Conduct a heuristic analysis

Conducting a heuristic analysis is a simple way to familiarize yourself with foundational usability and design principles. To amplify your efforts, focus on the products or websites you know and love. You’ll get even more insight into experience when you able to use the product capture screen flows . To conduct a heuristic evaluation of your own, follow these steps:

• Choose a product or website to evaluate.
• Familiarize yourself with the heuristics or usability principles you will be using to evaluate the product or website.

<aside> 🔍 Here’s a good place to start.

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• Evaluate the product or website using the heuristics, taking notes on any usability issues or interesting opportunities.
• Create a detailed report outlining your findings and recommendations for improving the usability of the product or website.
  • *Bonus points for creating a visual solution to compliment your analysis.*🎉

Create a redesign an existing product

Redesigning an existing product is a great way to demonstrate your design skills and creativity. But avoid using the typical Spotify, Netflix or Apple; they’re just fine to practice with but in your portfolio, go for something more unique that could make a personal splash. The closer the product is to your personal expertise, the more your unique experience can be leveraged to your advantage.

• Choose a product that you use frequently and identify areas for improvement.
• Develop a design concept for the product, incorporating your ideas for improvement.
  • Leverage design systems when you can!
• Create a wireframe or prototype of your redesigned product.
• Conduct user testing to get feedback on your redesign and make any necessary adjustments.

Participate in design challenges:

Start looking around and participating wherever you can in design challenges and hackathons, participating in those will help you gain experience working with stakeholders and introduce some real world constraints to build your skills.