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UX - How to become a UX Designer

UX card sorts Open & Closed

This lesson is exclusive to members

Questions

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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.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

All right, in this video we're gonna do something called  an open card sort. Now what it means is, like in the last one we did,  we did the kind of features list. And that works for some, um, you know, uh, some parts  of the, uh, UX process for different products. A website was really good. Apps really good, but let's  say it's something slightly different. You need a, you're rejigging your websites or new redesign,  or you are adding lots of stuff to an existing kind  of database or website  and you need to kind of, um, group them in certain ways.

Um, a good way of doing it is like a nav. Thinking about as a navigation. Say you've got a navigation, you are an e-commerce site,  and you are selling, um, you know, you're selling lots,  you're an Amazon, eBay type thing, okay? Imagine them. They have  to categorize stuff that people can find. They need to go through and say, you wanna buy a laptop?

It has to be stored somewhere. It has to be under, you know, um, computers, under laptops,  under new, you know, there's kind  of like a structure to that. Um, it also might be for, say,  say you're developing something for like an airport kiosk  or say a mall kiosk where you know, somebody has to kind  of figure out, you know, they wanna buy women's shoes. Where do you group them? You know, do they go under fashion? Great.

Okay. Or do they go under footwear or, okay. It's just a way of kind of  categorizing things and put them in order. You might have an idea, but you need  to kind of work them out first. 'cause it's amazing the projects that I've worked on  that I've thought what they should be in. And then you realize, 'cause uh, what,  what we do in New Zealand where I'm from is very different.

And some of the languages are very different. Like, um, we're gonna do this one where we are dealing  with vegetables and there's some things that we like. Uh, just an example. We call, um, things called capskin here in Ireland. They're called, um, peppers. And I kind of understand that,  but I would definitely, if you New Zealand,  there was a peppers, um, category.

You'd be looking for things like black crack pepper. Okay, but not capskin. 'cause they, they're not pepper. Okay? So, um, you know, it,  it just helps you get the language  and kind of ideas and group things out. So if you're doing a navigation for a site,  or in case of this one, it's a supermarket checkout.

You know the bit where you're doing a self checkout  and you're trying to find, you know,  you've bought some random muffin  and you can't find it anywhere. Or you've bought a vegetable and it's just not there. You can't find it. Okay? This kind of thing helps people get them in the right place. Okay?

So what you do is you list out all the  things you need to categorize. In this case, we're gonna use a supermarket, um, analogy. You, you do yours for whatever you need to do. Okay? I've got loads in here. And what you need  to do is break everybody into a group.

Okay? So if you've only got three people,  then there's gonna be just three groups, okay? And if you've got loads more, um, you know, if you've,  you might have to break people into  peers, that's probably it. Okay? But 'cause what you wanna do is not get them all done. You want them to compare what  that group decided the group  names are and what that group is.

Will it make a little sense when we do stuff? Now, um, the problem with this, I guess is that, uh,  you can't see, uh, the, um, they're a bit small, okay? The ones that I use for my, um, class, look,  this is Lees broccoli, parsnips, garlic. And what you're doing is, as an example,  is you start laying them out. You say garlic here, parsnips here. I'm gonna run outta space really quick.

I understand. Okay. So, uh, you, you,  you got my group names, you can sit over there. It's parsnips, broccoli, leeks. Oh, I still feel like we haven't grouped them. I love that one.

Bleaches, leches. I have to Google that every time. I have no idea what that is. Okay? And that's a really handy one  to have in throw in a few odd balls  because it's, it's fun to, not fun,  but it's like sometimes people just assume  what they're called, okay? And you'll be like, no, no, that  needs to be called something else.

It's known in this region. Is this, okay, so I have no idea. Here is at Google carrots  and then I'm gonna go with parsnips, kind  of a root vegetable type thing. And this is where you start going, okay,  this group here now is gonna be called root vegetables. Okay? So I'm gonna grab my marker  and I'm gonna call him root vegetables.

Okay? Root veggies. And what you're doing is you're looking for the,  what the other groups call them. They might've categorized them differently. They might've put this, um, you know, I'm not sure  what they would've put other than root vegetables,  but they might've, okay, uh,  mushrooms, where's that gonna go? Uh, maybe they've decided garlic and mushrooms go together.

Uh, chilies jam. So maybe chilies and garlic go together  and they call this one maybe spices  or you know, um, you might call this one  condiments or what you're looking  for is not the right answer. You're looking for lots of variation  because one group might come up with spices  and the other group come up with another name. And that's the beauty of this. You can go through and say, actually  and discuss about what you should be calling them  and what things ended up. So I've got onions.

They might go in with leeks  'cause they're kind of a, in my head,  they're the same family and this is what you're gonna do. Oranges, fruit, fennel. We've got loads of in here and you're looking for groups. There'll be a couple of outliers. There'd be like this leches thing  'cause I don't even know what that is, okay. Sitting over here and,  but somebody else might put it in a really good group  and, you know, just renamed it and included this one in here  and becomes very obvious.

Okay? It might be that names are not gonna work. You might find out that it's just too hard. You've got so many groups you're gonna have to use, um,  images for, you know, as well as names. Okay? And that's what the idea of this card sort is about.

It's about getting the conversation going,  making sure there's separate teams. Okay? You might be doing this by yourself  and the two other people have the same, same printouts. Okay? And, but just coming up with different group names  and kind of putting 'em together differently  and, you know, all peers. And it is about working out what these kind of group names.

So that navigation, now I could, so  for my supermarket checkout I could go through  and, you know, have these kind of like home directories. And then, you know, you click,  you click the little tap button and then these appear. And that's, that's the whole reason for this. Or it might be a navigation on a website. Um, yeah, so closed, uh, um, sorry,  owner open card sort is uh, this way of doing. Now a closed card sort is something different.

What you do is you give people the group names already. Okay? So you give them uh, root vegetable spices  and what you do is you say, I'd like you  to place these in a group so you don't get  to pick the names, okay? The users have to put them in, they have to try  and find out which ones these gonna go into, okay? Because you might have an existing navigation that works  and you don't wanna be rejigging the whole thing, okay? 'cause it's too much work.

You wanna just find in,  say you've got all of these things,  but these two are new, new objects, okay? Or new features or new things that you're gonna include. And what you need to do is find out where their home is so  that way you can go through and they'll include them  naturally and then it makes it easy for you to know  where they have a home on your website or app or thing. Alright? So that is a closed card sort. And um, yeah, those are all kind of, uh, it's really useful  for integrating stuff into an existing site.

I realize my hands kinda wave. I do this when I'm talking. It makes more sense when my hands are wiggling  and you can see my face, but you can't. So hand wiggling it is, all right,  I'll see you the next video.
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