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UX - How to become a UX Designer

Finding users for you UX testing

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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, so now we need to find users for our testing. So we've done the flats, we've added some interactivity. Now we need to find some people  to actually do the, um, testing for us. Now, you need to find the right users, okay? And this is quite important. So, uh, you have a site  that you know is for people sharing stuff, kind  of instagrammy style, uh, WhatsApp type thing,  and you are getting your grandma to do the user testing.

If they're not the target market,  there's gonna be the big disconnect between what her kind  of experience is and who the kind  of target market's going to be. So just make sure that those people are aligned. The ways to go and find them is if you're gonna do in-person  things, you're gonna have to think locally. So it might be Craigslist  or some sort of, um, advertising  that's working in your country to go  and say, these are the kinds of people we are looking for. Are you interested? This is how much it's going to be.

Can you can find some people to come in? Or it might be, I find it's quite useful  to look at things like Meetup. If you've never seen meetup.com often there's loads  of people that are identified themselves as certain kinds  of users, and often if you talk to the person who owns  or runs that meetup, you can say, Hey, I'm looking  for people to come and help. There's a, a payment  or some sort of, um, gift that you can give them,  or maybe it's, uh, a kind of really passionate group  and they'll be willing to help out for free. Okay? And you just wanna find some people  that you can meet up with and do some  over the shoulder testing.

And we're can talk about what to do in the testing later on,  but now we're looking at how to find them. So it might be advertising in terms of, what I tend  to do the most of is I wish I could do a lot more in,  you know, over the shoulder in person testing. What I do is a lot of online testing  and probably the most, uh,  useful is this thing called user testing.com. There's a few other alternatives for it,  but this one here I really like. And the service is brilliant. You pay about $50 per user  and you can, um, you know, you can say what kind  of user you want, age group, um, you know, um, you can kind  of, you know, get it down to a reasonable, you know, uh,  equivalent of who might be using your site.

And what happens is you set out a bunch of questions, okay? And what they do is they kinda automate the service,  and I'll show you the kinds of things they get. You get back. So you signed up, okay,  here's some the kind of thing you're gonna get back. This is what you're gonna get for your 40 or 50 US dollars. Um, I've asked the questions  and they're gonna respond to them.

So watch this. Let's listen to a little bit. We won't go too far through it because it's a long video. It's about 12 minutes. Imagine yourself in this scenario,  you're interested in learning more about web design. Sounds interesting.

It'll be shown a webpage for five seconds  and ask, answer three questions. Do not go to task two until you answer these questions. Course is for visual people. Uh, all right,  answer the questions out loud. What do you remember? Something about visual people?

What can you do on this site? It looks like you can learn how to do  graphic things. I'm not exactly  Sure. Okay, so  we're not gonna go through it all,  but you can decide on the questions  that get asked the different things. There's, it's, there's quite a few little types of tests  and things you can do for users,  and it's brilliant for getting feedback. I find it's quite hard as  the designer to get kind of feedback.

It's a little awkward at the beginning,  but you'll get past that, okay? Where you can go off and just set tasks. You can do things like I would like, um, you to go through,  um, and book a Photoshop course  and go all the way through until the end,  but don't put your credit card in,  or at least don't put this submit button  in and they'll go and do it. They'll go through and then you can watch  and see do they get lost? Do they find out where they're going? You know, uh, are your assumptions of putting that there,  working out, calling it that?

Did that make sense to people? And was, was it really clear what I meant? Okay. So you can ask as many or as little questions as you need. And the good thing about it's, you can go make little  iterations and go back. It can cost you like, I feel like the $50,  $50 per user is, it's fine for any sort of level.

If you're gonna spend any money on a UX designer  or you know, be charging as UX designer, you need  to make sure that this is part of your budget  because this types of stuff is the, is the real good,  is the, you know, the feedback loop on your project. So you can go through and change things and design things  and try and get them really streamlined. So that's user testing. You can just go off and buy them. Another good way to go off and do it,  and I use this quite a bit, is something called Fiverr. So Fiverr, fiverr two rs.com is  what you can get Ton for $5 US now from $5 up.

