 I wanted to cover in today's lesson the question I get asked most, which is, what is UX design and how can you get started? This is a question that every beginner asks and not many people can find a coherent answer to. There's lots of information on the internet, lots of long articles, lots of opinions. I'm going to give you my opinion from over 10 years in the industry working as a UX designer, as a UI designer, explaining where UX fits in into the design cycle and why it's so important to big companies. So let's get going. The first thing I'm going to start with is a quote from a world famous designer, Dieter Rams. So he was in charge of the design for Braun when they made some classic products. If you haven't already, check out Dieter Rams, Google him. You'll see a lot of Apple products referenced or similar in nature inspired by some of Dieter Rams earlier work, Cheese Grater, iMac, the iPod, Johnny Ive obviously was a huge fan of Dieter Rams and used some of his influence in his own work. So definitely check him out. But he says, good design is making something intelligible and memorable, but great design is making something memorable and meaningful. So what UX is, UX is design and software for machines that is memorable and meaningful for the user. So that's something that I wanted to include in here just so I could give you a snippet of what I actually think UX is. And it's really important that we include memorable and meaningful because yet anyone can design software for machines, but a way that software is memorable and meaningful for the user is something that's easy to use, something that's beautiful on the eye, something that's intuitive and something that leaves a lasting impression with your customer or user. And that's something that we want to really get across. We want to make something that's the best we can make it. We want to make something that's beautiful and we want to make something that actually stays with someone. And the only way we can do that is by applying lots of different techniques and really making something not just visually beautiful, but we want to make it meaningful as well. So we want to make the user feel like they can use the product, we want to make sure that they can feel like at one with them don't feel stupid for not knowing how to navigate the website or something. But yeah, so that's a key, a key in this design process that we want to make it memorable and meaningful. So on the screen now, this is the UCD, which is the user-sensitive design process. And this is how you create any digital product and it's kind of like a format for how you design something. So there's four different stages. The first one is research, then it goes to concept design, then it goes to detailed design, and then it goes back to test. And you can see underneath I've put where UX fits in and where UI fits in. So UI is part of the UX design process, but UI is a specific UI stands for user experience. So user interface and UX stands for user experience. UI is a very specific visual design field. There's lots of different ways you can work in UI and it's a rich subject by itself, but it fits within this user-sensitive design process and you can see UX goes before and it goes after. So we'll just talk about a little bit about different ones. So starting off, at its core, every business solves a problem and you wouldn't have a business if you didn't solve a problem. People need you to do something and that's why they come to you to solve that problem. So in the research phase, as a designer, you need to understand exactly what problem you're trying to solve for your user. That might be, as a bank, you're trying to give someone a loan and as a user, you need a loan for a house or a car. So as a UX designer, you need to understand that problem and then understand the solution that the company is trying to provide for that. And that might be just a tiny bit of a web page that you're trying, like a tool for getting a mortgage or you might be designing the actual whole experience for the bank. So you need to understand in detail that problem that you're trying to solve and there's lots of different research techniques that a UX designer can use. And to be honest, in the last couple of years, UX researcher roles have actually been coming onto the market a lot more and that's something that I'm seeing grow as an industry by itself. So you can come into UX, I came in as a predominantly as like a magazine designer, as a graphic designer, but you can also come into UX, someone who studies like human computer interaction at university or college and you can come in that way as more a researcher, more interested in the actual like testing and that has its own home world that you can actually focus in on. So in the research phase, you can do lots of things. You can you can do user testing. So you can interview users, you can talk to them about what their problem is. You can create personas, which a lot of companies do. So that's kind of like a fictional representation of a user who they will then reference throughout the rest of the project. So say you were working for a bank and say you've created Steve, Steve had a family. You would explain on like an A4 piece of paper who Steve was, what is what his life was like, what his family was like, what his job was, why he was using the product. And it just gives the designers something to go off so they can understand the target audience a bit better. But a lot of other research techniques, you can use the things called diary studies. When we did one in the BBC, so say you were doing a big website, you can actually hire a researcher to go out and be with someone for a full day and see in different situations when they're using the app, how long they use it for. And it's more of an in detailed interview, but it lasts for a full day rather than a single session. But yeah, so that's the research phase where a lot of other things, I'll probably go into it a little bit more detail in a future video. But then that moves on to the concept phase. So as a UX designer, once you have all your research done, you understand the problem, you can then propose a solution to the problem. And that's in the concept phase. So that could be