UX Design Foundations: Research, Design, Usability Testing

Description

In this course you’ll learn the basics of the end-to-end UX research and design process, including the theory and some key practical skills, which will enable you to start putting UX research and design methods into practice right away.

We begin with an Introduction to UX, to provide you with a 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 outlining some key Qualitative and Quantitative research methodologies, in order to integrate 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 it is used to structure 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 about user flows and how they’re used to design every interaction in the user journey.

Then we’ll look at how to lay out all the elements 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, introducing 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 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.

Also, please be aware, this is not a UI (User Interface) Design course (which is a vast specialism in itself), it is a UX Design course. Therefore doesn't cover visual design skills specifically (although we run through many relevant design principles) However, everything in this course provides a strong foundation for any student wishing to study UI design further.

This course is taught by Mazy Burns, a UX Professional since 2006 and former Masters degree Lecturer at the University of the Arts London.

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