ARTS 347: Final Course Reflection

Creating a website and working on designing it has been an important part of this class for me as well, and something that I think will be beneficial to me in the future as I get closer to graduating and entering the job field in design to have that to show my work and essentially who I am as a designer. I definitely struggled to keep my website clean and not over-designed, and taking Professor Khalili’s advice that my website should let my work be the focus. Hopefully, though, as I continue working and establishing a brand for myself, I would like to have a logo and some other things to add some more charter and personality to my site. My goal is to expand on my site over winter break and include my work from previous semesters so that I can start sending it out in internship applications!

This is the last week of my ARTS 347 Interaction Design class. At the beginning of the semester, going into this course, I knew nothing about UI or UX design, and I was scared that I wasn't going to like it. It was intimidating at first, but I found that once I let myself learn and put the time and effort into learning this new way of design and new programs like Figma and Aero, I enjoyed the class and am excited about some of the work I was able to do. As the course progressed from smaller group exercises to learning figma through a single scrolling site, to then starting larger projects with multiple components, such as mobile and desktop prototypes to augmented reality, it was nice to have these sorts of stepping stones in the learning process as I was very new to interaction design coming into the class. One of the most exciting projects in this class was, by far, the opportunity to work on creating a class collaborative AR scavenger hunt for the CMA's Art and Draughts event. Being able to work with a client and go on-site and plan all these real-world things out was so different from anything I have done in previous design classes and gave me a good taste of what the real world of working in design is like. It was an incredible experience to see people interact with a project we worked so hard on as a class in real time something unique to interaction design is that the user becomes an active participant in the work itself. I think I've built a lot of technical skills and grown a lot as a designer in this course, and it has opened me up to the possibility of pursuing more opportunities in UI/UX design.

Overall, I had a lot of fun and enjoyed this class, and found I enjoyed UX design more than I thought I would. Thank you, Professor Khalili, for a great semester!