working with pen and paper to start with. So and you'll probably work in a team. So you might have another UX designer with you, you'll understand the problem. You'll bring all your research together and then you'll just start like sketching out different ideas. And that's fine to be on paper for now because what you always want is maybe you want someone from the business or someone who you're creating this idea for involved in this process because I always say it's a lot easier to throw away a piece of paper than throw away a detailed design. I know we all love going on the computer and design the website from scratch, making it look great in Adobe XD or Figma and then someone to come along and say, oh, they don't want to like that. That's kind of heartbreaking and it wastes a lot of time on your part. So in the concept phase, do things on pen and paper. You can even take photographs. You can make simple prototypes if you want at this stage. And that you work of your people in the business or your work of people you're producing this for. And then once they kind of agree, the flow that you were, you want, you might draw little screens and say, OK, this is the fair screen. This goes to this. And you'll do it really rough. But once you understand what you're creating, then you'll create something called a wireframe. So a wireframe is you'll probably see in it. It's like a boxy version of a website. So there's no images. There's no colors. There's no detailed fonts. All it is is really simple boxes with arrows go into places and buttons on there. And it's just a first digital version of the sketch. And the whole idea of making it simple is it takes out all the conversation about images, about font choice, about color, about detailed design, which comes later. So all you're really focusing on is the flow of the website, how you move from one place to another, how you get people to what you're trying to get the website to solve. So you do all your core functionality and all your core detailed kind of like interaction and design of the website. You do that in the concept phase. And then once that's done, you can then hand it over to the detailed design phase, which is where UI comes in. And UI could either be done by UX designer. So product design is kind of a new word on the market, which is combining UX and UI. Or you can give it to someone more graphically design focused and they will put the UI together. So what they'll do is they'll take the wireframe from the UX designer and then they'll apply the look and feel of the company that they're working for. So in a lot of big companies, they have a design language. And a design language is kind of like an internal website. And it's a set of like fonts, colors, buttons. It's a daily alarm drone images. So in Barclays, I work on the design language team. And this is something that we created. So any new website or app within Barclays would then use this style. And it makes it a lot easier for this design phase. And it also keeps a similarity between everything that you produce. And that's something that's really key keeping consistency. Because even big companies sometimes you'll see they'll have four or five websites. And they won't look anything like each other. And that's because they've spent too much time on doing different UI for different websites. Yes, you'll bring different designers in. They'll have their own ideas. And they'll do something cool. But then it won't look anything like the brand. So a lot of these companies have brand teams who keep all this an eye on. If you're working for more like a startup where you're creating your own design, then this is where a graphic designer's flair comes in. Then you'll be able to choose what fonts you like, what colors, what the color palette is, what images you use. So it really depends on, I'd say, the size of the company, how much freedom a graphic designer's going to have within this UI phase. But basically, the architect of the website is the UX designer. And the UI designer is more the decorator, the flair and bringing it to life in color, more the artist. But they work together. And then at the end, when they'll have this realistic-looking website, they'll be able to prototype it. So we work in tools like Adobe XD, Figma and Sketch, InVision, these tools, you can do UX and UI design in there. And because a lot of good designers have worked at big companies for a long time, they'll have this, like it's called the UI Kit. So that's why I talked about them like a design language. And they might skip the wireframe stage out and design straight in the look and feel of the website because that's not going to change if it's a big company. So depending on where you are, the little differences will happen in this. But then at the end of it, you'll then work with developers. And you'll hand over all your designs to developers. They all make the website. It will then go through a whole process of development. It will then go live. And then that's where the UX phase kind of kicks back in again. And this is where you test it. So you'll test what you've built with different users. You can test the actual build. Sometimes it's better to test the build. But you can also test your prototypes. In Barclays, we had users come in. We interviewed them. We tested simple prototypes with them. And you can really find kinks in what you've designed because you'll see people clicking on buttons they shouldn't do or people go into different places in the website that they shouldn't do. So you'll really, during that testing phase, you'll find out a lot about the website that you're building. And you'll be able to hone it and make it better. But then, yeah, so then it's developed and it's made and it's released. And then that kind of goes full circle and it goes back into the research phase because then you'll be able to look at analytics from how the website's performed. It's really, really important to track how your website's done because a lot of people just design something, release it, and then it's done. And they don't really think about, oh, okay. Because a lot of, like most websites, I have Google Analytics installed. So you can check how many people have come into the website, how long they're