 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 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 reusability. Accessibility means what you design and develop is usable to all people, regardless of disability type or impairment. 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 thin air. They're created by researching 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 user 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'll 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 specialize in this. A front-end developer will take your design and make it come to life. They'll 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 improvement's favourite ROM. 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. In this section, we're going to look at some of the best tools for UX designers on the market. There are hundreds of tools out there, so I'm only going to talk about the ones which I've personally used. The great thing about most of them is the free or they offer a free trial and you can get up and running quickly. Let's start with my favourite design tool, Figma. Head on over to figment.com and sign up today. The best thing is for you that it's 100% free. Figma is used mainly for UI designs, designing websites and apps. I use Figma for all of my design work and prototypes. Prototyping is built into the tool itself and is really easy to learn. If I'm designing a website, I'll put together a detailed prototype for all the pages in Figma and share this with the rest of the team to get feedback. Figma produces a shareable URL for the prototype. This doesn't share any of the design assets, just a clickable prototype. When you work as a UX designer, there will normally be other designers that you work with and Figma is really good for collaboration and sharing design files. With the free version, up to two designers can work on the same file at the same time and for collaboration, this is great. One of the great things about Figma is that it's opened up its software to extensions in the community tab and you'll find lots of great resources. The Reven fully completed design systems to get you started. One other thing I found really useful about Figma is that you can import design files from other tools. This saves you recreating all your artwork and it normally does a great job. I've put together some tutorials where I walk through creating a website in Figma and if you're interested, the link's in the description. Adobe XD is Figma's biggest rival. You can find it over at adobe.com forward slash products forward slash XD. XD again is free for personal use and for professionals and small teams, it has a small monthly cost. I've used both XD and Figma and there isn't much to choose either way. They're both really good. The benefit of Adobe XD is that it's created by Adobe and they have an amazing track history with design tools. You can guarantee that XD is going to keep getting updated regularly and is going to get better over time. Within XD, you can create designs, prototypes and has a really good integration with the other Adobe tools. If you're familiar with Photoshop, Illustrator, or Premiere, this may be the best for you. There really is no in the standard UI prototyping tool and it's up to you and your colleagues which one works best. As a side note, if you're keen to get started with either Figma or Adobe XD, I have a full UX design course with plenty of example projects where we walk through and design websites in both tools over at AnthonyCombo.com. I'll mention more about this later but it's got everything you need to start designing today and some great example projects for you to work along with. Sketch is another UI design tool similar to Figma and XD. You can download a 30 day free trial over at Sketch.com. Unlike XD and Figma, Sketch is Mac only and once the free trial over, there is a one time fee for the software. This is still great value and I know plenty of teams who still use Sketch. A couple of years back, I used Sketch to design Barclays.co.uk and the tool was great. It was one of the pioneers for digital design tools specific for UI design. Sketch has prototyping built in and some great calibration features. The mirror mode is great where you can preview your mobile or tablet design right on your device. One of the best things about Sketch is the developer handoff where you can share your design with a single link. Developers can open this link and check it out in a browser. They can inspect elements and even export assets. This is extremely useful in a real world project environment. If you have time, check out all three and see which one works best for you. There is no right or wrong and they're all pretty similar to use. You won't have trouble using one over the other and you'll pretty soon get the hang of things. Now that you have your UI designs, it's time to test it out. Check out usability hub. This is one of my favorite online user testing platforms. You can sign up today and try it for free and see what different type of tests they offer. If you were designing something simple like a logo for example, you could set up a preference test. This is where you show multiple variations of the same design and that's good use of the choosers one they prefer. It's a great way to get lots of quick feedback on something which is a straight up choice. If you have an email list then you can send out a link to the test and the feedback will normally come quite quickly. It's a really good way to provide evidence for any design decisions and base your choice on data. If you don't have an existing audience to send your test out to, usability hub have a panel of over 170,000 users that you can recruit for a dollar a response. You can target this audience on