Day 1 - The Basics of Design

Starting day 1 of this journey by reading the most acclaimed book in the industry of UX UI "Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman.

Today's learnings from the book Design of Everyday Things:

  1. Design is an act of communication.

  2. Most of the time we blame ourselves for being not able to understand the functioning of simple things around us, but in many cases, the design might be at fault.

  3. A good design is something that gives an idea of its functionality, the way it works, and the possible actions that can be taken.

  4. Various design principles should be followed when designing something, critical ones include:

    i. Conceptual Model

    ii. Feedback: When designing anything it is important that we show the effect of an action whether it is clicking a button on a website or handling buttons on a physical object like washing machines, or fridges.

    iii. Constraints: It is important that we put constraints on our design. When there are specific ways to handle certain things and when handled in other ways which might lead to errors, either we must make it possible to do it only one way or give the flexibility to do it in different ways without making an error.

    iv. Affordances: This brings to the visibility part of the product whether physical or digital. We need to make sure that the right things are visible and inappropriate things are not visible.


The next part of the learning comes with watching a few roadmaps related to " How To get into UX UI design in 2024" and looking out for UX UI profiles on Linkedin. Read a few articles from Nielsen Norman's website, a medium article that talked about a unified theory to design anything by Christina Wodtke.

This journey of learning UX UI started way before stepping into this 60-day journey so any one who would like to know the basics of UX UI, to know what UX and UI are, differences between them can dive into the following resources.

Youtube Channels:

  1. Ansh Mehra - @AnshMehraa

  2. Malewicz - @MalewiczHype

  3. Neilsen Norman Group- @NNgroup

  4. Career Foundry - @careerfoundry

  5. Flux Academy- @FluxAcademy

These channels will give a perfect start to enter into the field of design with a lot of other resources, and roadmaps.

Thank you for your time spent on this article.