We pair you with a mentor who has extensive professional and academic knowledge of the field. You’ll have one-on-one conversations with him or her, and receive useful feedback on improving your work.
Each week, you’ll complete a series of videos, quizzes, slideshows and projects through our online platform – available to access at any time. Scheduling time for a mentoring session is just as flexible.
Our mentors are here to keep you motivated, answer questions, provide feedback, and help deepen your understanding of essential tools and techniques.
How to design for human-system experiences and interactions so that they are desirable, pleasurable, and engaging? This course focuses on understanding and appreciating underlying principles, frameworks, and methods of envisioning and communicating great experiences and Interactions. The unit will introduce key topics such as UX, Design research, Journey Maps, Principles of Interaction design, Requirement, Information Architecture and Task-Flow modeling, Ideation and Concept Development, and Design Validation.
■ Explain course expectations in terms of pre-work, homework, projects, office hours, Schoology, etc.
■ Define the elements of User Experience Design.
■ Develop basic skills in creative problem solving, innovation, and human-centered design through a fast-paced design thinking activity.
■ Sketch out potential design solutions to the problem you have defined.
■ Practice adapting to rapidly changing stakeholder requirements.
■ Create a paper prototype of your proposed solution.
■ Present designs and justify design decisions.
■ Describe the skills required to conduct and recruit for an effective user interview.
■ Define contextual inquiry and articulate its benefits.
■ Prepare unbiased interview questions.
■ Conduct an effective user interview.
■ Draft a research plan and write a discussion guide for final project interviews.
■ Compare products in the same space or in adjacent industries, including competitive reviews and task analyses.
■ Conduct competitive research to help inform your final project concept.
■ Explore how surveys and task analysis inform research.
■ Effectively synthesize research into a problem statement and design direction that reflects the primary need of your target audience.
■ Apply sketching techniques to ideate through solutions.
■ Explore examples of how to map the flow of a specific product or experience.
■ Articulate the value of testing early in the design process.
■ Apply paper prototyping techniques to iterate on your design concept.
■ Practice formulating task scenarios and running usability tests.
■ Break down your user goals into more granular user stories.
■ Use a common framework to prioritize features that align with your vision.
■ Discuss struggles with feature prioritization and vision alignment and how to address them.
■ Define the field of Information Architecture and explain when its techniques are used in a project.
■ Explore methods for organizing complex and diverse types of content.
■ Explore methods for organizing complex and diverse types of content.
■ Use card sorting results to construct a sitemap that will then become navigation.
■ Define best practices for wireframing and annotating.
■ Use industry standard tools (Sketch) to create high-fidelity wireframes
■ Download UI kits and discuss their role.
■ Explain the difference between human interface guidelines, design principles, pattern libraries & style guides.
■ Explore principles of design and how they relate to digital interfaces.
■ Learn to apply fundamentals of visual hierarchy, grid systems, and typography to give your final project UI more structure and clarity.
■ Make visual hierarchy and typographic choices that enhance the appeal and clarity of your content.
■ Identify and describe the different categories of tools for prototyping.
■ Create clickable prototypes using InVision that will support usability testing goals.
■ Discuss gestures and motion how they are commonly applied.
■ Prepare a discussion guide to test your final project.
■ Run 3 usability tests using best practices.
■ Synthesize your testing results and identify major takeaways from testing.
■ Outline 3-5 improvements that you will make to your work.
■ Describe what makes a great onboarding/first time use experience.
■ Practice designing an onboarding experience that communicates the value of your product to potential users.
■ Learn about Nir Eyal’s Hooked model of habit formation and how it may be applied to the final project.
■ Practice applying different types of variable rewards to final project concepts to create experiences that will keep users wanting more.
■ Receive instructional team feedback on your final project.
■ Turn your project into a stakeholder presentation
■ Practice going through real industry UX design problems from beginning to end.
■ Work in teams or independently to develop design solutions for the industry design problem.
■ Present your design solution.
■ Define and describe the principles that drive a strong user experience with search & results
■ Identify the components of search & results, recognize their function, and how to use them effectively.
■ Review & evaluate examples of search & results
■ Evaluate how the use of specific search & results components, in given contexts, enhances or detracts from the user experience
■ Design a search experience that provides a strong user experience
■ Explore examples of good UX portfolios and discuss the story aspect of portfolio building.
■ Write the 5 most valuable takeaways from your project.
■ Practice telling your personal story to different types of stakeholders.
■ Identify next steps and receive project rubrics and grades.
Chief Product Officer, Xperian