Day 87 - Designing with Empathy

Millions of people world wide have a disability so remember to design with empathy.

1. Pay attention to color for people with color blindness
2. Learn how screen readers work
3. Label everything usefully
4. Put yourself in the customer's shoes
5. Talk to people with disabilities

Day 65 - Empathy and Collaboration in Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a process designers can use to create solutions that match people's needs. The process looks something like this:

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

Two things that must permeate the design thinking process are empathy and collaboration with the target audience.

Empathy is a feeling of affinity with others that is a soft skill. As a ux designer or product manager, you must continually possess and develop it in order to create useful solutions for your customers.

Collaborate with your target audience by directly talking to them to understand the context and culture of your users. As you gain an understanding by using direct observation and qualitative data, you can articulate the problem out of which you create user stories and solutions.

Day 12 - Understand the User's Goals, Needs, and Tasks - Model the Solution

1. Task Modeling - understanding what people want and how to design for them.
2. Find out the steps people go through and the decisions they need to make. Then base your designs around that.
3. UX is often stuck in academia. Talk to real users.
4. With the task model, you're aligning design experiences that fit with how people expect things to work in practice.
5. Think from the user's perspective first, but utilize systems thinking, holistic thinking about the overall experience.
6. Empathy - understand and share your user's experience and emotion.
7. Constantly check in with your users to make sure the UI is on point. But the goal is to be able to tell the story without showing the interface.
8. All the details in every page and component of your product should contribute to the overall experience.