Notes
Objectives in Labs
What are Objectives?
Instead of Sprint Challenges, Labs uses Objectives to assess your understanding and your contributions to your project.
Objectives are your ticket to graduation—achieve them all, and you'll be ready to graduate! (Note that it will take a minimum of four sprints to achieve all your objectives, and you'll have up to eight sprints to do it.)
Your objectives are tailored to your role—another way to arm you with an experience more relevant to you.
Objective Types
Here's an example set of objectives:
![List of Labs objectives:
- [ ] Attend at least two Stakeholder Meetings for your product - [ ] Attend at least two Product Reviews for your product - [ ] Attend at least four Design Critique sessions - [ ] Pass `Labs` course - [ ] Pass `Labs: UX Engineer` course - [ ] Pass `Career Readiness` course - [ ] Peer-review at least six teammates on Searchlight - [ ] Submit at least six qualified pull requests - [ ] Review at least 10 pull requests from your team - [ ] Have at least one pull request merged](https://lambdaschool.instructure.com/courses/1544/files/384468/preview)
Note that generally, there are a few types of objectives:
Pass a course in Canvas
Attend meetings
Submit or review pull requests
Peer-review teammates in Searchlight
Other (role-specific)
Continue to the next page for information on how to use this course to track your Objectives throughout Labs.
How to Use This Course
This course houses and tracks all your objectives in Labs. You can visit it throughout Labs to track your progress toward graduation.
You'll find multiple modules in this course: this Introduction (you are here!), Graduation Objectives for your role, and Sprint Milestones.
At any time, you can return to view all the modules by clicking Modules in the left course menu.
Graduation Objectives
The module right after the Introduction contains your objectives—pass these, and you're eligible to pass Labs.
You'll notice these are in the form of "assignments," but they can't be submitted. All your objectives will be tracked and/or verified for you, and reflected here.
You'll also notice points assigned to each objective—don't worry about those, as they'll be used internally by staff as a normalized measure of progress.
Sprint Milestones
The other modules are Sprint Milestones—together, they're a roadmap laying out a path to achieve all your objectives in four sprints.
Each of these modules contains some bits of activity that will contribute toward your overall objectives.
For example, the above set of sprint milestones recommends what you'd need to do during your first sprint in Labs to stay on track to pass after four sprints.
Labs: Labs 101 means "Complete the module called Labs 101 in the Labs course in Canvas."
Similarly, Technical Project Manager: Training means "Complete the module called Training in the Labs: Technical Project Manager course in Canvas."
Use these sprint milestones as a guide to ensure you're on pace to achieve your objectives.
Questions? Concerns? Excitement?
Reach out to your Release Manager at any time for questions about achieving or tracking your objectives.
Happy achieving! 🚀
From here, you can view all the modules by clicking Modules in the left course menu.
UX Principles
What is UX?
If the title of this module didn't already give it away, UX stands for user experience. UX is, ultimately, what users experience when using a product.
We can hear you from here: "Well, that's vague." An apt observation! "UX" is a super general term, and it's also constantly evolving. That's largely because user experience is a relatively new area of study, and we're learning more and more as products and the technologies used to build them evolve at an exponential pace.
UX vs. UI
You've likely seen these terms bandied about, used interchangeably, or even in combination with each other: UI, UX, UI/UX, design, interaction design, UI design, UX design...
UI stands for user interface (though sometimes it can stand for "user interaction"—this isn't helping, is it...)
Ultimately, the distinction between these terms does matter, but it doesn't matter too much. What matters is that you understand that they represent various areas of focus that are ultimately trying to get at the same thing from different angles—how is a thing used?
User experience (UX) design focuses on what happens to the user when they use the thing.
User interface (UI) design focuses on the pieces of the thing the user interacts with—hopefully informed by an anticipation and understanding of what their experience will or should be.
UX Principles
useful
usable
desirable
valuable
findable
accessible
credible
Like our seven principles of design, these seven principles of UX certainly aren't the only way to break up and talk about UX. But they do give us a helpful anchor for discussion!
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