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UX - How to become a UX Designer

Post project testing A B testing search bars & live chat

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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

All right, so you've built your project  and what happens now, now you're kind  of crossing over into maybe a little bit of that  of your UX kind of project  and into more just caring for the business. Okay? So it's up to it. It it'll depend on the size of your team. Now, if you're working with a larger organization,  there's gonna be people that are gonna pick up this kind  of like optimizing and testing after the fact, okay? And kind of like nurturing the business product.

Um, but if you're working on a smaller team  or working on your own project, this is totally part  of your UX project, okay? 'cause it's testing, testing, testing,  but it's with live sites, one with actual customers. So, um, let's look at some of the things you can do. Now. Probably one of the, the nicest  and easiest, um,  tests you can do once you've got something live,  say it's an app or it's a website,  is you can start doing uh, multi-variable testing. So it's, Uber calls it a b testing or a BC testing.

It's just the way of having two versions. You split your, um, you know, you um, grab some of your  visitors and you stick half them on one side  and half them doing the other thing. And then you compare the results. Now the trick with it is that you need  to keep it small, okay? You don't wanna go change a load of things  and then compare it with the old version  'cause you're not gonna really know what it's gonna be. So it is takes quite a long time.

So what people tend to start with is call to actions  and uh, maybe, um, uh, uh, pricing. Those are the kind of big easy things to test. And then later on you start kinda working in the smaller,  um, you know, smaller parts. It might be some of the headlines  and then working through to some  of the strap lines and things like that. Okay? So, um, in terms of testing,  you're gonna need a tool to do it.

Um, there are kind of three main ones. There's this one here, Optimizely  and this one here, uh, uh, VWO. And um, Google does one called content experiments. Now is content experiments the most. 'cause it's built into analytics  and it's super easy to get going. Um, if you've never used it  before, uh, Google Analytics,  then you might have to go one of these other two.

These other options here, I like more. I've used both of them. Um,  VWO here has lots of other resources. So does Optimizely. They're both really good. Um, have a little look at, for me, it really comes down  to their pricing plans when I was looking at it.

Um, but I'll do use both of 'em. They're both really good. They both do AB testing,  but they do AB testing plus other stuff  and have a look at the other stuff  that might be some of the things that convince you. One or the other content experiments is free. Um, Google getaway with loads of free stuff,  but you need to have an analytics account running. If you don't have that, it's also free to get going.

But that can be a little bit of a headache  where these are really quick and easy to get set up. So, um, what they are is, uh,  this one here has a really good example. So let's have a look at the little video. So look, example, they've moved it to the right,  they've got two versions, the original versus the other one. And then your thousands, hundreds  of thousands dollars of sales come in. Okay?

And I get that's in a nutshell,  that's what you're doing, okay? You're looking at conversion rates  and they're never gonna be this, you know, dragging it  to one side's, never going to give you another  $150,000 in sales. Ah, it might do okay,  but, um, normally it's small things, okay? And often it's really hard unless you have good traffic. Okay? So say one of my sites,  like the site I was working on this morning has a thou, uh,  5,000 people coming at per month, which is cool,  but it's, it's huge  to get statistically significant changes.

I do an AB test and it takes ages to run  because, you know, uh, it gets quite anecdotal in terms  of, oh, I had a sale yesterday. I had a sale this afternoon, I had a sale tomorrow. And you know, was it better than last month? It's hard to know because of there's so many changes. So you need good numbers to make this work. If you've got a brand new site,  it's not time to be AB testing.

Okay, well, it could be,  but in terms of statistics, it's quite tough. So you might have to make some big broad  changes and that's fine. Maybe it's pricing. That's a nice easy  one to test with small numbers. But when you start changing the color of a button, okay, uh,  from blue to green, it's gonna be a little bit hard  to measure that. Statistically if you don't have a good amount of customers,  um, e all of them are easy to implement.

