Whether you’re a newbie or a pro who has been in the industry for years, you know that in order to grow and stay relevant, you need to keep learning. Learning new trends, and techniques in this rapidly changing world of technology gives us a feeling of accomplishment, which in turn boosts our confidence in our own capabilities. Acquiring new skills will unveil new opportunities and help you find innovative solutions to problems.
There is a multitude of books, articles, videos, podcasts, and various other resources that can help you gain that knowledge, but information without implementation isn’t the best way to learn and get ahead.
“One learns from books and examples only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.” – Frank Herbert
Now we aren’t saying that books, articles, videos, podcasts, and various other resources that can help you gain that knowledge are unnecessary, in fact, they are as crucial as practical learning. But we’re saying that in order to make the most out of that knowledge we’ve obtained through these resources, we need to put what we’ve learned into practice.
But where do we start? How do we know what to practice? Worry not as we have created this list of websites that offer UX/UI challenges that you can use in a practical way to enhance and elevate your skills. Each website is unique and will offer challenges with a slightly different approach, but all of these have one thing in common, they will help you get better at UX/UI.
UX Tools
Great UX challenges on this platform with plenty of information about the challenges. These challenges are divided into 4 parts,
- Understand (which includes user interview, journey map, competitive analysis, user persona, empathy map)
- Ideate (which includes user flow, wireframe, and digital prototype)
- Test (which includes usability, card sorting, survey, heuristic evaluation, diary study)
- Implement (which includes design systems, accessibility, forms, information architecture, and onboarding)
The best part about challenges on UX Tools is that they have added plenty of tutorials, articles, guides, and other resources that can be incredibly helpful with the project.
UPlabs
Uplabs is another great website that offers UX/UI challenges. Challenges on this platform are more like contests. The winner of the challenge will have their work featured in Uplabs’ newsletter that goes out to some big names in the industry like people from Google, Facebook, and Airbnb.
In my opinion, this is a great way to motivate young and upcoming designers as well as professionals who have been working in this niche and want to keep improving their game plus get some more exposure.
DailyUI
Daily UI is another great service that will send you UI challenges to your email inbox over the span of 100 days. Each day you will receive an element to design (don’t worry, they will not send you challenges on weekends). Some challenges are intentionally high-level, so it’s up to you to interpret how to design it (i.e. mobile vs web, full-page vs one component, etc.) You can also post your work for feedback on Dribble or Twitter with #dailyui and your prompt number (ex. “Just finished my first design for #dailyui #001”).
UXchallenge
UXchallenge is an amazing website that offers a handful of excellent UX challenges that will get you thinking and working. All challenges have products that are made to solve these real-world problems for customers. Challenges are focused on the product categories, like smart home or transportation, so your portfolio is packed with relevant case studies when you send it off to Google, Uber, or (insert your dream company here).
UI Coach
UI coach, as its name suggests, is a challenge generator to practice UI design. Click generate challenge on the home page and you will be given a prompt, a color palette, a font combination, and an illustration library to use. If you happen to not like one, or any, of those task details, you can refresh the specific part of the task details given to you and get a different combination.
The best part about UI coach, in my opinion, is that it also works as an anonymous feedback platform. Sign in, upload your design, and wait for other people to give you their opinions and suggestions, and that is a great way to know and learn things from other people’s perspectives.
Sharpen Design
Sharpen has over 16 million design prompts. Yes, you read that correctly. Sharpen generates open-ended project prompts that reinforce critical problem solving, curiosity, and creativity across 21 different categories and 2 unique generators.
What we love about this prompt generator is that you have the option of choosing prompts for branding, marketing, or product/UX design.
Designercize
Designercize is another impressive prompt generator for UX/UI design. Something unique about this prompt generator that we really like is that you can choose the difficulty level according to your preference. And if you want to get better at time management, Designercize also has a timer to help you with training your speed and getting better at that.
Fakeclients
Fakeclients is another great website that generates prompts for you to work on. But it’s not limited to UX or UI, it can generate prompts for logo design, graphic design, web design, illustrations, as well as content writing. It is one of our favorites because the website offers fun exercises that can help you in your learning process. Moreover, you can upload your work and get feedback as well, which is very helpful when you’re learning.
sketchingforux.com
Sketchingforux.com, as the name suggests, is a website that lets you practice sketching UX design. Sign up for the newsletter and you will receive a great UX Sketching Challenge (daily) — it will take 5–10 minutes/day. The topics include UX design, UI design, service design, sketching & visual thinking, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, product development, and basically anything that might be useful for designers working on digital products or services. If you subscribe to the newsletter, you’ll be receiving Sketching for UX Designers WORKBOOK for free.
100Daysofproductdesign
100 days of product design is another great resource that you can use to practice product design and up your game. They have a great collection of everything that you need to learn to be a product designer. Challenge topics include design thinking, empathy maps, journey maps, user personas, user goals, task lists, user flow, conducting interviews, wireframes, mobile-first design, design systems, process, sprints, and many many more.
Conclusion
As UX/UI designers we need to constantly be in a place of learning new trends and techniques to stay relevant and in the game. The resources are available to us in abundance these days and we just need to utilize them. We just need to find and make the most out of them. Hopefully, with these amazing UX/UI challenges you can create some portfolio-worthy projects that will benefit you in the long run. Keep practicing!
