 The UX design process is also known as the user-centered design process, UCD, and is essentially how you make a great digital product. The UCD is split up into four stages, and it's all about understanding the problem you're trying to solve and testing with actual users along the way. The first step in the UCD is research. This is where you really understand the problem that you're trying to solve and who you're solving the problem for. There are lots of different UX techniques that you can use to understand your users. Creating personas allows you and the team to keep the user at the centre of the design process. Personas are the answer to the question, who are we designing for? Personas are not just made up out of thin air, they are created by researching information about your audience and summarising it in the creation of one or more persona sheets. UX tasks, such as user interviews and surveys, can help with research for persona creating and give you some valuable insights you can use during the design process. Your main task during the research phase is to develop a realistic vision of your user. These insights enable you and the team to create user-friendly products based on real-life feedback. The next step in the UCD process is the design phase. This is where you're going to get down on paper and initial design for the project you're working on. The quickest way to get started is to use pen and paper. I normally have a kick-off meeting with designers and other team members to sketch out some initial ideas. The level of detail you need to go into is very low. Don't be afraid to draw boxes and scribble lines for text. The idea is to see the big picture. The small details can come later. Over the years, I've found it better to get collaborating early on in the project and make others feel like they're part of the design process. When working on paper, it's much easier to throw away and make changes. Once you have an idea of what you're going to create, the next step is a basic prototype. The goal should be to have something usable and tested early on with potential users. Having a workable prototype early on is also a great thing to show stakeholders within the business to make sure that you're on the right track. There are a few really good tools that you can use to create prototypes and in the next section, we're going to discuss them in detail. The next step is testing and this is vital. The difference between the first design of your product and what makes it into the world can sometimes be night and day and this is all down to use of feedback. Just imagine your first design is a draft and then once you start showing it to people and getting feedback, this will change. There are a lot of different techniques for gathering feedback on your design. If you work for a large company, you may have in-house testing facilities. Normally there will be someone from the business who has a list of tasks for the user to perform. This can be quite eye-opening as you get to see how your design performs in real life and it soon becomes obvious where the problems are. If you want to do some testing online, there are plenty of places to go to. I'll mention these tools in the next section. All you need to focus on is that once you have a design, the goal is to keep improving based on user feedback. This feedback will be invaluable and can be a little heartbreaking too if I'm telling the truth when someone sees your design and it's shown to be unusable. The next step after you have incorporated all of this feedback into your design is the development process. Your design will be broken down into small pieces at every little detail discussed as a team and documented ready for development. A lot of people ask, do you need to know code to be a UX designer? You may get a lot of different answers but from my experience you don't. Personally I know the basics of HTML and CSS and that's about it. As a junior designer you don't need to know code as this is actually a different job. In every place I've worked as part of the team there are actual front-end developers who specialise in this. A front-end developer will take your design and make it come to life. They will put it together in code for whatever type of product you're working on. If you design a website then this will be HTML, CSS and JavaScript. If you're designing an app then this will be different. There may also be Java developers which can be confusing because Java and JavaScript sound the same but they're actually two entirely different code languages. Many tools I've built have had multiple front-end and Java developers working together over many months to create. This is why I believe you don't need to know code. It might be nice to know but it certainly isn't necessary. Once your product has been developed and launched to the world there's still one more thing to look at and that's analytics. When you create a website for example there's a tiny bit of code that you get from Google that you can put on your website and this tracks all the interactions. This is so useful as a designer to see how things are going. You can see things like how many people visited your site, where they clicked, where they came from, how long they spent on each page and find out where they leave the site from. Now is the time to collect all of this data and package it together ready for improvements favour on. As a designer this is really fun and interesting and it's a step not to be forgotten. The user-centered design process is a loop. All of your analytics can now go back into the research phase to discover new problems and things that can be improved on your site. You can keep making your product better and better and now have a framework to do it in. Okay now you know the basics of UX and what a designer does day to day. Next is the part you've been waiting for. Let's get you up and running with the best design tools.