Learn UX Design

November 06, 2017

This 35-part course consists of tutorials on UX Design, including topics like User Research, Visual Design, the Sprint Process, etc.

Once done, you will have an excellent conceptual and practical understanding of what the field of UX looks like, how users interact with your products, how to go about improving your users’ experience, as well as have a toolbox of a few processes to get you started right away.

The primary objectives of this course are:

Understand what is UX Design, and how is it much more than making your app look pretty.
How to design various foundational components of your site/app — including the homepage, the navigation, and the search.
How to run Usability Tests to find out the major flaws in your design that annoy users.
Understand what various design frameworks like Human-Centered Design, Lean UX, etc. mean.
Understand the UX Research Process: What are User Goals, Task Lists, User Flows, Empathy Maps & Journey Maps? How do you use these to make User Personas? How do you use all these to make more usable and delightful products?
Understand basics of good visual design including visual hierarchy, typography, color theory, etc.
Understand the most popular UX Design process: the Sprint Process, and be able to run a sprint with your team.
Work on a few capstone projects to start building up your UX Designer Portfolio.

Subscribe to add this course to the top of your Home Page. Get started with the first article below.

Introduction

What is UX Design?

A very quick overview of UX Design

Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think” is considered a classic amongst UX Designers. In the following four tutorials, we’ll go through the least you can do today to make your website a lot more usable. It’s a good way to jump into the field, and once done, you’ll already feel like you can start making contributions to improve your site’s UX.

Researching and Strategizing UX

This section will help you develop a framework to think about how your users experience your product. Starting from Human Centered Design and Lean UX approaches, we will look at how we should approach the process of designing products while keeping the user in focus. After this, we will look into BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model which gives a good framework to think about why certain behaviors happen, and how we can design new behaviors. We will end this section with a summary of Nir Eyal’s ideas on building habit-forming products.

Sketching UX

This section starts with an overview of what UX Research methods you can use, and when you should consider using them. It should get you familiarized with the process to do your user research, create user personas, quickly build your prototypes, and write effective copy that works for your product.

A sample UX process: The Sprint

The Sprint Process is a UX Design process. It brings together a host of ideas that we have discussed throughout the course and puts them together in a 5-day process. You’ll revisit how to map out the users’ journey through your product, make a prototype, and test it with real users.

Conclusion

Hopefully you’re comfortable with UX Design Process to some extent at this point. This section will help you think about how to get started with building your UX Portfolio, and what other places you can go to, or books you can read to keep improving your UX Design skills.

Practice Projects

This section covers a few real-life projects that you can work on to start off your portfolio. The Commonlounge team will critique each submission, and will consider implementing solutions you propose to the actual product! This is a great chance to get some real-life UX experience :)