things like age, gender, education and get quite specific on who the target audience is. Design surveys help you make confident decisions by collecting user feedback. You can ask multiple choice questions and even show your design when the question is displayed. This way you can ask the user about certain elements on your page. Another test you can run on usability hub is a first click test. This is where you ask the user to perform a task and then show them your design. Usability hub will then provide a heat map so you can see where users clicked. This is awesome to see if you've got the placement right for important elements and make sure your site is easy to navigate. You also get a breakdown of how long users took to make this click so looking at the speed let you know if this is an intuitive location. If you already have a website then CrazyEgg is an unbelievable tool that will help you understand how users interact with your site. For every new site I build I get CrazyEgg installed from day one. This way I can make sure the site is behaving like it should and any problems will be quickly discovered. CrazyEgg tracks user sessions as they browse your site and allow you to watch them back. It provides heat maps of where users viewed and clicked. Nothing beats watching a user interact with your product and it gives you a different viewpoint. By watching multiple sessions you will soon see a pattern of how users behave. Users may not view entire section of your content that you may have put a lot of time to and they also may miss the main call to action on the page. By watching sessions and discovering these floors you can improve your site and repeat. Another amazing tool is A-B testing. CrazyEgg can analyze your website and allow you to offer the users who visit your site to slide variations. A-B testing is the survival of the fittest in the digital world. If you can generate more sales for your business by changing the color of a button or an image choice, then this is game changing. CrazyEgg handles all of this for you and you can make the changes via the interface pretty simply. At the end of the test you'll get a breakdown of which variation won. You need to define before you do the test what success is such as purchases or clicks to a certain page but this one is one of my favorites. I've put a link in the description and the guidebook to one of my favorite articles about A-B testing. This is from the 2000 night director of analytics at the Obama campaign entitled How Obama Raised 60 Million by Running a Single Experiment and it's a great read. It details the test they ran on Barack Obama's website for the US presidential campaign for sign-up rates and they tested two things. The wedding on the button and an image. By creating a multivariant test they randomly combined these two factors and discovered that they actually performed quite differently. The winning combination helped boost sign-up rates by 40%. That's an extra 2.8 million emails and according to the article each email on average donated $21 to the campaign which translated into an additional 60 million in donations. This test could have changed history. When you apply for a job as a UX designer the most important thing is your portfolio. I want you to take away something from this section and that's to say it's not personal, it's business. When you apply for a job all the hiring manager knows about you is a piece of paper with your education and your work history along with your portfolio. As a junior designer you don't have a wealth of experiences so your portfolio it's the digital representation of you. This is all a hiring manager will look at and most of the time it may only be for a few seconds. If you have 30 applicants you can't afford to read for every word in the portfolio. It's more about the overall sense you get from it. It's obvious who has put the effort in and who hasn't just by viewing for a few seconds. This is where you're gonna stand out. Rather than leave this up until last minute we're gonna get set up now so we can build towards something. To begin let's start with the basics. You need an online portfolio. When I started I used to put my design files on a CV on a USB stick and hand it out at events. This is when USB sticks were expensive how I envy you. Now it's easier to have your portfolio on a website and keep it updated. Don't worry you don't need to know how to build a website you don't need to. There are plenty of ready-made templates and builders out there that are fantastic. For this process let's make things simple and stick to Adobe portfolio. If you already have a creative cloud account with Adobe then great it's free. If not you can sign up and publish a website for free within 60 days. I've used many different hosting platforms over the years, bought domain names and done everything myself plenty of times. Trust me it's a lot easier just to sign up for something like this with Adobe. Yes we're pressing other content management systems you have more control but at the end of the day it's the actual content within the portfolio not the flashy website itself that's the most important thing. If you head on over to portfolio.adobe.com and click get started for free you'll be able to preview and click a ready-made theme. The best thing is that you can change your theme anytime if you change your mind. Each one of these themes has been designed carefully by Adobe for the specific purpose of hosting your portfolio. They all work responsibly across desktop, tablet and mobile and are nice and simple. Choose the one you like and get started. You can even assign it a custom URL such as yourname.com. One reason I also like Adobe portfolio is that it combines well with Behance. If you check out Behance.net