 Hey everyone, welcome to this UX fundamentals lecture. Today we're gonna learn how to take an idea all the way to a product in the shortest possible time using the user centered design process. So we're gonna learn about UX fundamentals along the way. So the first thing that we really need to talk about, which is the first step, it's research and that is what problem are we trying to solve. So every business at its core solves a problem. Every good product solves a problem. It's why the market comes to the product. So that's what we're trying to figure out. What problem are we trying to solve? And the main thing that we need to find out along with that is who we try to solve the problem for. So that is our users. So this is the UX design stands for user experience design and the user centered design process is putting the users of the product at the center of what we do. So we have a toolkit essentially, which is a lot of different UX tasks that you will use as a designer. And we're gonna pull from each one of them and we're gonna learn little bit as we go forward. So our main goal really to start off is to find out about our users. And that is whenever we go into a product or we're starting something from scratch, we have a problem and then we're gonna interview the users. So there's lots of different interview techniques you can use when you're in a company. You can do one-on-one interviews where you're in a setting in like a studio. You can do gorilla testing, which is where you go out into like a car park or something and interview people as they go and buy. But you want to learn as much information as you can from the person who is the user of your product. So obviously you will go into the setting where they are using your product and you want to interview people who are your target users. So you find out as much about the problem that you're trying to solve and how they currently use the product or how they might use the product going forward. So that gives us a good base understanding. That's called qualitative research and that stands for quality. The next one is quantitative research and that stands for quantity. And that is where we're gonna go to a larger set of our audience. It's much less hands-on than the interviews. So we might ask them some multiple choice questions and this really gives us a stepped back feeling of how the product might solve some problems for people. So once we have the results of our survey, we're gonna wanna analyze them and we're gonna wanna present them in charts and graphs and try and keep it as simple as possible to the project and whoever we're presenting the information to. But we essentially wanna analyze all the information that we have so far. And from that, we want to learn some insights. So we've done our interviews, we've done our surveys and this is where we're gonna use some UX tools to basically analyze what we've discovered so far. So the first thing is we wanna basically get the analysis of the interviews. We can write some cards, we can use tools like Fig, Jam and Miro for this and we want to basically write down what people said and we want to organize it into groups. So this then allows us to basically simplify and understand what we've learned. So each one of these tasks might take like an hour to do but it's a really good way of simplifying some of the things that we've learned. So then once we've understood something about the users, we create something called a persona. So this is a fictional representation of our user. So again, it's a simplification. It's basically just, it could be one, it could be a couple. We're basically just categorizing things that we know about our users and putting some fictional users in place so we can keep these at the center of the design process as we go forward. So these are fictional but they are based on real characteristics that you've noticed during the interviews and surveys. And we might talk about their interests, their goals, their motivations. Some more information here that will help us going forward. So we're basically trying to put ourselves in the user's shoes. So after that, we might do things like empathy maps where we take the persona a step forward and we really think about, okay, what did I say? What did I hear? What did I do? And we're putting that user in the process of them contextualizing our application or product that we're going to design for them. So if we design an app for finding a local farmer's market, for example, we might say that the person sees fresh produce at a local farmer's market and wonders when the next farmer's market is available or is coming to town. So we're putting them in the situation. Then going forward, we might put them, this is called a customer journey map. So this is then taking another step back and understanding how they step through the process again with us. So now that leads us onto step two of the process and that is the design phase. So starting off with the design phase is big, by the way. So start off with IA. So that is information architecture. And what does that mean? So that's essentially, what are we actually designing? What pages? So we're going to need to think about our application really roughly. If we're doing an app for a clothing store, we're going to want a homepage. We're going to want a category page. We're going to want detail pages for the products. We really need to think about basically a content survey of what we're actually going to design just roughly just to start with. Then we're going to want to organize the pages that we have using something called a card sort. And that is into basically groups that people understand. So you can do it yourself. So you can have a list of 20 pages. You can organize into groups and you can write a title for each page. You can do it with users and see how they would understand the information architecture very, very useful. And then we will just analyze it and put it all together. But this is what a card sort might be if you were doing it digitally. You can do it in person, but essentially you have a load of cards and you organize them into