One of the best ICS class I have taken
13 May 2021Software engineering I at UH Manoa was one of the best class I’ve taken up till this very moment. I enjoy that class because I have learned many skills for web design in this class. While the class is call software engineering, the class focuses heavily on developing web apps. As someone who wants to become a UI/UX designer, this class was very beneficial to me. The class began with learning about Javascript, which is a very popular for web design. We built little programs using the language. Then I learned Html and CSS, which is another language that is also popular for web design. I didn’t expect Html and CSS to be the beginning of my UI design journey. With HTML and CSS in my toolkit, I began building a website that had very limited functions. However, I was able to code the size and color of the text, along with different pages within the website. The following skillsets I learned that was most beneficial to me was the User Interface Framework and Agile Project Management.
User Interface Framework
A User Interface Framework is a structure that defines the user interface. There are many User Interface Framework people have coded already. A developer can just use a framework to design interface element, rather than spending time on the structure of the interface. Learning User Interface Framework is very beneficial to me because UI/UX designer often uses the frameworks for the web development. In bigger companies like Facebook and Google, their UI/UX designer code their own framework. Those frameworks help their UI/UX and full stack developers to design their own website more easily. While I don’t want to code the frameworks itself, in the future I will be using the frameworks to design different aspect of my website. If I want to code an aesthetic way to display a picture on a website. I would just look into the framework API and choose a specific design to the frame to showcase the picture. The User Interface Framework was a powerful tool I learned.
Agile Project Management
Agile Project Management is breaking a big project into number of milestones and diving the task of the milestone into separate parts for each team member to work on. Agile Project Management is crucial for UI/UX designer because they often work in teams. The project the designers faces are big in terms of workload. Is important for a team to be able to set multiple milestones, so they can break the project into smaller pieces and set a date when to finish the pieces by. That way the team have a clear goal at each different stages of the project, rather than have different team member to be working at different stages. It was also important that I got to experience how to communicate with my team members as a developer. Issues I experience in a software engineering project is different from issues I face with other courses. One of the things that was key to the communication was giving an update to other group members on what I’ve completed, so the group member can start developing on a task that rely on my code. Agile Project Management is skill that is not only important to UI/UX designer, but for any developer who will be working in a team.
