Everyone is a designer and should think about their product’s design. Life is too short to build apps no one wants!
We packed out the auditorium at our offices and were joined by Rikke Koblauch, UX and UI designer at ustwo, the studio behind the hit app Monument Valley. She gave us incredible insight into how ustwo approaches projects, what it means to be a UX/UI designer, and so much more.
Rikke is a product designer at ustwo working with big global brands to craft cool stuff for small screens. Her mobile design experience encompasses user experience (UX), concept development, and visual design. Outside of work, we found out that Rikke has created some awesome apps of her own through collaboration with Twitter followers.
She told us about her process of designing and building Steps, an app that helps people overcome social anxieties with fun and progressive challenges.
She talked about how she validated the idea by mapping out the market, talking to therapists and most importantly, testing with users. The usual approach to testing would be to build a prototype, but instead, she did something she called Pretotyping.
Pretotyping means you don’t build anything, but instead do the absolute minimum to get validation. So she started with SMS instead of coding up an app. She sent out daily challenges to friends and users helping them to overcome social anxiety through exposure therapy.
Pretotyping allowed Rikke and her team to go from initial idea to gathering insights in only a few days. We found this to be in-line with our own experience and what we teach our students in regards to the lean methodology and building minimal-viable-products instead of every possible feature.
About The App Brewery
The App Brewery is a leading tech education company. We enable people from non-technical backgrounds to quickly understand and get up to speed with the latest frontiers in technology. While we provide a whole range of bespoke corporate educational events, we also invest back into our community with our public courses on programming, design and digital marketing. Join one of our events today or contact us to find out more.