 what's up guys in this video we're going to talk about what actually UX design is and what it's like to be a UX designer let's go before we get started my name is Anthony Conboy and I've been a professional UX designer for 15 years I've worked some of the world's biggest companies and I hope some of the stuff I'm going to share to you now is useful so let's take a look at the board this is UX in the middle let's talk about actually what UX design is and there's three circles here so the first one is we want to make something that's useful that's really important then we want to make something that's actually desirable so we want people to desire something and usable so you exit to the center of this but what exactly is UX design so I'm going to give you a practical example now we'll go through what it's like to design e-commerce websites okay so let's start with our econ website I'm going to draw a big circle and this represents a user's experience I'm going on this website so think about this is UX here so think about UX as the whole process so within that user who comes to the website what do they see well first of all they might see some images so good good product photography they might have UI which is the user interface so this is a the looking field of the website or the app then there's also other sections about this so they might have the actual experience of a check out then there's the content on the website and then there's other things like the actual interaction animations stuff like that so UX and it compensizes everything there's all these little sections this is what people actually get a bit confused about UX so UX already actually exists so any website or an app you already have a UX and it's not about a designing a UX to say it's about improving things to make sure that the person who comes to the website their user experience is as good as possible so let's take a look at some good examples of UX let's take a look at an example of a home page for the e-commerce website so we've got our page at the top we've got a navigation bar so then we've got some labels and we've got a search so a big part in UX is making sure that the information architecture on the website which is basically how things are organized that arrange is good so making sure all of the labels here are clearly defined simple language and understandable that's a really important experience then we've got search so search is a big part of the website having that clear and predominant and making sure that experience is really good so we also have images are a big part of the website making sure that the products are clearing the images it's not confusing it's very simple then we'll have some descriptions so it's making sure the descriptions clearly indicate we don't want any surprises what the products actually are and then what we want is big call to actions and we want we want the user basically to know what happens when they click that button so this is an example of a product detail page so we still got our navigation then we've got images rating well done high quality images then we'll have some sort of title and description and big clear call to action which is like add to basket and then underneath here we want things that are useful to the users which might be there might be some reviews then we might also have other bits of information like different sizes small medium large a very simple structure for a website but has all the elements that are really useful for a user now we'll take a look at what happens when someone actually adds something to cart and I'll show you a good example of a UX Amazon's a really good example of a good checkout experience so this let the page up into three sections so the first thing is a delivery info then this is where you do your payment and then at the bottom is basically where you review everything it's nice and simple and they've also got one of the most amazing experiences in UX which is the one click buy so this button here which is a basically your confirmation they've brought that button earlier in the cycle to the actual page where the product description is so you don't need to add something from the basket you can purchase this straight from there it's very addictive and it's one of the best bits the user experience to actually increase revenue for the website so the reason why UX is so powerful for companies like Amazon and other e-commerce websites is basically they make an easy process for the user to purchase something and this creates a really really happy customer because it was nice and easy this then leads back into revenue for the company because they retain to the product they make it seem simple as easy as possible is a brilliant way to attract great customers now let's take a look at a bad user experience so let's just example we've got our customer here for this let's call her Meg so Meg wants to go to a different e-commerce website so she logs in and she tries to find what she wants to buy so she looks at all the items and then she decides to add something to her cart so she's found what she's looking for she then goes but then it then asks her to make a new profile so there's no log out as guest or no check out as guest but you have to create a profile so Meg goes through all this she fails in the form she creates a profile that's fine so there's no log out with google or anything like that she has to create a form on this website but then once she's created the new profile her basket's empty so there's nothing in it so what she added then before it gets forgotten about during this journey so now she has to go back and then she finds her item again she then adds it to her cart but while she's adding it to her cart she gets a big pop-up here which is like 50% off all the offers for the website with a tiny small cross button in the corner which she can't find so once she removes that she's getting bombarded with advertisements on the website they're distracting her from the whole process she then gets fed up of all of this and wants to contact us but then gets taken to a 404 page which is a broken website then she just gets fed up and decides to leave the journey so you can see how different that is from amazon there's so many steps involved here amazon everything was really nice this one lost a sale amazon gained the sale and that's the power of good and bad UX so let's take a look at the UX design process now and an example of what you might do today so let's still stick with this e-commerce website and let's take a look at okay our job is now to redefine the bad user experience on the bad e-commerce website so the UX design process is split up in the five stages and you'll see this on the internet um on each stage basically you do different things than the UX designer so let's start with the first stage which is the fine so before we start we need to know what exactly we're doing in the project so we need to talk to the business and find out what they want and their job is okay make this sale make this sale process better but we need to know actually does that mean um have they gone off traffic coming to the website so they need to improve the advertisement or is it that the the users are falling off a certain point in the journey so we need kind of something solid to go by and because this is what we're going to be judged later on so for this example they've got plenty of traffic coming to the website but their purchases aren't as big as they want them to make aren't as good as they want them to make okay so that's our problem then the next thing we need to do is we need to understand why this problem's happening and this is a this is kind of like the using research phase of the project so this is quite uh it's kind of quite fun as a designer so this is where you get to have your thinking hat on and you get to actually so you want to meet with customers so you you can meet them in person that's great you want to talk about um their problems with the process some big companies have in-house testing facilities so when it was in Barclays they had these rooms where they got customers in the customers get paid for the time and then you get to