UX Design Fundamentals

This hands-on course examines how content is organized and structured to create an experience for a user, and what role the designer plays in creating and shaping user experience. You will be led through a condensed process that acts as a roadmap for developing robust UI/UX design: from ideation and sitemapping, to the creation of paper and digital prototypes. Building on the design skills learned in Visual Elements of User Interface Design, you will apply this methodology to produce a digital prototype for a multi-screen app of your own invention. By the end of this course, you will be able to describe and apply current best practices and conventions in UX design, and employ the fundamental principles of how UX design functions to shape an audience's experience of a given body of content. This is the second course in the UI/UX Design Specialization, which brings a design-centric approach to user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, and offers practical, skill-based instruction centered around a visual communications perspective, rather than on one focused on marketing or programming alone. These courses are ideal for anyone with some experience in graphic or visual design and who would like to build their skill set in UI or UX for app and web design. It would also be ideal for anyone with experience in front- or back-end web development or human-computer interaction and want to sharpen their visual design and analysis skills for UI or UX.

• Course Overview
• Welcome! In this first module I will summarize the assignments and expectations of this course.
• Ideation, Articulation, and Development
• Your assignment at the end of this week is the first stage in a multi-step process towards developing a clickable prototype: coming up with a clearly articulated idea for an app with a specific goal in mind. So this week we will focus on how to articulate and structure your ideas and goals, how to use naming and language as a part of your app’s identity. We will also look at audience research and user centered design.
• Planning, Testing, Researching, Mapping
• This week we’re going to continue to develop, plan, and test your app idea. We’ll start by sketching out more extensive content and mapping it into a structure. To test what aspects of your app are working, we’ll look at how to create a non-visual paper prototype and work our way towards a sitemap. While you’re developing the logic of your app, you’ll also begin to develop the look and feel of it: the visual development process.
• What Goes Where?
• At this stage in our process we are going to take our site map, look and feel research, and user testing to the next level in order to get a more accurate static prototype. By building a wireframe of our interface, we’ll figure out what goes where, and on which pages, utilizing our user testing information to figure out the hierarchy and structure of our app. This week is about the logic and functionality of our interface, and how it’s actually going to work within the app.
• Making it by Faking it
• In this final week of the course, you will be taking your wireframes or app screens and make a simple functioning digital prototype to simulate the experience of interactivity. We’ll be using simple prototyping software to put your static screens into a realistic context, and simulating interaction in order to understand how your app feels, in order to troubleshoot and fix problems. This is the part of the course where all your talents come together! For me this is the most exciting part of UI/UX development, when it all starts to become real and you have a believable prototype in your hands.