5 fun online games to sharpen your UX design skills – SiliconRepublic.com

by Jenny Darmody
25 Nov 2022
Whether you’re just getting to grips with UX design concepts or you’re an expert looking to keep your pencil sharp, these games will help.
User experience (UX) design is an important skill that brings art and technology together to give end users a positive experience with digital products and platforms.
UX design is a growing space in Ireland and last year, UX design companies such as Each&Other and Lucky Beard said they were expanding in the country and looking to hire design talent.
If you’re just starting out on our career, you’ll need to start with understanding the fundamentals of UX design, the different disciplines, and how to get started and land your first UX job.
Just like other technical skills such as SQL, cybersecurity and JavaScript, it’s important to constantly expand your knowledge and hone your UX design skills to stay on top of your game. Luckily, there are plenty of interactive games and online learning platforms that can help you in that department.
One of the most important skills in a UX designer’s wheelhouse is having a strong knowledge and understanding of design concepts, including hierarchy, alignment and typography.
Can’t Unsee gives the user the opportunity to test that knowledge by showing two design components and asking which one is the more user-friendly option. They may look similar, but good UX designers will notice small differences that impact the user experience.
Colour plays a major role in UX design and having the ability to identify hues and saturation as well as complementary colour pairings will be important when creating your own designs.
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To brush up on your colour skills, Color is a game that challenges you in all of these areas by showing an interactive colour wheel and asking you identify colours within a limited time. It also asks you to match colours for triadic and tetradic colour schemes.
Any UX designer will know that if any element on a design is even slightly misaligned, it impacts the overall look. Properly aligned elements creates a proper connection between them and paints an effective complete picture.
It’s Centred That is a good game for training a designer’s alignment skills and sharpens their abilities to catch spacing mistakes and misalignments instantly by asking you to figure out if a dot is centred inside a shape.
For UX designers who want to brush up on their pen tool abilities, The Bézier Game will help users create more precise graphics and test their vector skills.
The game guides you in drawing simple geometric shapes along with more complex shapes with as few anchor points as possible. The fewer anchor points you use, the better. The game gives designers an opportunity to practise their pen tool skills without ruining any of their own work in Photoshop or Illustrator.
UX designers looking for their next job may need to complete a whiteboard exercise as part of their assessment. Leading an ideation session or a design sprint is an important skill, but having to do that in front of another person can make it even more difficult.
That’s where Designercize comes in. This app was created to act as an digital version of an analogue whiteboard exercise to help users get better at designing out loud. It can be used to practise on your own, but it’s worth considering involving another person to create a more realistic whiteboarding session.
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Related: Know-How, education, skills, UX
Jenny Darmody became the editor of Silicon Republic in 2023, having worked as the deputy editor since February 2020. When she’s not writing about the science and tech industry, she’s writing short stories and attempting novels. She continuously buys more books than she can read in a lifetime and pretty stationery is her kryptonite. She also believes seagulls to be the root of all evil and her baking is the stuff of legends.
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