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Design your UX learning journey

  • These challenges should take no longer than 30 minutes to complete! Sometimes we provide additional modules to help you understand a concept.

  • You’ll learn about research, context gathering and of course ideation!

  • IF you are going to progress in your UX career, you absolutely need to know and understand business thinking so that you can work with diverse stakeholders.

  • Its important to be able to define constraints for your project or problem and scope it to MVP (minimum viable product).

1.Empathy & ethical design foundation.

So today’s empathy challenge is to find a community or user-group that you would like to help, who is vastly different from you. And then go and empathize with them by talking to at least 1 person from that community. 


This will force you to step outside of your comfort zone and try to put yourself in the shoes of people who are very unlike you. This is also when the true practice of empathy begins. Can you empathize with people who are unlike you and whom you might not even like as individuals?

2.Define core values for your design project.

For today’s challenge, we want you to choose a project topic that really resonates with you, but also challenges you. This project topic will be used for the remaining challenges this month.

This could be a project topic you choose based on what you’re passionate about. For example, Angelina chose to focus on holistic wellness for women because she was passionate about how this topic applied to her own life. She was also interested in helping her friends with holistic wellness. Lyndsey also chose to focus on learning more about the women in her life with her project topic. 

Or it could be a project topic that you choose based on what you’ve known in the past. For example, Jennifer chose to focus on caregivers of the elderly because she had been a therapist for the elderly for many years. 

What UX/UI Design or Research job best suits your personality and work style?

Take 2 minutes to take our personality quiz and get recommendations for how to focus your job search and your UX learning!

3.Eliminate the competition.

Your UX challenge for today is…doing some secondary research about competitors in your topic space and then finding niche subtopics in your space where there is little or no competition. This is how you can start to focus your project topic and position it better. Try and interview at least one prospective user who is a part of your niche space.

For example, Yasmine was passionate about the topic of beauty and skincare but realized that this was a supersaturated market (i.e, there were a lot of competing products in that space).  So, she chose to focus on male skincare products as she got more specific about her project topic. She realized that by taking on this unique angle, she could position her product idea in a way where she wouldn’t have to compete with too many other brands, since most brands focus on female skincare. 

4.Rapid ideation activities to try.

Today’s challenge for you is to come up with 15 hand-drawn ideas or sketches for your topic space in 15 minutes. Do you feel that’s do-able? 

Now you might be thinking that’s a little crazy…15 ideas in just 15 minutes! 

This is known as a rapid ideation exercise and it forces us to think outside the box and not take any one of our ideas too seriously.

This also helps us eliminate over-thinking! So don’t think too hard- just go for it! Grab a pencil and paper and time yourself. Ready! Set! Go! 

5.Fear of failure and experimentation.

For TODAY’s UX challenge, we want you to follow along with our Redesign Airbnb ideation workshop. As you go through the workshop, we want you to consciously try to overcome YOUR fear of failure and develop a more playful and open-minded mindset towards idea generation. 

Let yourself go! Just have fun and sketch out a whole bunch of ideas! You got this! :) 

After you go through the session, try and repeat a rapid sketching ideation session for YOUR project idea. Can you still remain playful and self-motivated?

6.Emotional storytelling and managing stakeholders.

Today’s challenge for you is to talk through a 5-minute “elevator pitch” of your idea and why it’s important. What’s the problem? What’s the best possible solution?

Practice your storytelling, particularly emotional storytelling. Let’s see if your elevator pitch convinces friends and family members that your project idea could have a HUGE impact on the world. How do they react to your pitch?

“I kind of just made the decision that it was like, I invested in myself, so I'm going to show up for myself. I do need to change careers. I don't want to be in the same spot a year from now.”

Lyndsey, Ideate Labs Spring 2022

“I don't know if I would have been brave enough to do this freelance project without going through the bootcamp. I think that the basic skills that I'm using are skills that that I've had as a therapist, as a person, it's not that different. “

Jennifer, Ideate Labs Spring 2022

“My imposter syndrome came from not having any formal training in it. And I know everyone says, there is no formal training, but like, there is there is some formal training you can get.”

Maggie, Ideate Labs Spring 2022

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  • We talk about successful mindsets and tips to ace the career pivot. injust 6 months.

Top 6 Tips to Get Hired as a UX Designer

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