„Take your time to read, listen and find your true interest in the UX. The more you get to know about it, the more interesting it gets“.
This is the most valuable advice from our student Agnese Priekule-Sikavica to all those who plan to learn UX/UI Design in 2022.
In this interview, Agnese shares her motivation to keep going even though things seem impossible to learn.
What is your secret sauce when it comes to learning?
Curiosity!
What was very challenging, but also something that you are proud to have achieved during the Focus on Visual Design?
We had a very challenging task to redesign a complex main menu for a website and app. The company – Skidata – has a very wide scope of services and products that they offer, so the structure of information architecture has to be clear and straightforward. I both struggled and enjoyed working with this task but I think I managed to improve the current menu structure quite a bit. Along the way of restructuring the menu, the task was to focus on UI design as well. Although I have a design background, I’ve always struggled with visual consistency and also with scale and proportions of visual elements. This task was perfect for learning through practice and improving these aspects. Our mentor Catarina gave us amazingly structured, concrete and information-dense material on UI topics and I tried to follow it in practice. It helped me so much! My final work was still far from perfect, but I learned a lot and it looked much better than I expected from myself – It was visually consistent, no chaos!
What was the best learning experience and support for you in this module?
Our mentor Catarina first and foremost. Her lectures were intense because of the amount of new knowledge we gained; her presentation material was extremely valuable, concrete and applicable in practice – it inspired us to try these principles by ourselves. Also, within the team work setting, I learned from my teammates by working together and sharing the knowledge.
Can you tell us how you felt at the start of the unit vs. at the end?
We started off with a positive vibe, with cute and funny introductions of each other among us, the Brainster students, and our mentor Catarina. At the same time, it felt unsure, blurry and having some self-doubt. At the end, the topic seemed much more clear, there was a structure about it in my head and I was much more sure about my ability to do this or find a solution when I don’t know how to do something from the start.
Can you share one thing that you are most proud of achieving?
Sharing my unfinished CV and case studies with my bootcamp group and mentor during a lecture, and asking them for feedback!
Any last bits of advice that you would give to potential students who want to break into UX/UI Design in 2022?
Take your time to read, listen and find your true interest in the UX. The more you get to know about it, the more interesting it gets and you also get a fuller picture of the diversity of it. Also, be brave and don’t be a perfectionist, haha 🙂
„From the beginning of this Unit, Agnese has shown the ability to design functional interfaces that not only look good but also feel effortless and intuitive. She has an eye for colour, spacing and patterns, which she used throughout this module to simplify complex navigations and mobile apps. She’s also a good communicator, who doesn’t shy from asking questions and discussing her ideas. She has a flair for design and, most importantly, she’s an empathic designer who can step into the user’s shoes and try to understand where they’re coming from.“ – Catarina Ribeiro, an instructor at the UX/UI Design Bootcamp