you'll find lots of design inspiration from amazing designers around the world. It's a place where you can showcase your work and discover new artists. If you already have a profile on here your work can be shared with Adobe portfolio and put straight into your website. Behance is free to sign up and another place where you should be building your online presence with your work. The reason we've set up our portfolio so early is that it should be the goal to make the best possible portfolio. Each project you make is a reward for all the hard work you've put in. All the learning you're doing needs to be documented. Your portfolio is not just a finished work it's a living document that showcases your journey. Remember, it's not personal, it's business. The hiring manager doesn't know you. They don't know how much work you put in. Your portfolio is all they see and it's up to you to show them the work you put in by making the digital representation of you as good as the real thing. Now it's time to dive right into the fun stuff with some example projects. There's a link in the description. If you head on over to AnthonyConboy.com I've made a free course where together we create a UX design project. This is what we're going to use in our portfolio as our case study. Together we go through all the steps to the user-centered design process starting with research and each section has a hands-on user task. So in the first section you can create a persona. Then in the second section you can perform a card sort where you organize your information architecture. You create a low fidelity prototype which we do together in Figma and then we create a high fidelity prototype and make sure that it's accessible. This course is free to everyone. It's in the link in the description. It's AnthonyConboy.com So head over there now and sign up for my free course and together we're going to create your first project. In this step we're going to look at how to present your work and make sure that you stand out when applying for a job. This is where a lot of designers don't do themselves justice. And being honest I'm definitely including myself in this. When you apply for a job you need a portfolio that represents you to the best of your ability and it's easy to forget or just rush. At the end of every project or piece of work that you do it's important to write a showcase study. This is why we set your portfolio before doing any work. We're going to create this as we go along. A lot of the time you may be tempted to just put in a picture of the finished designs into your portfolio or a link to your prototype when applying for jobs. A case study done well is simply a documentation of the process you've gone through to come up with the design. This includes problems that you're trying to solve, sketches you've made, wireframes and early initial ideas. Include any details of any problems you've solved along the way. This is really good. In the description I've dropped a link to a great medium article called Six Case Studies Done Right. This shows six really good examples of how to do this and structure it well. Don't be embarrassed to include versions of work that didn't work out. This is all about telling a story. Your persona and user flow diagram that you created in the last step should go in here along with the design work. It's really important when applying for a UX designer role that you show more than just UI design skills. UX as a skill set has loads of other deliverables that you could include in addition to your designs. UX Planet has a great article called A Complete List of UX Deliverables by Nick Babich that shows you all the other examples such as mood boards, analytics and usability reports. Not every task is right for your project but it's better to show some other deliverables to make you stand out from everyone else. The key thing here is to show a journey and tell a story. You will have learned things along the way in every project. Take time in your writing to use gremly.com to make sure that your spelling, punctuation and tone are all in check. This is a wonderful tool that I'm actually using free right now to do this script. You certainly don't wanna spoil your great work with spelling mistakes and I can't count the amount of times that I've done this personally over the years. Another great place to host your write up is on Behance.net. This is perfect to share your work with the design community and find lots of other inspiration. A lot of designers write up their project on here and you will see some good examples of how to structure them. It's really important to always see what other designers are doing and some of the best in the world are on Behance. You might even make some new friends and get some feedback on your work. It's always cool to check what the community is doing as well. When presenting your work, you can actually use a video. It's not something I've seen many designers using to the full capacity. I'd rather watch a video than read in something and that's just being honest. Your phone probably has a decent video camera and for writing up, you could always do a short video talking about the project. Don't worry about production quality. I've spent loads of money on a fancy studio and most of my successful videos were either me filmed outside on my phone or a presentation made in iMovie like this with simple words on a screen. If I were to see a video of a designer talking about the work, it would make me more inclined to call you for an interview. I don't know why, it just feels more personable. You can of course still write up your work but a short video of you talking about something goes a long way. This is a step that almost all designers neglect. You need to present yourself