 What's up guys welcome to this workshop and the goal is I want to take you from where you are now which is a student And I want to show you the career path Basically all the way down to making 100k as a UX designer. So in this workshop, we're going to go through I'm going to explain properly the essentials of UX design showing good and bad UX experiences Then we're going to talk about career path and how you can make the transition The hardest transition from students to junior designer. We're going to go all over that in this workshop So let's get going 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 in 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 UX sits at 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 e-com website I'm going to draw a big circle and this represents a user's experience and 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 the look and feel 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 Animation stuff like that. So UX and it compensizes everything There's all these little section. 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 design in 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 homepage 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 cleaning 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 clear in 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 of the products actually are and then What we want is big call to actions and 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 Reading 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 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 Good 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 brought that button Earlier in the cycle to the actual page where the product description is so you don't need to add something to basket You can pitch this straight from there. It's very addictive and it's one of the best bits user experience to actually increase revenue for the website So the reason why UX is so powerful for companies like Amazon or the 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 returned to the product They make a thing 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 a 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 a cart. But while she's adding it to a cart, she gets a big pop-up here Which is like 50% off Well all the offers for the website with a tiny small cross button in the corner, which you can't find So once she removes that she's getting bombarded with advertisements on the website and distracting her from the whole process She then gets fed up with all of this and wants to contact us But then get 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 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 a minute So the UX design process is split up into five stages and you'll see this on the internet On each stage basically you do different things than the UX designer So let's start with the first stage which is define 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 the sale make this the sales process better But we need to know actually does that mean have they gone off traffic coming to the website? So do we need to improve the other tiseland or is it that 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 on as good as they want them to be okay So that's our problem then the next thing we need to do is we need to understand why this problem is happening and This is a this is kind of like the user research phase of the project. So this is quite It's kind of quite fun as a designer So this is where you get to have your thinking hats 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 and their problems with the process some big companies have in-house testing for synthese 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 in like like a police interrogation up off them. It's a lot nicer That's quite fun. So You can do that one-on-one you can do 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 and Real-life situations or you can do surveys and get quantitative data with lots of people and You kind of just understanding the problems. So with this website, we know that The checkup 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 This has loads of different steps in it. So we might start out by doing rough sketches. So we might 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 often the angle and you'll learn to there is your career progressors But you'll you'll actually you might sketch out the website and then from there because sketching so easy you can scribble off Doesn't cost that much and you get the paper from the business involved So you kind of know you're heading in the right direction before you even really get a role That's one of kind of land from our 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 it's really good. So you'll create a wireframe in that you'll then test up with You'll test out with the audience so you'll get people in you'll If you can use the test in a line, you can send people prototypes ask them questions like do this checkup process Then you'll go back and you'll make changes and 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 stepping 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 new harbors of UX designers 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 want the development team to basically you want to hand your plans to them and they'll make it in front-end tools hate them 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 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 realize in your ex designers to analyze 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 moved this back around so from the analysis remind me and a couple of things so we might see okay We've we've done this we've done really good a platform 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 Then 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 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 when I started. So here you are as a student And what are you thinking about changing career then? To get 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 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 Mike 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 gonna 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 designer 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 gonna be looking after a festival a small team We're 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 there The other way you can go is to become a contractor and that's what I saw of 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 Design 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 and you'll be in that company for a year and then you'll leave and you're probably go to another company or it might get extended So there's actually more financial gain in this side, but I'm not There are downsides to it as well. So I've had contracts canceled on me Basically the day before I went there's no stability 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 done 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 you creating you have a good portfolio You can make more money becoming a contractor But if you want to have a long-term election ship with a company you can go down the pavement and miss them a common manager Okay guys the most important thing we're probably gonna talk about on today's whole workshop is this The goal is to get you a junior designer role So I know that that's the hardest thing in the career because once you're actually getting the career Then you just got to work hard and apply skills and over time You eventually work your way down. These are these are the things that you need So there's six things on here and we'll go over each one of them and I'll explain to you how you can actually do this yourself Okay, so the first thing on the list is you need a good foundation of skills So one of the key things you need to be aware of when applying for a junior role is This career that you're applying for is user experience design. It's not user interface design So I know you'll see a lot of tutorials