With the launch of the brand new OpenAcademy app, we speak to the team members behind the curtain. UI/UX designer, Adleena Ali, gives us an insight into her experience designing an app that meets the requirements and requests of the team, solves problems, and ultimately, puts users first.
- Tell us about your experience as the the UI/UX Designer of the brand new OpenAcademy app.
Refreshing. I’ve been very keen to design flows that focus on user-generated content. I feel it was a unique design process to tackle compared to what I’m used to designing. I’m grateful that the OpenAcademy team has been very clear and elaborate on the direction from the first brief, and that there was also openness for new suggestions — all that definitely contributed to the final design.
- What was the ideation process like when approaching UI/UX design of the app?
Ideas either come from inspiration or problems. Sometimes, I like to explore flows from other apps I find useful first, as a base or “default” interaction. But the end product comes down to what problems we have to solve, so there could be five ideas alone to answer the question “How do we allow users to discover creators with ease and encourage them to follow?” It’s a bonus if we can achieve beyond that goal, where the flow is able to garner positive reaction from users.
- What softwares or tools did you use?
I mainly used Figma for collaboration between team members and to produce high-fidelity mockups. Scratch papers for sketches work too for quick ideating.
- What challenges did you encounter during development? And how did you overcome them?
There are a lot of stakeholders involved when pushing an app release – tech, business, product and even creatives. That was a challenge for me to address, all while ensuring I did not abandon users. For this project, I made prototypes to show how the flow worked with each change request or idea, screen recorded the, and sent them to stakeholders involved. Stakeholders were able to immediately get a sense of the app experience, so all parties involved get a clearer picture to make decisions and proceed to the next step.
- And finally, what tips would you give other UI/UX designers?
- Ask questions on business models. You’ll need to know more about the business you’re creating the app for than people think you should. This will help you design the UI/UX better.
- Overcommunicate – not just by holding discussions, but by showing your prototypes, sending the PDFs if need be! Get the most out of every discussion.
- Find new things to learn and have fun. In every project, there’s going to be something foreign you’ve never done before. Watch tutorial videos, Create, and Test.