DEV Community: Naera

Coming up with a general design strategy!

Naera — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 05:59:36 +0000

Designing in general is a very creative activity. It involves coming up with a model that serves a certain purpose. The best designs in general are the ones that have both great functionality and aesthetics. You want your designs to be both very user friendly and also looking appealing to the user. To be able to achieve that you must first as a designer do your homework. This can be divided into three phases, the pre-designing phase, the designing phase and the enhancements phase.

Lets start with the pre-designing phase. You need to create something useful to others. To do that you need to know what others really want. Otherwise, you’d be only creating for yourself. Which is not bad if you’re the sole user. But if you want your design to be implemented on a larger scale, you need to also include others needs in your work.

So, to begin the journey of figuring out what others need, you’d simply start by asking them: “ What do you need? Or what would be most useful to you? Or what do you think is lacking in a certain service or area?” That info might be already available in articles or on online forums and discussions. But it could also not be available and hence you will need to initiate the conversation about it. Once you roughly know what others need, you are off to a good start. You are now one step more knowledgeable than before. Ok, now you need to proceed to step two.

Step two is all about being more specific in your quest for knowing what people really need. You roughly know what they want, now you want to get more into the details. The more details you know, the more useful designs you will be able to come up with! Start approaching people, ask them about the details, give them the time and convenience to answer. Be a good listener. Be open minded. Empathize with their needs. Document every thing. Develop user stories. Make a list of their demands and proceed to the third step in the pre-designing phase, which is doing your market research.

You need to know that eventually the design you’ll be working on will inevitably be launched into a market. Do you know a lot about that market? Do you know if others have also developed designs serving that very need you’re currently studying? What about the details of such competing designs? How efficient are they? What about the market itself? How big is the user pool? What about the costs and the rewards of developing such a design? Again you need to develop charts and come up with a summary about the market details you’re getting yourself into.

Now you have good details about the needs and the purpose of your designs developed in clear terms that are much needed when you’re communicating with your team, with all stakeholders as well as when collaborating with others. Ok, all pre-design info is now available. You can comfortably proceed to the next step of the designing phase, which is coming up with an actual initial design model.

This is the most creative phase of them all. You now have enough knowledge about the subject to be able to develop solutions. Let’s get creative then. You want to develop something new to be able to stand out. You want to be an addition to the market. Not a repetition to it. You want to add value. Hence, you will need to come up with new ideas and to think outside the box somehow.

Start by brainstorming. Alone and in groups. Don’t reject ideas. Be a good listener and be open-minded. You never know! Give yourself and others the chance to explore and think. Again document everything. You will find yourself eventually with a whole bunch of ideas to choose from for the current project and maybe also for upcoming ones.

Proceed with choosing from the ideas documented. You can’t really choose if you have no options. This is why you brainstorm. To provide options for yourself and others to choose from. Otherwise you’ll have nothing and that is not good for creativity. You really choose by narrowing down your options to the ones closest to your purpose. Which ideas are more fitting to the project’s needs and aims? Then you need to start developing them.

Come up with an initial model. See how it will look like and test it. Test it’s functionality and feasibility with your team, the development team and most importantly with potential users. You need a good design model that is actually reproducible and is user friendly and appealing to the market. So, it’s all about coming up with an initial rough design and testing it.

Now you have a solid frame that you can add details into. Details are generally added progressively. You need to add functionality based on priorities. The most important needs come first and the least come last. Then you can add aesthetics accordingly. After you have developed this high fidelity prototype, now you can again test it.

Always consider testing everything before launching. It saves you a lot of time, money and effort. You do not want to launch anything not thoroughly tested. From the marketing aspect, users will be reluctant to retry your product if they come across any flaw in their initial trial. You definitely do not want that. You want to retain and grow your user pool. This can only happen if users revisit your product and also recommend it to others.

This is why the third designing step is most crucial before launching. It’s all about designing, testing, documenting results, making improvements accordingly and repeating those steps over and over till you get satisfactory results aligning with your project’s aims and purpose.

Only then can you launch your product into the market while keeping an eye on the product and marketing analytics. Continuous product and market analysis are much needed for growth. You need to study and analyze how your product is performing in the market. You need to always have your product standing out and adding value and being updated accordingly. Hence continuous analysis, development and testing are much needed for such a satisfying purpose.

When I look into designing in general, I really consider it an interesting and diverse set of activities. You need to be a good collaborator, communicator, listener, creative, talented, detail oriented and of course knowledgeable in diverse areas such as design, development, writing, business and marketing. This is why you need to be a life long learner. Always reading, learning, training, testing and iterating. But the skill that I see most essential to achieve all that is to be indefinitely curious.

Since I find designing an engaging activity, I intend to continuously be posting articles about it, to get others interested in the subject too and to help interested people learn a bit more about it. Naturally my articles will progress as I write more, learn more, read more and design more. I am also most interested in getting feedback. Always let me know what you think, thank you for reading my article!

https://www.naeraelsharkawy.art/

Overcoming writer’s block in tech

Naera — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 10:43:56 +0000

Well, currently I don’t have much to say yet I still want to write a blog article. It’s funny because I am actually in the middle of a lot of things that I want to get done with and so I am not much in the mood of writing. But also that I still want to write is something worth noticing although I have no planned topic to discuss.

