Learnings from taking the 30-day Adobe Daily XD Challenge
New year, new 30-day challenge!
My mission for this year is to expand my design skill set, in order to focus on moving towards a Product Designer role.
With this in mind, I wanted to improve my wireframing and prototyping skills, particularly for the purpose of being able to present my designs in usability testing and to collaborate more with engineers.
When reviewing potential courses and learnings on the subject area, I wanted something that would allow me to practice these skills with practical exercises.
As it would happen I actually received an email from Adobe about “how to improve UI skills” through the Daily UI challenge they held every month, so thought I would give it a try.
Just a disclaimer of how I took on the challenge:
- Although there are 4 activities to complete per week, I only took on one per week. This was because I wanted to absorb the learnings and not feel rushed to complete each challenge. As well, I wanted to dive deeper into the subject area through other means of learning material (such as books and blog posts).
- I already had pre-existing knowledge of the Adobe Suite (particularly that of XD and Illustrator). This course is not to teach you how to use XD, rather how to create different types of UI (such as animations). On some of the lessons, it will require Photoshop, of which I have some experience of, but not as confident as the other two programmes.
- Adobe XD has been promoted as “free software”, but I believe this is a free 7-day trial rather than free software. Because I have a subscription with work for the Adobe suite, I’m not sure exactly what is the actual cost is.
- I would spend 30–45 minutes before work to learn these skills in order to not disrupt my workday. Not only did it help as a motivator during the day, but it also provided me with a chance to take small steps into improving my design skills. Realistically, I would say 1 hour is sufficient for completing the tasks, as there is some going back and forth on the video when trying to learn the tools and techniques from the lesson.
Some of the course teachers are Elize UX and Brandon Groce who are very knowledgeable within the XD programme and break the learnings into small chunks, so it makes it easier to follow the steps needed to complete the task. They also talk about upcoming UI trends, which helps to stay on track within this field and use these as a template for the challenge.
You are given the choice to either follow along with the templates provided within the challenge or create your own design.
The four challenges I took on were:
- Designing a home screen for a mobile music video app
- Sign up screen using neumorphic design
- Animated onboarding using Lotte animation
- Course Dashboard for an education business.
I found these lessons great fun and, although it can take some time in getting to grips with the techniques for the particular design pieces, it was the right level of toughness to incrementally improve my skills.
I found the following benefits of doing this challenge:
- It has given me the confidence to present my design work to the public. Normally with my design work, I only show my designs to either my manager or the Front End developer for the changes to be implemented within the system. By doing the challenge, it has helped to put my work out for design critique to other creatives.
- It has pushed and expanded my skill set. I’ve learnt new skills such as animation, dashboard design and mobile design.
- It has provided me with a chance to meet other designers through the Discord and Behance channel and being in a safe space to seek advice on design work
As I’m writing this blog, I am pleased to say I’m continuing with this challenge as I found it a sustainable way of continually improving my design skills.
Although these learnings have been tailored around the Adobe XD program, I have found that nearly all of the features and learnings can be transferred over to other software (such as Figma).
So if you’re looking for a 30-day challenge to improve your UI skillset, I would definitely recommend you try the Adobe Daily XD challenge!
For more information regarding the Adobe XD challenge, please click here.
Fancy a chat about all things UX and personal development? Feel free to book in a 30 minute chat with me with Calendly.
