Ux Design Foundations: Research, Design, Usability Testing

UX Research and Design: Everything you need to get started as a UX Designer or to add UX skills to your current role.

What you'll learn

UX Design thinking: How to think like a UX Designer and get into the UX mindset

UX in Business: How to match Business Goals with User Needs to create a solid UX strategy

User Research: How to learn all about your users - Who they are and What they need

UX Research: How to conduct effective Research and Testing on your designs

UX Definitions, Origins and Roles: Get a grounding in the theory that will make you sound like a Pro

UX Process: How to plan and carry out UX Research and Design activities

User Interviews and Surveys: How to get the insight you need from your users through communicating with them directly

Interaction Design: How to map out user flows to create user journeys that will make your product easy to use and enable users to achieve their goals

Information Architecture: How to create content categories that users will understand, to allow them to easily find your content

UX Design: How to design layouts of your screens, using Sketching and Wireframing, to optimally position every element of your interface

Prototyping: How to create simple Prototypes which you can use to Usability Test and Demo the interactivity of your product

Usability testing: How to plan and conduct usability testing with real users, to gain insights into how well your design works on real users

Requirements

No previous knowledge, skills or experience is required.

Equipment: A computer with web browser and internet connection. Pen and paper.

Software: If you choose to do the practical exercises you will need to set up Free accounts for some online UX tools, most importantly, Figma.

Description

In this course you’ll learn all the basics of the full end-to-end UX research and design process, including the theory and core practical skills, which will enable you to put UX methods into practice right away. You will discover how to learn about your users and to design effective and engaging digital experiences that will meet their needs.We begin with an Introduction to UX, to provide you with a solid foundation about What UX is, the UX Design Process, UX Strategy and UX Design Thinking.Then we explore UX Research, looking at why research is such an important part of UX Design, before covering all the key Qualitative and Quantitative research methodologies you’ll need to know, in order to integrate effective user research insight into your design process.Next you’ll be introduced to the 10 Usability heuristics and a range of key UX Design Principles, to help you create usable and pleasurable designs that look good and work well. These will also provide you with a good basis for evaluating other peoples designs.You will then learn about Information Architecture and how to structure your content categories or website sections in a way which makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for. You’ll also learn how to create user flows, to design every interaction in the user journey, so users can easily complete their tasks and use your design successfully and enjoyably.Then we’ll look at how to lay out all the elements of your design in a way which will make it easy to use and aesthetically pleasing. We start with Sketching to roughly outline where each element will go, before crafting our layout designs into digital Wireframes using Figma.Next we’ll look at Prototyping, exploring the different methods and techniques to create prototypes before learning how to develop our Figma wireframes into a simple clickable Prototype, which can be used to demonstrate and test the interactivity of our design.Finally, we’ll cover the full process of designing and conducting Usability testing sessions, which will enable you to test your prototype with real users. This will provide insight into the Usability and User Experience of your design and help you identify where it can be improved, in order to fully optimise the User Experience.There are 2 ways to take this course -Theory & Practice: If you’d like to pursue a path to becoming a UX Designer, you can watch the lectures and also carry out the Practical exercises - which build upon each other to provide you with an end-to-end UX research and design project. The completed project could be the first piece in your UX portfolio.Theory only: If you simply want to learn more about UX (if you’re not seeking to become a UX practitioner, but you want to expand your knowledge about UX), you can just watch the lectures and skip the Practical exercises. This is great for those working in digital professions who want to collaborate more effectively with UX practitioners as well as bring some more UX knowledge into their own role.Please note: This is not a Software training course, although we include 2 very simple, basic Figma tutorials to help complete beginners with the Practical exercises in Wireframing and Prototyping.This course is focussed on UX methods, theory, process and principles. All the knowledge you need to get started as a UX practitioner. There are many different tools available for UX design (discussed in the course) and 1000s of tutorials for them available online, so once you know how to approach a UX project (which you will learn in this course) you can start learning your chosen software and putting it into practice.This course is taught by Mazy Burns, a UX Professional since 2006 and former Masters degree Lecturer at the University of the Arts London.

Overview

Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 About the course

Lecture 2 Introduction to UX

Lecture 3 Good and Bad examples of UX

Lecture 4 Origins of UX

Lecture 5 UX Terminology

Lecture 6 Everyday UX + UX Thinking Exercise

Lecture 7 Key roles in UX

Lecture 8 The UX Process

Lecture 9 The 5 Planes of UX

Lecture 10 UX Strategy + Business Goals and User Needs Exercise

Section 2: UX Research

Lecture 11 Introduction to UX Research

Lecture 12 Key UX Research Methods: The UX Research toolkit

Lecture 13 User Survey and Interview Do's and Don'ts

Lecture 14 Practical Exercise: Design a User Research Survey

Lecture 15 Introduction to User Personas

Lecture 16 Competitor Analysis for UX

Lecture 17 Practical Exercise: Competitor Analysis for UX

Section 3: UX and UI Design Priciples

Lecture 18 The 10 Usability Heuristics

Lecture 19 Key UX Design Principles

Lecture 20 Gestalt Design Principles for UX

Section 4: UX Design Part 1: Designing the Structure

Lecture 21 UX Design part 1 Introduction

Lecture 22 Information Architecture

Lecture 23 Card-sorting to create user-centred content categorisation

Lecture 24 Practical Exercise: Card-sorting

Lecture 25 Interaction Design: creating User Flows

Lecture 26 Practical Exercise: Create a User Flow

Section 5: UX Design Part 2: Designing the Skeleton

Lecture 27 UX Design Part 2 Introduction

Lecture 28 UX Sketching

Lecture 29 UX Wireframes

Lecture 30 How to Create Wireframes

Lecture 31 Figma Wireframing Tutorial

Lecture 32 Practical Exercise: Create a set of Wireframes

Section 6: UX Prototyping

Lecture 33 UX Prototyping Introduction

Lecture 34 Types of UX Prototypes

Lecture 35 Figma Prototyping tutorial

Lecture 36 Practical Exercise: Create a simple Prototype

Section 7: Usability Testing

Lecture 37 Introduction to Usability Testing

Lecture 38 About Usability Testing

Lecture 39 Types of Usability Testing

Lecture 40 Designing a Usability Test

Lecture 41 Prototype Usability Testing

Lecture 42 Usability Test recruitment

Lecture 43 Usability Test logistics

Lecture 44 Usability Test moderation

Lecture 45 Usability Test reporting and presenting

Lecture 46 Practical Exercise: Usability Test your prototype

Lecture 47 Course conclusion: Next Steps

Complete beginners who want to learn about UX,Aspiring User Researchers,Aspiring UX Designers,Digital Professionals who want to expand their UX knowledge, including: Project Managers, Product Managers, Digital MD’s, Digital Marketers, Web Developers, Web Designers, Content Editors, Graphic Designers, User Interface Designers, Researchers (non UX), SEO practitioners and all other roles in a digital team.