AdWork Redesign | Anik Ahmed

AdWork: A Mobile Redesign

Why A Redesign?

Pain + Self-Reflection = Growth - Ray Dalio

I wanted to improve my own visual design skills while also improving my understanding Laws of User Experience in order to create a better experience for my users.

To that end, I decided to critique my old design and discuss how my new design reflects a specific law of UX & why it is an improvement.

Layout & Familarity

People will think if something is aesthetically pleasing to look at, & have similar features from other applications as good design.

My original design had a lot of information stacked on top of each other but the fact that there was too much information gave users a sense of information overload.

The layout itself also may not have been intuitive to users that have used similar applications & thus would create further confusion when switching between matching & home feeds.

It broke the Aesthetic Usability Law & Jakob's Law.

Spacing, Typography, & Information Architecture

If there are too many options at once, people will be confused. If there are too many objects close together, they are grouped together.

The original design had too little spacing between its content. This created confusion on what was interactive vs what wasn't.

The lack of spacing also created an information overload to users because of the amount of content that was shown on particular pages such as the profile page & the hamburger menu.

My font/color pallette also did NOT mesh well & broke a few accessibility guidelines.

These examples broke the Law of Proximity & Hick's Law

Redesign Process

Sometimes, less is more

Taking all of the laws that my original design broke, I decided to go back to the drawing board, think about my primary inspirations for a new design, sketch a few iterations of what the new design can be & how a new user's journey would look like.

My motto for the new design was all about keeping it simple but familiar.

To this end, I implemented Occam's Razor in order to aid my design decisions and remind myself that sometimes having cool features isn't worth compromising useability/functionality.

The Actual Redesign

The design ended up utilizing Miller's Law which references people's memory only remembering 7 or fewer objects as well as Occam's razor as mentioned before.

The design's UI uses a regular dock at the bottom reminiscent of Instagram's dock (Jacob's Law) with a 'add new post' button in the middle, a button as a means to switch between the regular feed of posts, the matching with new clients, messaging, & payment methods.

My new design also uses the Roboto font instead of the 'janda manatee' font because it is more user friendly in terms of legibility & makes it look less cluttered. I also simplified my color palette to use a flamingo red as a complementary color but white as my primary color.

Overall my goal was to make my new design be familiar to users while also making it simpler by learning a few laws of UX.

It's always painful to look & critique your own designs but it's necessary growth as a designer & a person. as Ray Dalio once said:

Pain + Self-Reflection = Growth

Thank you for reading!