There are multiple ways to work on your UX skills in the Studio setting next to the bigger (multidisciplinary) client projects - a personal project, a lot of small challenges or something inbetween. Think of it as a good way to balance out your bigger, multidisciplinary projects with stuff that is more personal to you. These are also an important part of what you’ll be showing at the assessments so try to do both!
| **🖐 1.** Personal projects | **✊ 2.** Unsollicited Design Projects | 👌 3. Design Challenges | 🤝 4. Multidisciplinary project | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What do you do | Work on your own personal UX-project | Redesign something that already exists in the world | Design a semi-random new thing | Work on you multidisciplinary project |
| Good stuff | - You’re usually more motivated if you have a good personal goal |
You’re your own client and often target audience | - It already has clear goals and limitations built in
Easier to find your target audience | - You often get really interesting, outside of the box challenges.
You can generate a good fitting challenge quickly | - A nice big project that forces you to work in a realistic multidisciplinary setting with a client. | | Risks | - You’re your own client and often target audience | - Hard to know all the goals of the actual client | - There’s no client so you have to take that role on yourself | - The project mostly defines what is being made, not you | | For whom? | Self-sufficient students with a clear goal and path to get there. | Students that are good at critizal analysis and want real life boundaries for their design while still having fun. | Students that don’t really know what to do but still want to make a lot of smaller, interesting things for practice and fun. | Everyone |
One of the best ways to learn UX design is by finding your own itch to scratch - that app idea you’re always thinking about, that experimental website you’ve already designed in your mind or that weird idea that you’re still a bit unsure about but want to explore nonetheless. The Studio gives you the option to actually work on your own idea (sometimes as a solo designer but also with others). Make sure to talk us through your idea so we can give you tips and feedback.
Let’s be honest: a really big chunk of (digital) interfaces suck. They’re either poorly designed, never tested with users or just plain evil in some cases. At the UX studio we’re trying to fix the world of interfaces by making them more user centered. And sometimes this means that you have to go and fix things without people asking for it. Enter the Unsollicited Design Project - find something in the world that doesn’t help people and try to fix it. To make this easier for you we made a list of interfaced things that annoy us to no end and we’re really waiting for someone to improve.
No personal project you want to work on? Don’t really feel like taking on an unsollicited project? Design challenges can be a good way to hone your design chops by creating small and quick design projects. Be careful though, there are some really terrible challenge websites out there so make sure to do a quality check with us!