Daily UX/UI challenges: Finding a way to train my skills daily

Natalia Sander

Oct 19·6 min read

I work as a full-time UX/UI designer and currently manage six different projects. One would think I
am constantly training my creative skills, while in reality most of these hours are spent finding
doable solutions within time and budget restraints, writing documentation, working with numbers,
convincing the clients, and communicating with the team.

So, what’s missing for me, is creative play-time where I can think freely and try out new things, in a
risk-free, sometimes purpose-less way.

I have a routine for that in my free time as a painter, where I fill one page of a 365-day notebook
with whatever technique I want to try out that day. Having the restraint of space and materials I can
use (it’s a rather thin paper), I come up with different ideas, that I can later use in bigger paintings.

In that notebook, I am not afraid to “mess up” one page, because what matters is just to fill the
page. And after a week or two, I start seeing how each of the small steps brought me to where I am
today. Such a fulfilling activity!

So, now I want to find a way to practice something similar in a digital way, find my “digital notebook”
and maybe some topic, some restraint, that will allow me to actually do that small step every day,
something that is easy to do daily. My end goal would be a collection of UX/UI solutions, that I could
look into when searching for creative ideas with a client project.
Research

As always, I started with a little research on what has already been done out there and gathering my
insights in this document. I hate nothing more than just reading something without instantly
applying it or at least creating something “I can hold in my hands” after.

Some official “challenges” I found:

 I discovered this great UX Writing newsletter that sends you a short exercise for 14 days. The
task is to come up with a Headline, Body, and Button for a specific topic with a limited set of
characters. Not sure if UX writing in English is very helpful for my job in an Austrian UX
Design Studio, but I wanted to save it as an option for later.

 This page offers a list of 100 UX challenges, that can be used to create small prototypes:

 Super retro-looking page with a “random prompt generator for whiteboard design practice”

 Also, here is a great website with UX tools, it could be helpful to check each of them daily, or
once a week, to learn something new

 I also found this “100 days UI challenge”, which has been done by so many designers already
(Dribbble, Collect UI) but also criticized a lot.

 There’s also this Sketching for UX exercise that I have done about four years ago, but
sketching is not what I’m looking for this time.

Daily exercise ideas based on this Quora discussion + brainstorming:

 Learn a new feature of the tools you are using — Sketch, Figma, Illustrator, UXpin, InVision,
Photoshop etc.

 Observe daily situations where you found a good user experience or a bad one & note them
down

 Reflect on the designs, meetings, interactions at the end of each day — in a form of a log for
example

 Save a good new website into the bookmarks every day (or a couple of times a week)

 Notice sites you hate — and how you’d do them differently

 Take one existing page and copy it — to learn new patterns you haven’t used before

 Take one existing page and while keeping the content the same, create 3–10 very different
looking UI’s with them, just to expand the visual possibilities

Some overall abstract things to do daily (they don’t fit for me in this case because I need more visual
design tasks):

 consider different ways to approach problems and challenges, e.g. always try out three ideas
before settling on one

 understand human and social behavior, psychology

 watch others interact with an existing site

 read research (for example Nielsen & Norman)

After reading all of that I discovered, that what I am looking for is rather a daily UI challenge — I
want to expand my available visual portfolio, have a reference for the look & feel of something,
because that’s where I feel I’m lacking most at the moment.

And while this article here suggests, that there’s now an “obsession about how things look over how
they work”, I think that we at Liechtenecker work very well on how things work (fixing user pain
points). With this exercise, I want to push the boundaries of what is possible visually (the sparkle,
the feel, and the extra things you didn’t expect as a user).