5 Ways to Improve your #DailyUI
A sustainable take on the throwaway trend.
is the 100-day challenge for designers looking to improve their interface design skills. Sign up and get a new challenge delivered to your inbox each weekday for 100 days starting with a signup page and ending with their own home page. Prompts are only a few words and it’s the designer's job to interpret and produce an interface based on sheer creative thinking.
The rise of Fake UI
Since the main end application for these designs is in a social media post, most designers spend their challenge creating one to two screens for a fictional application with lots of white space, big images, and minimal text or interaction — in other words,
Interfaces tend to be soulless or at least purposeless without any user or business goals, real-world applications, or client briefs. Designers try to stand apart from the pack with pixel-perfect visuals instead of implementing tried and trusted UX patterns. Followers could be forgiven for thinking good UX was just a lot of making it pop.
So when it comes to DailyUI, designers tend to gravitate towards this visually pleasing, minimalist to a fault, and high click rate style. But nothing about this helps practice for the real world. There is no good UX in Fake UI — it’s all throwaway culture.
5 ways to make your DailyUI matter
What if instead of following the pack your UI designs reflected real products? Instead of creating one-offs that look like art, why not use DailyUI to grow your skills in realistic design, UX patterns and principles, and reflecting domain standards. Make it real, complete, and accurate.
1. Make it real
What does it mean to make a concept design “real”?
It starts with forgetting about social media. No really. Creating an interface just for social media likes is a pointless endeavor that does nothing to help you understand real UX issues, project requirements, or designing for real users. Of course, that’s the crux of the DailyUI challenge, but more likes≠good design.
For example, imagine you’re working on day 24, a boarding pass. You’ve come up with an idea and executed it– now what? Does it make sense? Why not show what it looks like in the app? How does the user navigate to it? How do they add it to their Apple Wallet? What if they want to print it? What other screens could you use to show the function of the app?
When building a DailyUI interface, whether it’s one screen or an entire app, act like it’s a real project.
- Start each project by focusing on the realistic goals users would anticipate accomplishing with your product. Do some research and look into problems users are having with similar products or see what market trends are predicting for the next big domain.
- As you work, explore iterations to highlight and solve potential heuristic issues. Don’t settle for your first design. Use Agile methodology to fail quickly and iterate often. Or why not start with wireframes instead of jumping straight to the visuals?
- Prioritize UX rather than trends. While the DailyUI challenge is mainly centered around visuals, building designs that are UX forward will set your work apart and can even grow into bigger projects later on.
By taking more time to stop and consider your project before pushing pixels your designs will be more realistic and therefore more valuable to your practice.
2. Make more than one
After the first page, making a second takes half the time, and exponentially less from there. The majority of the time you spend on your DailyUI will be on the initial idea and design. From there it becomes quicker and easier to expand that idea into more screens, more iterations, or more applications.
For example, imagine you're designing an interface for day 58, a shopping cart. You’ve already created a realistic cart page for an e-commerce website and you have some extra time. What else could you build out from this? How about the flow for checking out, or the process for adding an item or removing it from the cart. What happens if the cart has a minimum total requirement as is often the case in grocery delivery products?
Creating more than one screen validates ideas as more realistic while showing how a product fits together, especially when exploring a flow.
- Start with one screen and then build from there or set a number from the start and try to flesh out your ideas to fill them. It may help to begin with a quick user flow diagram or some sketches of what you want to accomplish with your designs.
- Designed an app? Why not explore a desktop screen for the same product. Use this as an opportunity to familiarize yourself with responsive design principles and design for multiple screen sizes.
- When showcasing your designs on social media, you don’t need to show every screen. If creating a static post, keep to 2–3 screens that are unique but still show a potential flow. If you create a video post using the preview recording function in many popular UI tools you can show the entire flow.
3. Do your research
The internet is your portal to a surplus of reports on user preferences and market trends, collections of common interface patterns, and best practices for designing for X domain or Y users. With all this information, why default to what you think users want? Supporting your designs with a compendium of real-world data makes them not only more valuable but means you're building a potential future case study that can support your practice.
For example, you’re working on day 34, a car interface. This is something most people are intimately familiar with, and yet, is one component of an exponentially innovative sector. Automobile design is changing by the minute, so what’s next for driving interfaces? What do EV drivers need to know that may differ from gas-powered vehicle drivers? How will this change with autonomous experiences? Are there any features that would make this interface more useful or pleasurable for the driver or the passengers?
If your knowledge of vehicle interfaces or other domains extends only to the consumer level, you may want to do some research into how to design for this sector.
- Use your research time to see what others have done before you. Search “DailyUI” on Dribble, Behance, Twitter, or Instagram before you start designing to collect ideas.
- Consider user needs, best practices, and what innovation means for these companies and users. DO push the envelope and consider what the future of this domain will look like.
- Look to market research and insight companies putting out reports on the topic. Draw on these sources to benefit your designs and make them more realistic.
4. Redesign instead
Sometimes, a redesign is worth more than a fresh idea. While DailyUI is generally done with concept products and unique ideas, attempting a redesign of an existing product provides many opportunities to uncover real user issues and heuristic problems.
For example, on day 9, you’re working on a music player. You could go and design yet another app that looks and functions like or you could focus on a redesign of the Spotify app instead. Consider integrating a new social sharing function, or what a music video channel would look like. Could curating a collection of songs be made easier? What about personalizing the experience apart from the algorithm?
By taking on a redesign, you’re applying your skills to solve real-world interface problems.
- Look for reviews or issues users are reporting or consider your own frustrations and begin to fix or lessen them.
- If you have time or are building a bigger project, perform a heuristic evaluation or run some user testing to see where users are experiencing problems.
- Integrate a new feature that improves the overall experience with the product or research ways to incorporate emerging technologies.
5. Make it a project
While you may have the drive to make a unique project every day, sometimes spending multiple days on a single product can help you build an even greater idea. If you’re looking to build a case study or at least reflect your ability to think through a product, consider turning a DailyUI idea into a full project.
There are two ways to do this:
- Spend multiple prompts exploring the same idea.
- Choose a prompt to focus on and build a complete product.
From multiple prompts
Maybe there's an idea you keep thinking about. Maybe you created an idea you came up with on day 5 that you think could also work for days 25, 26, and 30. By using an idea on multiple days you build a product screen by screen or section by section that will enhance that original idea.
From a specific prompt
At some point in your journey, you’ll likely do some research into an unfamiliar and emerging domain. Why not take this research and propose a product that meets user needs. Map your process from research to the final product in a case study.
- Start by defining who your users are with personas and then move on to mapping flows or sketching your ideas. Build your project up from your research and ensure you explain how your final product meets these needs.
- Document all of your design assets and keep track of them so it’s easier to build your project on Behance or your portfolio site when you’ve finished.
When you’ve worked on a design to make it real and complete, whether, from a UX standpoint or purely UI, you’ll have a more valuable project to share online and potentially generate some interest from other designers, potential clients, or employers. Practice is the key to improving your skills and competency in design programs, but for your work to help you it has to make sense.
Make it real, make more than one screen, do your research, try a redesign, or build out a project. Use to help you grow as a designer, not just to get likes online.
Check out my own DailyUI projects on Dribble:
