Rachel's UI Challenge

Overview

After reviewing my personal skill and also validate from seniors that my UI design is still need to be polished. So that's why I want to create this blog to share the UI challenge. By tracing the design for the existing apps/webs to really in touch with the industry standard

Day 1

So my idea to start the ui challenge is that I feel I always run to 2 edge corner when it comes to UI design. Scenario 1: I'll transplant a simple design system and just modify the component.it's easy, standardized.

Scenario 2: I just played it by the ear, freestyle the ui, utilizing my "scattered" UI knowledge.


And all these preference lead to a tricky problems that my design looks wanky, first glance, it's great and then you'll find uncomfortable details like spacing or different corners. So I initiate this daily UI Challenge by tracing the current app UI screens to dive deep with interface design, and I'll limited m time to 1 hr which I can push myself to be more efficient.

Day 2

I feel more comfortable to reestablish the UI rather than day 1, and today I utilized Ruler to locate each ui component and try to find the grid system and other UI details that google have created. I noticed one some UX writing errors: the reading list is all capitalized, but recent tabs didn't.

Day 3&4

So previously I was trying to build ui from scratch, to feel about the font size from eye. Before this challenge I've trying to remember the font universal font size for ui. But always failed with it. So this time I want to practice to actual master the typography. And I start to have that mindset about how universal font size are used for mobile/web.

So today I want to try new things, design system. And I found a great application, Zendesk. I enjoy their product so much, the branding and the creativity behind it B2B standard products which I want to learn from them. To my surprise, they build up their design system called "Garden" (love this name so much!) And publish it as open source design system (which I love it too) So I start to utilize all the component in their "garden" And build up the page. Compare to "material design system" It's much more easier to onboarding, just using 20-30 mins to figure out all the component I start to build. And their design system is really mean it, I can make it to pixel prefect, to reshape the ui exactly what they should be. And that make me to think about the relation between scalability and functionality. Like material design, the scalability is really really great, it contains tons of colors, typography, card, icons, but .... it's really hard to understand it to use it. If I want to create a exactly google pages probably I need to spend 2-3 days to investigate the design library. So nowadays, enerysingle company start to use library, to expand the system as much as possibile to modularized, to simplified. But does it really simlified? When you looking at thousand of colors do you feel confused? I do