So what you can do in go in here  and you, there is people that do user testing  and what I find is quite usable. So user testing though will go off and give you feedback  and videos and stuff, and it can be a lot cheaper. Okay? Um, I like the service from user testing.com,  but say you're on a super budget,  it's go check out these ones here. Now these are kind of, I guess people that are  self qualified as usability people. You might find some really good ones you're looking for.

What you're looking for is, can you see up here? These are the, uh, the Green Pioneer is,  um, he's got five stars. So 80 reviews, okay? So this, you know, I, I love the review, okay. Service here. So you can kind of know that okay,  people are using 'em and they're good.

If they've got low numbers, you might not use them. And the other thing you can do in here is that, um, instead  of just finding specialized user  testers is just find people. If I've got, so I'm looking for a graphic designer. So say my user is a graphic designer,  I can just type in graphic designer  and find an actual graphic designer  and hit them up, go into here. And instead of them getting to me to do, you know,  doing graphic design for me, I can send them a message,  contact me and just say, Hey, I've got this weird thing  where I'd like you, instead of doing graphic design,  I'd like you to go through and, um, review this. And you send them the link to your Envision test.

Okay? Or it might be a link to your sketch, um, project  or your experience designer project. And yeah, get 'em to video themselves. Just ask them, will you do it? Will you do screen capture with audio and how much for it? And see if you can get it done for $5.

Um, and yeah, they just, they do it and send it to you  and you'll, um, do it for enough people, you know, do it  for four or five of them. It's not gonna cost you a fortune. And some of them will be good and helpful  and some of 'em will be terrible, but, um,  it's a nice easy way to do it. There's another site here called Upwork. Upwork. Upwork I use a lot, but maybe not for user testing.

There's some good user testing in here. I find five is a little better  and user, um, UserTest dot com's the best,  but Upwork is another site to go look at, um,  for finding people that, um, yeah, can go do that. Sort of same sort of testing. It's kinda  hiring a freelancer. This is the old OD desks if you ever use that. Um, another one is freelancer.com  Okay, you go use him as well.

Um, what the next kind  of useful one is finding existing users. So what I've got is, I've got people  that have done my courses before. I've got hundreds of people that have done  my courses before thousands. So I can go through to them  and I've got all their contact details  and I can send a bulk email out  and say, Hey, I'm looking for, you know, um, a few people  to help me out with user testing. You'll get a free login and password or a free course  or a discount on course, or some sort of incentive. And the good thing about that is  that they are definitely in the right zone  to say it's you're doing this UX course, I might send you,  uh, you know, an email saying, Hey,  I've got this other course to do with UI design,  would you help me test it in terms of, you know,  the user testing in terms of the web pages.

So you can find often existing users can be really  good for user testing. The last one and the kind of really Trixie one,  and the one it has really good value, uh, it's harder  to set up, is using AdWords. So if you've used AdWords  before, what you can do is if I do a Google search for, uh,  let's do Adobe training, okay? Um, up here are paid ads, okay? So that's one of my paid ads. That's Adobe's paid ads.

So you can see it says ad here. What you can do is you can start putting ads up yourself. It's a, there's a lot more to jump through hoops, okay? So if you've never done it before, it's not, you know,  it's not something you whip up in an afternoon. But if you're already using AdWords  and what you can do on an existing site,  you can set up an ad, special ad group to do some testing. So you put up a mock website, so it might be one of the ones  that we've done or a new site and you, you send ads out.

So when people are searching for Adobe training,  they're not, I guess they're not, um,  they're not doing user tests that were recorded  and feedback, but they're  actual people that are looking for courses. They might get p****d off  because, you know, you've got to use a, uh, Adobe training. They actually wanna pay for Adobe training  and they've clicked on it and they'll find  that it's a broken website or it doesn't get very far. But what you can do is you can add tracking  to the different buttons and clicker, well,  or say you made a quite complete user testing  like Muse, okay? I do that all the time where I build a full website, uh,  quick full website and actually see where people go  and see if people will actually click. You might not have the payment gateway working yet,  but will people go and click the button  and you might have a bit saying, sorry, you know,  the service is unavailable at the moment,  but you just by them clicking that pay now button  or that click here for prices, you can kind of see like, ah,  people are actually interested in that.

He, they were potentially prepared to click on  that button and go through in payment. So that's, it's a little bit harder using AdWords. But if you are already, you know, using AdWords  and know about it and on an existing site,  it can be a really useful way of finding users.
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