I’m calling it IXUX — Inktober with a UX twist
I’ve participated in Inktober a few times now.
If you’re not familiar, Inktober is a challenge to create each day in October with a focus on inked drawings. The idea is that you’ll develop a routine of creating, and challenge yourself even further with a medium that doesn’t allow you to undo, be that with ⌘ + Z or an eraser.
Last year I limited myself to quick drawings on Post-it notes that I spent a few minutes on and only shared with my sister. A few of them I promptly tossed as soon as they were shared (like “fuzzy” which I chose to represent with a hairless bear that looked like an evil wet cat). And a few of them I hung proudly on my wall as long as the adhesive lasted, or until I got tired of looking at them (like “crystal”, that ended up looking really cool and was actually very calming to create).
Do I have an amazing routine of creating every day now? Nope. If you exclude my work day, hell nope.
I think of Inktober as my creative new year’s resolution. Except that I stick with it slightly longer.
This year, the prompt list came out at the end of August, and it got me thinking. I want to step it up. So I have an idea.
I’ve been trying to spread the word about UX to the world, and I love the idea of doing so in a fun and creative way. So this year, I’m taking the Inktober prompt list one step further, and doing a mashup for each prompt with a UX term, methodology, deliverable, whatever. I’m calling it Inktober by User Experience (IXUX) because well, that’s cute, and why not?
It’s 31 days of UX related content and inked drawings. It will be a beast, but if I can do it, it will also be epic.
The Plan
In order for me to be successful, I need to get organized, and put some rules in place.
- Each article should be a brief, but informative piece about the UX term for the day.
- Each article graphic should represent the article but also incorporate the Inktober prompt for the day.
- I’ll spend each Saturday researching for the week ahead, writing, and doing some rough sketching.
- Each day I’ll limit myself to a 15 minute maximum for any ink drawing.
- I’ll post each drawing/article good or bad.
- I’ll have fun doing it damn it!
To create my list, I compiled a list of 31 UX terms that I feel confident to share insights about, and I feel would be helpful. I was surprised that hyper-focusing on UX terms versus those that are kind of related got me scratching my head at about the 20 mark. That also got me excited though, because when I keep all of the product, development, and visual design-specific terminology out, it means I’ll be ending up with a pretty useful UX glossary in the end here. I might have to re-release this article when I’m done as “The Ultimate UX Glossary — the only 31 things a UX designer needs to know”.
And then I’ll wait for the hate mail to come in.
I then assigned each UX term randomly to an Inktober prompt. I literally printed them out, cut them into strips and pulled them out of a hat (my hand).
While some are going to take some extra creative juice (looking at you Day 4 -Scallop/Information Architecture), some I can’t wait to get to. Armadillo persona? Yes please!
So here we go! Stay tuned.
I’ll update the list below with links to the associated article as each is released.
Inktober by User Experience 2022
Day 4 — Scallop/Information Architecture
Day 12 — Forget/Cognitive Bias
Day 14 — Empty/Design Thinking
Day 16 — Fowl/Usability Heuristics
Day 17 — Salty/Product Roadmap
Day 18 — Scrape/Mid-Fidelity — a typo in my draft for this article led to me writing about “scrap” instead of “scrape”. A happy accident because it worked well. Sometimes when you make a mistake you just have to scrape up what you can and move forward. That’s what I did here, as I only discovered the discrepancy on day 22. Oops, my bad.
Day 24 — Fairy/User Experience
Day 25 — Tempting/Market Research
