April 25, 2024 | Starglider Systems Blog

UX Design for Mobile Developers: Learn to Design a 5-Star Android App is an Udacity course about how to design your user experience for Android apps.

The course page suggest 6 weeks with about 6 hours per week.

Personally, I took the course in about 3 hours, but I mostly avoided using Prezi for the assignments. Prezi is used on the course to design cute boxes with the persona, their attributes, use cases and flows (how a user would perform a use case in the app). It looks like it would be lovely to wireframe the whole app and share with your team or clients, but for the flows it is actually used in the course, I think it is a whole lot simpler and faster to just use text.

I also had a rather simple app in mind for some of the assignments – a STG FolderPrint Plus extension for Android (yes, I realize for most people this doesn't make sense, I'd love to have a decent file catalog of my phone I can easily view and some people actually asked for it in the last survey). For anyone interested, I plan on making it for FPP 5.0, eventually.

There were some useful stuff in the course. They cover personas, use cases, several concrete ways to improve user flow (such as dropping forms entirely when possible) and the important constraints for mobile design.

The thing is, last year I saw another course that covered most of this elements and much more – App Making: Designing & Marketing Successful Apps (not an affiliate link).

So effectively, what I learned in this course was fairly minimal. I was really hoping for more of best practices UI coverage of examples.

Overall, not bad for a free course, but if you'd like more on how to design and market your apps, App Making: Designing & Marketing Successful Apps (not an affiliate link) is a much better resource – but you will pay for the difference.

PS: The course videos supported speeding up (1.25x feels great) and the closed captions are near perfect. Udacity also has an iOS/Android app, but it lacks those features on iOS so I didn't use it.

Chaos Planning, by Sean D'Souza, covers ways to plan while considering the chaos that usually affects the best laid plans.

The Premium version also includes Pronto Learning: Insiders Tips To Speed Up Your Learning .

Both are quite short and to the point – it took me about an hour to read them while taking notes.

The main principles of Chaos Planning are interesting – add extra time to your to-do lists and plans, so that they don't crumble when the unexpected happens.

Other ideas on Chaos Planning are:

– Write down and get external pressure (such as clients, friends or other people in a forum).

– Get actually competent at stuff you regularly do, instead of blundering through. Do a daily practice of 15 minutes to learn something – starting and stopping (a problem I commonly have) makes it hard to learn. Bring it with you for when you have to wait in lines – E-book reader apps are great for this, depending on your smartphone screen, or just take a physical book with you if possible.

– Go through what you want to learn several times, at increasing interval. I have read this several times before and have seen it on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Learning on Steroids, and the Superlearner course , so it is very much recommended. The hard thing is getting the time for it, but having good notes (that you wrote yourself – apparently these work much better than just copy and pasting book material) helps.

– Do pre-sells to get a real deadline. They also help test viability of a product and tend to help sales, and you can e-mail (and maybe send a bonus) and do refunds if you really can't pull it through. Sean also has a pre-sell course.

– Clear distractions, such as excessive e-mail newsletters (not mine, I hope!).

Pronto Learning: Insiders Tips To Speed Up Your Learning:

– Plan to teach what you learn, even if it is just mentioning it to an spouse or colleague, or maybe doing a blog post – your mindset is different and it is easier to find the gaps in what you learned. Actually applying what you learn is even better.

– Again, the repeated learning principle, recommending a week for the first time and then months.

– Take real breaks (not just going on Facebook or random sites) – take a 20 minutes nap, go to a cafe, etc.

– 15 minute principle, if you can't understand something, or solve a problem in 15 minutes, ask for help and take a break. Or look at Google/YouTube for a tutorial.

– Use dead time: listen to workshops or audiobooks while exercising, or read a book while waiting.

– Make a list of important tools and skills and go through them.

Conclusion

Overall, I think they were OK, and barely covers the asking price. Sean's stuff isn't cheap, but at least it is not packed with filler and it is a quick read. It definitely has useful information, though.