How I approach design challenges

A little bit of context goes a long way

What is a design challenge?

It’s a way of framing a situation or problem where the approach to solving it, is with design. This can be physical (like creating more space in your house) or digital (like creating a sign up experience that explains the rules for the password creation criteria upfront and clearly and avoids frustrating users).

As a Junior Designer, something that is often levied as a critique, is “not having any or too little experience” which can be a self fulfilling prophecy of not being able to get experience without getting a job which requires experience.

Anyway…

I think the way “experience” is defined in job application criteria should be redefined, but a way that myself and other junior’s try to circumvent this issue is with side projects, and design challenges can be a good way to demonstrate a lot of skills.

There are many services that offer design challenges (DailyUI, Adobe’s Daily Creative Challenge, sharpen.design, CollectUI etc) and they can give a good premise/starting point for creating designs.

Whenever I approach a design challenge, I take the initial challenge instructions and break them down to help frame it in a context. As an example, the Daily UI 10th challenge, Social Share, asks you to:

“Design a social share button/icon and be mindful of the size, imagery, placement and purpose for sharing”

On the surface, it’s pretty simple. Design a button/icon for social sharing. To give my design challenge more meaning, I try to place it in a real world context, like looking for or remembering an example where I had a bad sharing experience, or look for examples where this is a problem. From there, I then use that as a contextual foundation to approach the design challenge.

In this scenario, I used the poor experience of sharing food/meals that occurs on the myfitnesspal app.
For context, I use the app to track my meals and calories (it’s primary purpose). But a lot of the meals I cook and eat are divided into two and I share them with the my partner who I live with. I imagine this is a common scenario, sharing meals with the people you live. Friends, siblings, significant others. But the experience of sharing meals within the app is cumbersome, and despite being able to add friends, you can’t share directly with them in the app.

So using this frustration, I framed the design challenge around it. I designed my solution around solving this issue, incorporating elements like the in app friend system, and design patterns from share sheet screens.

Here are the screens I designed for the challenge

Trying to place the challenge into a context, I find, can help ground the design in a problem solving mindset rather than an abstract design approach. As designers, it’s our job to solve problems with design, and it’s something I try to keep in mind whenever I design anything. It’s also a good way of practicing light problem solving and I find you can talk more about the process when you have a reason (the problem) to solve with your design (the solution).