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UX - How to become a UX Designer

How to get your first UX project

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Course info

29 lessons / 2 hours

Overview

The idea of UX, or User Experience, is not new but continues to be a sore point for designers and end users. For those who can figure it out, it pays well more than graphic design alone. And, UX design uses skills you already have. Interested? Don’t have a clue what UX Design is or where to start? We’ve got the UX design training experience that’s going to open a whole new world, and better-paying work!

UX design is creating products, most commonly apps and websites, that are easy to use, please the end user and look great. It’s understanding what the target user needs and how they get what they want. It’s how they interact with the information and how they navigate your design. The reason there’s so much demand for UX designers is that not a lot of graphic designers truly understand what’s involved. It’s more than slick graphics!

At BYOL, we’ve got years of design experience and an equally impressive number of years teaching design to real world standards. We know what UX and UI design for professional grade work require, and we know how to give you the best training and information to build you a lifelong foundation.

What are the requirements?

  • No previous UX understanding is necessary.

  • While a basic understanding of design will be needed to become a UX Designer you don’t need any of these skills to complete this course.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • You’ll learn what the relevant tools are for UX Designers.

  • You’ll find out how much a UX designer can earn.

  • You’ll learn how to research a UX project.

  • You’ll learn the difference between UI & UX.

  • You’ll learn what the responsibilities of a UX designer are.

  • You’ll be able to run your first user testing sessions.

  • You’ll know how to run competitor research.

  • You’ll learn how to build user profiles & personas.

  • You’ll learn how to create wireframes.

  • You’ll learn how to use InVision building mockups.

  • You’ll learn how to report your user testing results.

  • You’ll know how to run A/B testing.

  • + More…

What is the target audience?

  • This course is for anyone interested in becoming a UX Designer.

  • This course is especially beneficial to people who already have Graphic or Web Design skills.

  • This course is for designers who want to earn double as a senior UX designer.

Course duration approx 2hrs 40mins

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

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Transcript

Hey, in this video we're gonna look at creating your first  UX project, or at least getting your first project  or getting your first job in ux. What's gonna happen is you're gonna do the theory like this  kind of course here. And, um, you're gonna need some experience. You're gonna have to actually work  through at least one project. Now, how to get your first project, um,  you've got two options. You can either go off and just do it something  personally, okay?

Take a project that you might have an idea,  a business idea of your own. It might be a project that, um, you know, you'd be meaning  to start for a friend or for a family. Get that going and turn that into this UX project  and take parts of this  or all of this kind of theory that you've learned here,  and put it into practice so that when you do reach out  to say your boss  or looking, you know, into a career as a freelancer,  you can go to clients and explain, have the language,  and have some sort of, you know, experience in the industry  to be able to share with them. Now, what will happen in smaller businesses at the moment,  nobody's valuing ux, the medium to bigger businesses are,  but if you're in a small business  and you're working slogging away  and you want to get into ux, what you're probably gonna have  to do is go off and just do a project  and then share the data afterwards. So, um, big for forgiveness, not for permission. So say you are handed a job  and you think this would be a good one to do some  of this user experience stuff.

And what you can do is just do it on your own bat,  on your own dime in your own time,  and share the data afterwards. So, it might be a new website you're building,  but you can go off and maybe debrand it so you're not kind  of breaking any sort of confidentiality, um, agreements  and go off and do some user testing, do some research,  and then, um, you know, share those results at the end  and say, look, I, you know, I wanted to get into this. I, um, I did this on my own time  and these are the kind of results,  these are the things I tested against. I did some ab testing. I, you know, did some user testing,  and I feel like this has got us to a better place than maybe  what was originally proposed. And going in with that sort of stuff  that you've actually done  and you've proven, rather than trying  to convince them you should do it, show them  how well you did do it.

Now, in terms of bigger companies, what you might have  to do is show them, um, the numbers. Okay? It might be that, say you're designing a website  for a company and you're doing the checkout page,  that could be a really important one. 'cause a lot of customers are lost in that checkout flow. So you might do some user testing  and show that, okay, people got from buying, uh, you know,  from, um, looking for searching for products  to the actual buying or checkout process in three clicks  with one design and five with another. And then you can go and say, look, you know, um,  if you have an attrition rate  or kind of, you know, holes in your, uh, flow  and you're losing clients, you know, on the fourth click,  okay, you can actually add some kind of dollar values to it.

At least you can infer dollar values  that maybe the business owner can start to see  and go, oh yeah, I can, I can, you know,  five clicks is a whole lot worse than three clicks. Or it might be that your design changed the fact that, um,  people are less confused  and you can kind of add, um, you know, attribute kind  of customer service care calls  and, you know, that kind of, there's a, there's a cost  to a business where they have to, you know, reply to emails  and, um, have customer care hotline people. So you can test designs where people, you know, people get  to where they want to go quicker and easier. Um, um, going to them with those sorts  of numbers can really help cement, um, their  wanting you to get more involved with ux Okay? And user design. And if you're doing the personal stuff,  go off and do it and pick projects and just go off  and do it so that you get a portfolio of UX projects  that you can talk about things you've done when  you go to talk to employers.

So the most important thing is getting some experience,  any experience, all experience,  as much experience as you can. So the name of the game is experience is getting out  and actually doing it  and doing your first jobs in the first couple  of jobs might be terrible, but it's all right. You have to go through those phases so that you know,  so you learn and get better and be able to go off  and be a bit more confident about the industry. Alright, that's it for getting your first job in UX.
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