ask them questions and sit behind like a glass wall it's kind of like like a police interrogation apart from it's a lot nicer that's quite fun so you can do that one on one you can do um it's called infographic research we follow people around in real life and you you observe them using the website or the app in actual day to day um real life situations or you can do surveys and get quantitative data with lots of people and you're kind of just understanding the problems so with this website we know that um the check of journey basically wasn't good we added it to a basket it dropped off we have to create a new profile and we were bombarded by ads so we understand that by going through the journey ourselves and by talking to customers then the next stage is the design phase so this um this has loads of different steps in it so we might start out by doing rough sketches so we might um sketch a sketch a new journey but we might do this in a workshop where we'll get people from the business we might get some users in and as a designer it's quite important to facilitate workshops so that's something that you'll learn to do as your career progresses but you'll you'll actually you might sketch out the website and then from there because sketching so easy you can scribble it off doesn't cost that much and you get the people from the business involved so you kind of know you're heading in the right direction before you even really get rural that's what I've kind of learned from my career then you'll take those low fidelity sketches and turn them into wireframes then you can prototype prototype them in websites applications like figma or sketch or Adobe XD figma is the one that everyone's using at the moment so it's just been bought by derby it's really good so you'll create a wireframe in that and you'll then test that with um you'll test that with the audience so you'll get people in you'll if you can use the test online you can send people prototypes ask them questions like do this checkout process then you'll go back and you'll make changes you can make a high fidelity version of it so you'll make it look and feel like the real website you basically go back and forth back and forth back and forth until you've got something which you're actually quite confident in and then there's kind of a step in the before analysis which I'm going to say develop so it's really important to work with it let's just hand that in dev so one of the key jobs you have as a UX designer is to work with the development team so this might actually be the majority of the year because projects take a long time to design and develop you work the development team so basically you want to hand your plans to them and they'll make it in front end tools hate doing lcss JavaScript and they need to basically you're an architect and you're giving them as good a plans as they could possibly have so that could be a prototype but you also want to work one on one with them and make sure they understand the nuances of the design and then that will get developed and released and then one of the key things that people don't realise in your exercise is to analyse what you've done so you want to make sure that okay actually this is performing how we want it so okay we're getting just as many users coming to the website and our conversion rates gone up so we're making the company more money but then you can then kind of move to this back around so from the analysis we might learn a couple of things so we might see okay we've we've done this we've done really good apart from on this one page we're losing right the checkout final page we're losing a lot more people than we should so you'll take our finding go back into the defined stage and then you can then understand on the new design why people are falling off on that page and then go through the process again so as you can see this might this whole process might take a year so during the first couple of months of the year you'll be doing different jobs than you would be later on when it might come more design and development and it's quite fun because you get to wear different hats as a UX designer and following this process that no day is actually the same so you're probably watching this video interested in becoming a UX designer I just want to give you a quick overview of what your UX career path might be like which is which is interesting and I wish I would have known this one started so here you are as a student uh what are you thinking about changing career then the first job is always the hardest actually so you want to get a junior designer role and to get this role you're going to need a portfolio of projects so you'll need three to five case studies which is where you might redesign an app redesign a website or make a brand new one from scratch and this is the hardest part so this is where I might be able to help you if you check out the link in the description Anthony Conroy.com I've got a course where I basically take you from a student to a junior dev so we create projects together we put them in a portfolio and then I teach you about the US design process career paths like this and then I get you interview ready so you'll have the confidence to take this portfolio into an interview then once you get this junior designer role you can then progress you become a mid designer senior designer and as for the salaries you can expect my first junior role was about 30k in the UK obviously this depends on what country you're in it might be slightly more now but if it depends that was in London might be slightly left in different places obviously in California it's going to be higher than other places but then you might go you might go 30 35 40k then you've got a decision to make so the big decision is is whether you want to continue in as a design as an individual designer or if you want to become a manager so this is where it forks off now as you see on the example before the e-commerce website kind of the whole digital industry works in projects and kind of unique to digital so there's two ways you can go one is to become a contractor or the other one is to become a permanent employee and this is so you're you're senior dev so go down the pain roll this is where you then start to lead teams so this is where you're a manager and then you can you know you can earn you can earn 100k and above and that's where you're actually going to be looking after a first of all a small team of three or four designers and then you might need a global team of like 50 or 60 designers but your actual day job will become more management and less hands-on design so the other route the the other way you can go is to become a contractor and that's what i have them both so you can become a contractor and that's where you might go into a big company and you might be given a year contract so that will be designed this e-commerce website you get paid on a day rate so you might earn you might earn $500 a day this could go off to a thousand dollars depending on your experience and you'll be in that company for a year and then you'll leave and you'll probably go to another company or it might get extended so there's actually more financial gain in this side but there are downsides to it as well so i've had contracts cancelled on me basically the day before i went there's no stability it's kind of not great with a family because there might be so this one you might have three month notice one month notice this one could be two weeks or even a week and companies are more likely to cancel big projects and move you on so there's no stability after a year you've then going to apply and get another job it might take you three to five months to get it but if you're good and you become good for your career and you have a good portfolio you can make more money becoming a contractor but if you want to have a long term relationship with a company you can go down the pavement and risk them becoming manager i have this overview has given you kind of an exciting glimpse into becoming a UX designer if you want to learn more what's the next video i'm going to go over the UX design process step by step in further detail let's go