IxD — Exploring Structure + Figma

Our first assignment in Interaction Design allowed me to better articulate why a website is well designed or poorly designed. I paid closer attention to elements like motion, color, typography, and data organization. These elements held a lot of weight in influencing my eye when navigating the websites. Our badly designed example did not guide my attention to important elements. The Nike website, however, had a clear hero image and navigation was made very intuitive.

Our second assignment was important in my understanding mapping out a site. Information Architecture is the root of navigation, page layout, and really an entire website or other experience. When mapping out our assigned website, I noticed that each page did not navigate to a sibling page or jump across the map to a child of another parent page. Each page navigated a level above or below in the tree. This informed my image of IA to be very hierarchical.

Although I was experienced in Figma before, watching the official tutorials was especially useful for learning its idioms and traditional workflows. Understanding the common use patterns other creators follow allow me to set up my files and work in a way that is more intuitive to navigate. Creating any project file in any application is designing a user experience for yourself and your collaborators.

The third assignment tasked us with creating a website featuring the work of a randomly assigned designer. The in-class demonstrations bettered my workflow, specifically when it comes to separating component and style storage into discrete pages to keep the actual design page tidy. Scrolling behaviors are what I learned the most about in addition to grids. The tips from class and the experience I gained from the past two weeks will certainly help with my first project.