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10 UI & UX Lessons from Designing My Own Product
Lessons from designing and launching my product from scratch.
In 2016, I recognized that I wasn’t achieving my goals, learning new skills, meeting new people, getting in shape, or focusing on my mental health not because I wasn’t motivated, but because I wasn’t tracking it.
Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” This maxim became the cornerstone that I used to transform my life. With that quote in mind, I decided to outline my goals and then break them down into simple habits that I could achieve in bite-sized amounts daily.
I began tracking my learning, fitness, and mental health with a piece of grid paper and the days of the week. I tracked my habits religiously for years and saw my life incrementally transform into one where I no longer saw the goals I wanted to achieve as unobtainable. I saw every objective as something that I could achieve by staying consistent and chipping away at it day by day.
After years of tracking my habits on paper because I couldn’t find a product that met my needs, my co-founder Wilson and I resolved to upgrade my habit tracking. We built a free web app and Chrome extension called Confetti — a colorful daily habit tracker that launches confetti for every completion to celebrate your daily accomplishments.
In my 4+ years of product design, this is the first product I’ve designed from start to finish entirely on my own, which taught me a lot. In this article, I’ll be sharing those insights, UI & UX lessons, and things I wish I’d done differently.
1. Define features for launch
At the outset, my co-founder and I had a rough prototype that I designed for the three main screens. We didn’t…
