Over the weekend of May 17-20 2019, two volunteers from the Erasmus Mundus Association traveled to Brussels to attend a training on introductory concepts to UX/UI Design. The training was organized by ESN and funded by ESAA. Most of the participants were from various ESN organizations around Europe and had experience with coding and IT. The purpose of the training was to bring together talented people who could work together to create a framework for a new ESN website. ESN was able to invite participants from the other ESAA organizations. Thus EMA, GaragErasmus, and OCEANS attended the training.
UX/UI Design stands for User Experience and User Interface design. Both of these elements work together and are equally important for website developers. While UX deals mostly with the ‘backend’ (i.e. functionality and usability of the website), and UI deals more with design (branding, graphics, adaptation to all screen sizes, etc.).
The training was run by two UX/UI designers and creators, Jan Hruby and Emmanouil F. Ioannidis, and took place over two full days at the ESN office in Brussels. In a fully packed weekend, we learned all the basics from font hierarchy to color theory to prototyping. Also, the trainers have elaborated the different concepts with examples and critiqued the different Erasmus+ websites such as the ESN satellite sites. The trainers elucidated the dos and don’ts of website building like limiting the depth of navigation menu, SEO boosting for the websites through appropriate keywords and content optimization based on the analytics, optimizing the site for different devices is crucial for delivering the content to the end users.
The attending EMA volunteers represented two important teams: Srinivasa Raghavendra Bhuvan Gummidi from the IT team and Gabriella Mikiewicz from the Communications team. Bringing together these two volunteers with different backgrounds, skills, and perspectives would allow the best possible understanding of UX/UI to take place, and for the volunteers to be able to share their new knowledge with the rest of EMA properly.
Report by: Gabriella Mikiewicz from the Communications team & Srinivasa Raghavendra Bhuvan Gummidi from the IT team