staying for, what they're clicking on. And that kind of will reset this whole process and then you can then go into a concept phase on how to improve them once you have those base fundamentals. So such a good process. It's a revolving wheel almost. And you can always go from test into research because you'll have the website developed and then you'll have some analytics to work from. So another thing I wanna talk about is a Japanese concept called Kaizen which is continuous change for the better. And that I think sums up UX and that design cycle perfectly. So a design is never finished. This is what made the Japanese car industry so successful. The Japanese invented lots of processes around how we work that we still use today in creating software. And that's something that's never done. You can always improve, like I said, the process went from develop to then analyze again. And every cycle of Kaizen, which is a cycle through the process, you'll gradually improve, improve, improve, improve and you'll have something great at the end of it. So I think that's something that you should apply to every walk of life. Never think anything's done. Always release something, analyze it and you never know what you think. This helps people get over the idea of perfection as well. A lot of people won't release something until they think it's perfect but I always think it's best to release something when it's 80% done rather than perfect and then apply Kaizen to it because some things I've released and I've looked at the analytics and I've found, whoa, that's performing completely different than I expected. And that's almost more important than waiting for perfection because perfection can't come without the numbers and without the analytics and the research phase to make it better. So why is UX so important? And this brings me onto how a digital business works. So every business sells a product. That's how they exist. And that product makes money. And then in the last few years, the way we sell products online has changed and we sell it now through, people don't really buy adverts like they used to anymore. Like in the old days, people used to make a product and they'd go to an agency like a Don Draper. They'd then have an advert on TV, the advert would be glamorous, it would be made by an agency and then people would just be expected to buy the product. There'd be no tracking of how many people sold the advert and bought it. Maybe this was in a newspaper or in a magazine but because we've got such detail on analytics now online and the reach of online is so much, you can actually do your own advertising through content marketing. And you'll see that everywhere. So you'll see a company will have like, they might produce content, so they might write articles, they'll have their website with their product on, but they'll also have a blog section where they'll write loads of content. So a magazine, so that content is kind of designed to interest people who might be interested in the product. So what they'll then do is they'll then have social media accounts. So like I've got my YouTube account, there'll be LinkedIn accounts, Facebook accounts, Instagram accounts and what those accounts are for, they're to talk to your target audience. So you'll connect with people on there but that's a place to push your content that's away from your website. So my website is school.antonicombo.com. My product is my course and my social media channel is where I produce content and hopefully some people who like that content that's out on there will then follow through the process and they'll go to your product and then eventually buy something from you as a business and that's how every business online works and it's the honest truth of how every business operates. So you'll see this everywhere. You'll see someone pushing something free on social media because that's what people want. That's how you get people interested. It's called the lead. So they'll offer you a free PDF or something. You will then give your email in exchange for that PDF so you'll consume that content and then what they'll do is they'll contact you via email or via social again to keep you in this loop of viewing content and then hopefully at the end you'll like that content so much you'll go and see the product and then at the end of it you'll make a purchase and become a customer and then hopefully become a loyal customer and create that relationship going forward. But as you can see, it starts off with 1,000 people then 100 people might be interested in the content then 10 might view the product and then one might purchase it. So this is where content marketing and UX comes in because social goes out to many people and you can see you have to generate lots and lots of views to get that single sale at the end and that's why UX is so important because UX comes in at every stage in this process and helps to funnel, they can make one 2% differences. So say your product page might have 10%, so 10 to one people might buy it but if a UX designer could improve that by only 10 to two then that's 50% more revenue for the company and the UX designer might just analyze the web page say okay it's a bit too long or this button text. Like some of these changes are really simple like the color of a button, the image, it'll give a different emotion to the audience but if they can change tiny things on this and help improve these numbers then you'll see massive revenue growth at the end and that's why UX is so important that's why UX designers get paid so much by companies and why it's such a highly valued thing to go into because you are essentially improving revenue at the very bottom end by just improving this funnel and you're also doing it for the right reasons because customers do want to engage with content and there are products that people do want to buy that's how the world works but people only want to do that if they have a good experience that's memorable and meaningful throughout and that's something a UX designer can do and they can help make the process smoother and then go into customer relationships and there's loads but UX designers so so important in helping the bottom end by improving this funnel. So I just want to quickly