 What is UX? In this video, we're going to cover all the basics that you need to know to get started. UX stands for User Experience. This is how a user, who is a person like you or me, interacts and feels about a product that you make. Every company in the world wants people to use the product that they're great, and as a UX designer, it's your job to make something that's simple to use, solve a clear problem, and put the end user at the center of the design process. UI stands for User Interface. User interfaces are what you interact with on a day-to-day basis. We all know them. We all use them. Everything you see on a computer screen is a user interface. It's the presentation layer to the application. I've seen a large shift over the past 10 years towards what's known as design systems or design languages. A design system is simply just a collection of components that are used to build websites. The goal is re-usability. A great example is material.io. This is Google's design language used for creating Android apps. When you design an app, you are expected to work within these guidelines. There are examples here that show exactly how apps should be made using material design, and a case study that breaks down how they're made along with videos of interactions. On this website, you'll also see things like color palette, typography, navigation, and even an explanation of how motion is used. DesignSystemsRepo.com is also a really good, frequently updated collection of design systems. That's great for inspiration. Apple has their own version over at developer.apple.com. Along with the website, there's usually a file that designers can use, which has all the elements already made, and creating a page is simply a job of organizing. Accessibility means what you design and develop is usable to all people, regardless of disability type or impairment. Accessibility requirements are implemented at the development level, but as a designer, it's really good to know, and one thing you can also check is if your colors are accessible. I've left a link in the description to webaim.org, and this is where you can put in the exact color combinations that you want to use. You'll get a score to see if they're passed. A great example of accessibility being used in real life is the London Underground. If you go on over to their website, you can download an accessible version of their tube map, and instead of colors being the different lines, there's actual textures on here, so there might be some dashes or dots, and it really helps people with visual impairments tell the difference. UX design process is also known as the user-centered design process, UCD, and is essentially how you make a great digital product. 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 center of the design process. Personas are the answer to the question, who are we designing for? Personas are not just made up out of thinner, they're created by research and information about your audience and summarizing 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 kickoff 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 test it 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 they're 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 and 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 mumps 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 through 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. If you're interested in learning more about UX basics I've put together a free guide which you can find in the link in the description. This will cover everything we've talked about, provide all the links in one handy place and you can keep referring back to it from time to time. If you need a little more information or a structured approach to creating a portfolio full of work then you might want to check out my full UX design course at AnthonyComboy.com. The first section is free and has an example project and you can start right away. The rest of the course features lots more in-depth tutorials, walkthroughs, how to create a portfolio, more information on the UX design process, tutorials on Adobe XD and Figma and we talk lots about how to get a job and prepare for interviews. This was just a quick introduction to UX design. If you're interested in learning more and want to become a UX designer then check out the next video. I've put together seven simple steps that you can use to become a UX designer. After watching you'll have a great understanding of the basics, what UX design is and how you can start your career and get a job in UX design. I'll see you there and keep designing.