Zero Requirement Exercise

This article was originally published on June 18, 2020

Over the last couple of weeks, I engaged in a fun exercise to help my creativity. I have found that when working on long-term projects it is easy for your creativity to become stagnant and to feel like you’re stuck behind a block.

To help stretch my creativity I started a “Zero Requirement Exercise”. I generalized the goals of an existing side project and just started coming up with UI with no thought regarding requirements, specs, restrictions, etc. This helped me look past the blocks I was up against and loosen up a bit. It was also a great opportunity to experiment with new tools.

Here is the final prototype that the exercise produced:

Here are a couple of detailed view of the different key states:

I recorded and documented each step of the process on TikTok, linked below:

Part One: Intro and UI design (Figma) timelapse.

Part Two: UI design continuation

Part Three: UI design continuation (supplemental states)

Part Four: Animated prototype creation (Protopie)