talk about a team how you fit into a team when you go into work in a company. So I've got 12 positions here so on some teams there's only one UX designer and one UI designer that's how things in my experience have worked and then there'll be a project manager who will oversee the project and then there'll be a BA so BA stands for business analyst and there'll be something who'll work with the UX designer and they'll help you understand the requirements from not the user's point of view but from the business's point of view so they'll understand what the, they'll be the ones who will let you know what the business wants and you'll work with them quite a bit. Then there is a thing called a Scrum Master and a Scrum Master is someone, this is a position that can change so at the bottom I've put, how we work is it's called a three week sprint and this is part of an agile design process and below that are just the meetings that take place but this is a new thing that's taken over the industry so every three weeks you want to produce something at the end which you can release and that kind of gets over the idea of making a website over like nine months and you do design, development and then testing so this you do smaller chunks the idea that it's kind of kaizen is to get something released, see how it performs do it in small chunks and it just, it seems to be a better process because you're testing more regularly you're not waiting for a massive thing to be released and then realise it's still broken at the end you're doing it in chunks and it's more manageable but a Scrum Master is someone it could change every three weeks it's just someone who helps that process along so a P.O. is a product owner that's the most important I guess, they're the manager so the project manager looks after the work but the product owner is someone who is represented for the business so they're the person who you want to deliver this to they'll be the stakeholder for the business and they're the person who decides what goes in and what goes out of the website so they're someone that's really important then normally you'll have something like four front end developers who will make the designs that you do and then you'll have some API developers which is back end developers who will make it all work so that can chop and change but I found that to be quite in my experience what a team in the UK looks like then there are more common there are different types of things you can do so this is called the sprint so this is a one week sprint so don't get confused with the last one which was a three week sprint this is something that you might do very, very rarely but it's a good way of getting an idea out so this was a book by Jake Knapp who was from Google Ventures and he put this out a couple of years ago and his whole idea was if you have an idea then in a week you can test something with users and this is something we tried in Barclays and it was quite successful it's quite good for startups because it helps you get your idea off the ground and what you will do is you set a week out you get a UX designer or UI designer you get some people from the business and on Monday you sit down and you talk about the idea you put all the information you need you sit down in a room for hours, discuss this maybe make some notes and then on Tuesday the designers will take all that information they'll sketch ideas and they'll maybe really, really simply wire frame it or do it on paper they'll take that back to the stakeholders on Wednesday who will then vote in the side which one's best on Thursday you will then build a really, really quick prototype in Adobe XD or Figma it doesn't need to look nice it doesn't... you just want to get that all out and then on Friday you get someone and you test it with customers so it's a really... it's quite high pressure there's quite a lot of work to do in that week you don't want to do it every week otherwise you'll burn people out but it's something that you can do to get ideas off the ground if you're a startup or if you want to test something unique and this time sensitive for that thank you guys for watching today's video if you enjoyed it and you're actually interested about a career in UX design then you might want to check out my brand new course which is available at AnthonyConboy.com the link's in the description together we spend some time and we go over the whole design process and the goal of the course is to get you a project like a case study in your portfolio which shows that you know more than just designing in Figma so together we create an app for a farmers market and we start by research so we create user personas together so I show you how to do this in Figma which is free software and then you create your own so the whole goal is you have something at the end of it to show so we talk about how to label and navigate websites and you do a card sort yourself so that's something that shows that you understand how to do all of that in your portfolio and then we take that and we do some wire framing and we do some user journeys to show how people navigate through the app and we actually design that out and then we take that all into Figma develop a beautiful looking user interface that looks like a professional website an app from scratch you see how I do it and you can follow along and do it yourself you can then test that on your own phone then you then test that with your friends and family improve the app and then from there we make sure that it's accessible to everybody we want to show some accessibility stuff in there so we install a plugin make sure that the 8% of men who are colour blind can view the app properly and understand it and then from there you can write it up and have a case study but my goal is to hold your hand and walk you through a mentor you through the process so at least in your portfolio when you go through an interview you can have confidence in knowing that you're not just a Figma designer that you understand from start to scratch house of design, digital products so the links in the description I hope you check it out and if you want to stay around on YouTube then check the next video out that's going to help you even more so see you soon