groups. Then once you have your content structure ready, you can test it with users. So there's lots of good online tools here, but essentially we will upload our architecture that we've just done and we will basically ask users questions. Like where would you click to find the address? And they will essentially click through our structure, which is called a tree of our site. And then it will tell us whether they guessed right or wrong and how we can improve the structure. So again, we're involving users early on in the process. So the outcome of that is producing something like a site map and that is essentially the structure of the product that we are going to build. So then we're gonna move on to interaction design. So now we've got our idea. We understand our users. We've got our site map. We know we're going to design. The next stage is to put ourselves again in the user's shoes and understand how they're gonna flow through the product. So they're gonna enter the website, what are the things they're gonna do along the way all the way to a goal, which is something like making a purchase. And for this, we can do task flows. We can do user flows, which are essentially a collection of diagrams like this which show journeys through the site. Then once we have those flows, we can start the fun bit, which is sketching. So we always wanna start on paper first. It's low fidelity. It's quick. It's cheap to throw away, but we wanna sketch out our designs. Really, if we're doing it in a company, we wanna sketch it with some stakeholders, which are the people in the business who are responsible for the product. We wanna go through as many ideas as possible and have a basic idea of the product that we're going to make at the end of it. So from there, we're gonna take that higher fidelity into wireframes. So that is essentially getting that onto the computer. And from this, we can make prototypes. We could test with some users at a very early stage, but we're essentially taking all design out of it and we're just doing it for basically the structure of the content and to test that it all makes sense. So then the next step, then, once we have an understanding of what we're gonna do with a wireframe, we're gonna take that into UI design. This is where we jump over into programs like Figma and we apply the graphical touches like the images, the fonts, the styling. We make it look like a real application. And at the end of it, we will then have a prototype and that prototype we can then, again, have it on your phone. It looks like a real application, but the goal then is to then start running some tests. So we can run usability tests and that is essentially where we'll take users through our prototype and we will find problems with it and try and improve. So we need to think about accessibility at this point. So a real crucial part of the user-centered design process which is making sure that people with disabilities are catered for when we're designing our products. So this example, this is a plugin within Figma that we can test our color contrasts to make sure that people with visual impairments can actually read our texts. But we also need to think about other things. We need to think about touch targets on mobile for people with motor impairments. We need to think about how easy it is to flow through the product. There's lots of different impairments and their accessibility features that we need to think about at this point and really make sure our product is easy to use for everybody. And the key really is to test, test, test and test the more testing we do, the cheaper it is at this stage because it's not been developed yet for the company. So it's quick to make Figma changes. It's not quick to make code changes. And then we want to get people we can do online testing with user-testing.com. We can do in-person testing. There's lots of different testing techniques but essentially we wanna go for a rapid iteration phase where we test and we make improvements based on what people tell us. Then we're gonna move over to the development stage. This is where we should have a fully tested product with users. We know what works. We know what the problem is. We understand the users and we've tried to solve for that problem. So then this goes through a process called agile development where you will be kind of like a stakeholder for the users in that process and you'll work with developers to make sure that what you give them actually looks like something you want at the end of it because very rarely does that happen. So the goal is to make good connections in the team and work through problems with developers. And then once you launch and the product is live, it's not over. So your goal then is to understand the metrics and the analytics. So look at how many people are coming to the site, understand how long they're on it for, are they doing what you want? And then this introduces me to something called Kaizen which is basically constant improvement for the better. So the product that you make is never really over. It's only, there's only more research you can do. So at this point, we might go back into the research phase but because it's a product that's already launched, we will use analytics as our kind of like our quantitative data and we will understand more clearly what we want to do when we might solve more nuanced problems within the application. So if that's made you interested in UI UX design and you want a career, then the fastest possible way will be hopefully the course that I've put together. The link is in the description. We essentially get your portfolio. We go through every step that I've just talked about in detail, we create something called a case study which is essentially your application from idea to product. Then put that into a portfolio, teach you all about interviews, what it's like actually being a designer and get you ready for an interview and be career ready. Hopefully it's the fastest possible way to having a career in UI UX design. There's a free introduction course. Check it out. The link's in the description. Thank you for joining me.