to the world so that others know you exist. You are a brand and it's time the world knew about you. This is something that you can work on throughout your career but let's get started right now. Everything you do in this step is extra and will help you stand out when applying for a job. The first thing to do is sign up for a LinkedIn account. This is 100% free and LinkedIn is a professional networking platform. Although it started out as an online resume, it's much more than that and has grown in the last five years. It's positioned itself as a social media network for professionals and it's a great opportunity for you. There's a real lack of quality content on LinkedIn and any post that you make has the opportunity to reach thousands of important people in the business world. Just doing a simple search for head of UX can pull up hundreds of names and add people to your network. If they accept, you will see future posts from them. Don't be shy here, the goal is networking. We'll talk more about this in the next step, finding a job but just know for now LinkedIn is your most powerful tool for being part of this design community. Whenever you create a new project in your portfolio, feel free to stand out and status update to LinkedIn. Share something you learned as an update or write an article from time to time. The key thing to remember is that nobody knows you exist until you produce something. This isn't personal, it's just the truth in the digital world. There are other social media platforms for you to share your work but the most important ones are Behance, LinkedIn and YouTube. I mentioned in YouTube because there's lots of potential here. The key is to share something that others find useful. Don't make it all about yourself. The best way to learn is to teach. So if there's something cool that you learned in Figma or Adobe XD, then make a short video and post it. You can share videos on LinkedIn and YouTube and remember these are evergreen and live forever and people will be finding these in years to come. So for now, stop building up a body of work. For each project you create, remember to document it in written and video format and share it. Even spending half an hour a week, you'll soon grow up a library of content that you can grow throughout your career. In the next and final step, we're going to see finally how you can break into the industry and get that first job. This is my favorite step of all and it's the hardest. If you've put in hard work to learn the basics, create a portfolio that's got some sample projects in it, have an active LinkedIn account, then it's time you made the next step. Here's the secret. Get your foot in the door before you even have a job. My first job was with Wired magazine in the UK and there's pretty much a 0% chance that I would have got that job by applying on the website or through a job board. As a junior designer, your biggest asset is you and your work ethic. To compete with thousands of other designers on paper is pretty much impossible and unfortunately this is where most people give up. Not you, not today. In the UK, we have Work Experience which is an internship in most of the world and it's where you volunteer at the company for a few weeks to get some experience. Before I got my first job at Wired, I was lucky enough to have already interned a Vogue magazine, GQ and Ferrari all in the same building. The only thing I was paid for was lunch money and tube fare. I stayed in a hotel until I ran out of money and then into a hostel. I travel to London every summer from Liverpool for three years and made as many connections as I could. I only found out about the job in Wired because I'd arranged to actually intern there and the first day I arrived, they needed a full-time junior designer. I was given the role because I was already in the building. This is how the business world works. A lot of the time it's who you know, not what you know unfortunately. The great news for you is that it's never been so easy to make connections from home. On LinkedIn, you can send out messages to UX designers from across the world. All you need to do is a quick search for UX designer filtered by people and location and then hit connect. You can personalize your invitation to connect with a message and it's something I suggest you always do. Try searching for head of UX and send a few nice carefully written messages with a LinkedIn portfolio and ask if there are any intern programs available. This is all about putting in the work, not being put off by a rejection and a slice of luck along the way. If you try enough people then eventually this may lead to an opening. From there, once you're inside the company then it's time to put in the work, network and find out how to get a junior role by asking people in the company. This work for me and I've seen it work for others too. I also know how hard it is to get a junior role and how tough it is getting rejected by company after company looking for experience. My only answer to this is make them an offer they can't refuse. Take all the friction out the hiring process and get your foot in the door before you even have a job. The next step for you to become a UX designer is to head on over to AnthonyCombo.com where I'm gonna be your mentor and step by step we're gonna create a UX project from scratch, we're gonna create a persona, we're gonna create user flows, we're gonna create prototypes and we're gonna test it with real users. By the end of it you're gonna understand how to create a website and an app from scratch, you're gonna have something for your portfolio and you're gonna be on your way to start on your new dream job in your UX design. So head on over there now, AnthonyCombo.com, the link's in the description.