Um, and so have a look at which one of those are gonna work. So one of the other things that are quite useful in terms  of you've got a product and you're trying  to figure out some testing, okay? Is installing a search bar. So this search bar here, um, you can install any search bar. If you are using a CMS like Jumela or Drupal  or WordPress, um, you can use that. They've got search functions.

Um, same with Google. What you want to do is you don't, don't want to,  you don't just want to install any old search bar. Um, what you want do is you want  to have a search bar that gives you details. 'cause you might have a site, right? And say you're selling widgets  and great, you've got red, green, and blue widgets on there. Great.

And they're selling, okay? Um, and then you go and add a search bar, okay? And what you might find out,  but people keep coming to your site unknowingly,  you haven't been selling yellow widgets  'cause you're like, who buys yellow widgets? But people have been using the search bar,  searching for where your yellow widgets are. 'cause they've found the red, green and blue,  but they can't find the yellow ones. And it's great because you can get data from  that search engine to go, huh,  I didn't even consider the yellow ones, you know?

Oh well, and that's, that's some really good testing  that people kind of, they, they,  they offer up what they want. Okay? I do it for my ones where people come to my site  and they'll be searching for something that's maybe outside  of the scope of what I've got or what I think is popular  and people are searching for it. So I can go off and build that course or build that training  because people are kind of looking for it. I'm like, oh, that's within my skillset. I can make something like that.

So  search bars are really useful. Just make sure they give you some sort of data about  who we're tracking, okay? Um, yeah. So there are lots built into CMSs if you want,  if you don't have a site that has a CMS,  Google will do a one called this, um, CSE okay? Custom site search. And uh, they allow you to use the power  of Google on your own site.

Um, it's a little bit googly and you do have to pay for it,  but it's the best in terms of tracking. You can hook it up to your advertising  and do all sorts of cool stuff with it. But anyway, that's the one I use. Um, and one of the last things you can do,  there's lots you can do in post, okay, in terms of ux,  but in terms of the nice low hanging fruit,  another nice one is live chat. Live chat. If you are responsible for kind of getting  to a project to its launch, be part of that live chat.

So live chat is, let's look at one of my sites. It's the little bar down the bottom here that says,  Hey, one chat with Dan. Okay? By clicking that  and entering in something here,  I get a message either on my phone  or on my, um,  through my browser saying that somebody wants to chat. And what I've found it really useful for is that, um,  what people might not say they come to the site. 'cause when you're checking data and analytics  and those sorts of things, it's lovely,  but you don't really know what they're thinking.

Okay? This here opens a window  to people start asking questions. It's funny, when I had my first kind of language, um,  this thing here, this cancel any time since I've added that,  man, my live chat has dropped. I was so many people were asking me, there's a free trial,  can I cancel in my head? I'm like, that's a free trial. Like how, you know, obviously you can cancel.

It's not just a free trial. And then I forced you  to pay at the end of the 10 days. But that was, that was kind of,  but so many people wanted to just double check. Okay? So, and live chat really told me quite quickly, um,  that I needed to change the language on the site. So you'll see cancel in time everywhere now.

And I have like, it is a bit anecdotal  'cause I don't have thou tens of thousands of um, visitors,  but it is, it has been quite important  for me, um, to know these things. 'cause people might have just left  'cause there is no channel, you know,  people didn't wanna get a hassle  of going to the Contact us form. They were doing that as well. But live Chat has really just opened a  bit of a door to my people. And the cool thing about it is you  can turn them into user tests. So people might ask, can I cancel any time?

And as part of Live Chat I can see  what pages they've been looking at. It's a bit creepy. But, um, so what I tend  to do is they'll ask about a question  and I'll ask 'em, Hey, um, you know, what are you doing  with HTML five banner ads or After Effects or ux? And they'll start kind  of telling me a bit about them, what they've been doing. And I get this kind of sense from people,  kind of one at a time. Um, what they're doing, what they're looking,  what their hassles are, what their problems are,  what they're liking about the site.

And I find live chat,  even though it's not our UX tool specifically,  I'm finding it, using it for user experience is an  amazing little extra. Alright, that's it for this video. I'll see you in the next one.
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