Weekly Roundup - 18th-22nd September 2017

Weekly Roundup September 2017

Monday 18th September 2017

It’s been a crazy few weeks with me finishing up at LEAP and accepting a new offer for a Senior UX Designer role with a company in Erina called PropertySafe. I’ll be documenting my journey as I work with the guys to create innovative and exceptional user experiences throughout their whole software offering. My main focus right now is a new project which I’m not able to go in to detail about just yet, so I will refer to it as ‘The Project’

As per my usual routine, I started my day with a solid workout. It felt good going back to the old stomping ground (Erina Anytime Fitness) where Coops and I used to train.

Met the whole team, everyone seems really nice. Got a full tour of the office and shown where everything is. Makes things so much easier to be shown everything on the first day. It’s safe to say the whole on-boarding experience was a success.

My daily tasks just got a lot better with a new 27′ iMac set up, full creative cloud account to be able to smash out the work. I have a similar set up at home so it’s great to be able to work on the same OS.

Josh, the Lead Developer went over their workflow process, they use Atlassian Confluence for project collaboration and documentation (which is awesome). It gives the team a single source of the truth and the team can see exactly how the project is progressing.

Had lunch at Nutrition Station located in the new Element building. Had the Crispy Chicken Bacon Wrap with sweet potato chips. I know where I’ll be a regular now. Really good!

Josh also showed me a new resource he recently found called draw.io which is perfect for creating user flows and architecture diagrams. Got straight onto that once I set up the iMac and started to map out the current user journey that has been developed to give me an idea of how we should proceed moving forward.

So far I’ve mapped out 20 pages in the application and have spotted a whole bunch of items that will need to be amended at some point.

There are a whole bunch of tasks to do but the plan for tomorrow is to create a new photoshop art board and start designing the pages and aligning them with the overall brand and ensuring elements throughout the application remain consistent.

Monday Back Workout

  • Warm up with Lat Pulldown
  • 3 x (12 reps) 54kg Lat Pulldown
  • 3 x (12 reps) 120kg High Row
  • 3 x (12 reps) 80kg Low Row
  • 3 x 6 reps Leg Raises
  • 15 mins Cross Trainer
  • 15 mins Sit Down Bike

Tuesday 19th September 2017

Got in the office early after my workout and got the Photoshop art boards set up along with starting to create the asset library. The main task for this weeks sprint is creating a UX review document of the current application, so I got a start on that.

I could be back on the coffee train too! The guys normally go for an afternoon coffee, so I tagged along and thought I’d get one with them. So far so good and it didn’t make me spend the rest of the afternoon on the can.

Tuesday Chest Workout

  • 3 x (12 reps) 60kg Plated Incline Machine Press
  • 3 x (12 reps) 40kg Bench Press
  • 3 x (12 reps) 16kg High Cable Flys
  • 3 x (12 reps) 12kg Low Cable Flys
  • 3 x (12 reps) 80kg Low Press
  • 10 mins Cross Trainer

Wednesday 20th September 2017

After doing some research last night on Sketch and its use for application design, I purchased it today and it’s bloody awesome!! It has a flexible workflow with support for multiple pages and artboards. Features like symbols and shared styles make reusing elements so easy and ensures the application stays consistent across pages. I update a symbol and it automatically updates across all artboards.

I got all the artboards set up with the application flow and started redesigning elements of the application that are the focus for the current sprint. Designed several options for a few different key elements and started to create a full design library.

Seeing as I’m on my new iMac set up, I decided to sign up to Spotify Happy days! Tunes on and let the creative juices roll.

Wednesday Legs Workout

  • 4 x (12 reps) 45kg Leg Press
  • 4 x (12 reps) 40kg V-Squat
  • 4 x (12 reps) 25kg Leg Curl
  • 15 mins Sit Down Bike
  • 15 mins Cross Trainer

Thursday 21st September 2017

Getting more into the flow of things now. In at the office early, have our daily scrum meeting with the guys and then get down to business.

I spent most of the day working on designing pages and elements for the project.

Thursday Shoulder Workout

  • 4 x (12 reps) 25kg Shoulder Press
  • 4 x (12 reps) 40kg Iso-Lateral Shoulder Press
  • 4 x (12 reps) 8kg Cable Raises
  • 4 x (12 reps) 28kg Upright Cable Row
  • 15 mins Cross Trainer

Friday 22nd September 2017

I finalised the UX review document I started earlier in the week, ready for next Mondays meeting with the guys. So far it has 74 items to review! Pretty sure the dev guys are going to hate me after this!

The next few weeks are going to be quite busy working with the dev guys though to get the project design aligned and the user journey right. Bring it!

So far I am settling in well. The experience of working in web for the past 12 years has allowed me to become agile and adapt to just about any situation. I’ve launched hundreds of successful projects and this is just like any other project. I’m going in with the right mindset and with the right team behind it, we’re going to make this one a huge success.

Friday Arms Workout

  • Warm up cable curls and tricep pulldowns
  • 4 x (12 reps) 16kg Dumbbell Bicep Curls superset with 16kg Dumbbell Hammer Curls
  • 4 x (12 reps) 32kg V-Bar Tricep Pushdowns
  • 4 x (12 reps) 25kg Barbell Curls superset with 60kg Tricep Pushdowns
  • 4 x (12 reps) 28kg Cable Hammer Curls
  • 15 mins Cross Trainer