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Insanely fast redesign exercises
How to grow as a UI designer the quick (but not the easy) way.
Design is hard work.
There are a couple of factors that influence how good you are at UI design: experience — or the sheer number of designs you completed — being the most important one. You can’t go around this — you need to design nearly every day, likely for a few years to be great. I designed over 400 different products in the last ten years, and that fact is the primary confidence builder.
However, you can improve a couple of other factors, especially one that’s often neglected:
The input-output lag between your brain and your hands.
Shut up, brain! 🤫🧠
We tend to overthink a lot of things and hesitate with important decisions. But it’s better to be wrong — learn from it — and adjust than to not take any action at all. You’ll discover that by not letting your brain think for too long can lead to extraordinary results, and quick!
Comfort zone?
It was a cold October evening in my hometown of Sopot, Poland. I was standing on the beach, shivering in the cold wind and thinking: “how am I going to do this?”
A couple of hours later, I was supposed to do a 1-hour live redesign in front of an audience of about 50 people. Doing things quick has already been something I’m confident with but in front of an audience?
That’s seriously stepping out of my comfort zone.
Imagine not having the time to think, yet 50 sets of eyes are watching your every cursor move. Scary, right? The stress was overwhelming before the event, but I pushed it away and stepped into the unknown. I remember seeing about 5–10 people in line 15 minutes before the event begun. I kept thinking, “well, that’s good…