Maybe this mimics much the life of a developer. You want to do something cool like building apps and websites, but sometimes you don’t find much motivation or projects and ideas to start working on or learning about. So what would one do in such a scenario? I’d say do what I am currently doing. I am writing down words and letters nonetheless, hoping that motivation and ideas will start pouring in.

Well guess what? It actually worked. I am going to talk about the developer’s block that is much similar to the writer’s block. I start writing to attract more words and ideas as much as I start coding to generate more coding ideas and interests. More writing will make me a better writer as much as more coding will make me a better coder.

It’s only by trial and error that one learns. One will never learn by merely wishing on things to just happen. Start doing some work no matter how simple or uninspired you are and only then you will attract more complex and inspiring things to work on. So yes, getting one’s hand dirty is the only way to improve and gain more experience.

Experience is great, it adds much to one’s personality, growth and prosperity. A lot of people can offer criticism… but only a few can offer solutions. Those who can offer solutions are the ones who had much experience. They worked despite everything. They got their hands dirty. They tried and failed numerous times. And from every trial they learned something and from every failure they learned a couple more things. Such lessons learned pile up over time to provide a reservoir of experience that they could make use of whenever they face new challenges.

Experienced people fracture big challenges into miniature ones. Only then they can start comparing it to similar situations and solutions from their reservoir. One little solution to one little problem after another will lead to solving the whole big bulked up challenge eventually. Much like coding big problems is like. One big coding challenge must be fractured into much smaller ones that are individually dealt with, that will eventually lead to solving the main big coding challenge.

The more challenges you overcome, the more motivated and inspired you get and the more experience you acquire. But to be able to do that just like anything in life, you actually have to start somewhere. Whether you’re coding, writing, creating, designing, or even working out, you just have to start to be able to finish.

So I started with nothing on my mind and a few words to write, now I have my article written and a few more ideas to work on! Next time I feel less inspired I will start anyway, because trial and error is the only way to get things done, and so should everyone :)

Thanks! :)

Getting into web development

Naera — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 19:50:22 +0000

Getting into Web Development

I would like to share my experience in the field of web development and trying to create stuff as a newbie. Well, it’s both kind of fun and funny. The funny part is obvious to all coders who often get stuck trying to find a solution to some problem or a way to get things working. Sometimes it takes a few minutes and sometimes it takes a few days/weeks, you just have to be persistent/patient enough. Of course it gets frustrating along the way but all that goes away the moment you figure it out. Only then you start laughing about it and mocking yourself remembering how hopeless you were trying to find an answer. It’s just that you never know how long it might take to reach such a moment and hence, you just have to be patient.

This is where experience counts. The more experienced a person is, the more patient they get because they’ve been through a lot to know it’s sometimes very easy and sometimes very hard and you just have to accept it and keep building on it.

When it comes to building it gets so much fun. Because yes you have to learn a lot to be able to build stuff, but also the more you learn the more tools you have to build bigger and better things. So it’s that rewarding feeling you get when you see your products up and running and you get to show them around and get others impressed too.

Getting others impressed is such an addictive behavior. Because now they know you can build stuff and you are so into tech, but what about the type of stuff you build? Is it beautiful, easy to access? Is it useful enough? Is it making their lives easier or helping them in any way possible? Educating them maybe? So you also start to be way more consumer oriented than before. And the first step to get a consumer to use your product is by having it well designed.

Designing products is awesome. It allows you to take a good break from core coding while still working on development projects. You focus more on the order of the content, colors, ease of access and cool graphics. So you get to play around a little bit more and be more creative with your tools.

But that’s all silent work! You feel you’ve been working silently for such a long time to get your type of product, your design and it’s coding right. You miss chatting about stuff. You want to talk about your product(s), your perspective and how you made it through. So here you are, also turning into a good content creator! Good job. You start filling in the content of your products with your words, writing about your experience and views in blogs and also maybe teaching others about what you’ve reached and how you’ve managed to do so via social media connections that allow you to connect with everyone everywhere.

So I guess you yourself have to be more accessible to people along with your products. They should find no trouble finding you, chatting with you and asking you about stuff or even sharing stuff with you. It’s fun, it’s interesting and it opens new opportunities to connect with people, to learn from them, maybe they can also learn from you, get new ideas, try new methods and get career opportunities. So who doesn’t want that! It’s a win-win situation and is also amusing :)

The more amused you get the better you’d want to be at all the above mentioned skills. You want to be a better designer, a better coder, a better content creator and a better communicator! And so you prove that jack of all trades is in fact a master of some :)) but you also prove that it will be a life-long learning journey that will never end, unlike other careers where you’re done when you learn a thing, or two … or even a hundred!

So your knowledge in various other different fields add up to your experience in web development and that’s why it is quite an inviting field for everyone to shift into because you know that your everything adds up to your value as a developer and that you don’t really have to start from scratch. You just have to work on your less developed skills while maintaining your more developed ones. And all that is done through more patience and perseverance.

Good Luck :)