# 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.

![Module: Graduation Objectives: Technical Project Manager](https://lambdaschool.instructure.com/courses/1544/files/384467/preview)

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.

![Example Sprint Milestones for Sprint 1](https://lambdaschool.instructure.com/courses/1544/files/384469/preview)

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.**

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## 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

in 2004, [Peter Morville (Links to an external site.)](http://semanticstudios.com/user_experience_design/) defined a core set of seven UX principles determining whether users will get value out of an experience:

* 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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