online Everybody's all over figment design and websites and apps in it. But as we talked about before you are design is just It's kind of just a small portion in that in the overall UF bubble so when you create your portfolio and you go for a job interview you need to show other types of skills so There's all of these other bubbles here, which are all different UF tasks so some of these research some of this is analysis the There's obviously UI desired, but then there's like there's like no for that I think wireflame and prototyping sketching of your ideas So I'll talk to you in a little bit about how you can show all this But that's one thing you need to bear in mind That's why a lot of people who go into this design lots of cool things and figment I actually never get to become a professional designer because that's just as a high-remover I've had loads of designers. That's one thing I look for not just skills in figment You've got to look so, you know, you've got to understand how to create a great digital product. So the next thing is Experience so how do you and this always makes me laugh when people look for junior designs are free as experience. It's like How do you become a junior designer if you've never got an experience and so I did when I came into it I had years of College and university that's when I did it But I also know that you don't actually fully need that when it talks about experience Like when I got my first job people that didn't actually ask me about my university degree The experience is shown in the next one, which is your portfolio and if you don't have any professional experience That's okay. That's where we create example projects I mean we're going to show them as case studies. So you probably need three to five things in the portfolio and Those three to five things we're going to actually focus on different part of the UX experience So we might redesign that but within that we might create a persona. We might do a user flow diagram We might do a high fidelity prototype, but we might also show how we use a tester there so you need to get all of those different things into your portfolio and Three to five case studies is more than enough to you know to show your knowledge of The subject so your portfolio. So a lot of this makes me laugh a lot of people You go into your X have these flashy portfolios. You'll see them online where people review portfolios and I Think the longer you're in the industry the less flashy you need to be or the odd the more simple you realize things are Because this is you're applying for a user experience role. You're not applying for a developer role So developers of people who make websites User experience designers You care about the experience of the website, which is actually making things simple You don't need all these animations and text flashy things which make it overly complex near the very civil portfolio Which shows your understanding of the subject and that's why like my own portfolios on Behance Behance is owned by Adobe And it's a it's a free portfolio platform and what's great about be answers If it adobe have another thing which is a paid thing which is called Adobe portfolio I think it's like $10 a month and it takes you Behance portfolio, which is like a public So it's almost like an as such a network for designers and Then it makes your own Private website with that work it pulls it in and it lays out written nicely so if you can if you full come if you can combine Behance and Adobe portfolio So you use Adobe portfolio when you're in a place or a job and you can use Behance as a free one And if you will combine those two you can make a portfolio really easy So next we're going to talk about So we've already mentioned this case studies. So when you write to know your work you need to Need to write in detail about the different things you went through on the use on the user sense of design process So write about them. Don't just design an app create a persona and talk about how you got the data for that persona and Right show the user journeys and explain why you think that you need to explain your full process throughout and the case study Should be quite long. We should have a lot of text in there It should have a lot of their maybe photographs of your sketches and even put some videos in there A lot of people don't take advantage of the phone being able to take amazing video Talk about the process and if anything it gives me as a higher amount as your own insight to you So if I saw two part to portfolio is one with a few videos in it I would feel more inclined to like you because I'd know what I was getting into before the interview Then what you've got that you can go into networking. This is where we use the link did Which is One of the most amazing tools on the planet. So LinkedIn is where it's so since my first job all of my other jobs Have come through LinkedIn So all of the big companies have recruiters and recruiters basically are paid to place you into a company needs to go headhunters. So They do have recruiters for the journey design walls So a big company also go to them and say we need the junior designer And you need to be on LinkedIn because they scour LinkedIn for prospects Which is what you are your prospects for that for their job Your portfolio should be on LinkedIn and you should also use LinkedIn as a marketing fees your own brand. So post articles on that right a couple of things About UX share your journey and you're getting and even go on there Say to recruiters you act recruiters in the cities you want and them start selling the messages and seeing if there's any Thing going there. So you need LinkedIn to basically build your own personal network and then The next one is where you actually get the junior designer role. So how I personally got my designer role I did internships. So it doesn't sound like glamorous But internships is basically where you work for free or you got paid lunch money. So I worked for Vogue magazine in the UK So I I got that position because I had a good portfolio I had lots of good example projects in there, which I made for university but you can do them yourself and They they like my portfolio and they give me an internship. So I went there for two weeks and then Off my own back. There was lots of other magazines in the building I went down to talk to the art directors and the different magazines Introduced myself explained that I wanted to become a professional designer and they in turn give me two week Experiences and another magazines like GQ and Ferrari and then because I knew people in the company When I graduated university, I got my first job in the same company for wired through someone I met in an internship So and and also I was sleeping hostels in cheap hotels while I was doing this I didn't have any money. It's not glamorous. I gave everyone tells you but I did that to get my foot in the door Because it's going to be very hard having no Having not that much experience you're going to be competing with loads of people for this junior role So you can do it as long as your portfolio in the case studies are good But I kind of went in the back door like I wasn't competing anyone for this internship And when the job came up, I wasn't competing with anyone because they knew me So it was just me. They just give me the role So that's what you need to do. So I hope that explains how you can become a junior designer And now I'm going to show you the next steps on what you can do to actually do this So in this part, I want to talk about mentorships So I was really lucky for my career. I had some great mentors I had the teacher in college who really cared for me and was able to mentor me And then when I went into working for magazines, I had two of the best art directors in the world who mentored me And I know that this isn't available for everyone around the world So this is where I want to offer kind of my knowledge and hopefully I can become your mentor So that's why I put together my online course, which is it's more than online course It's actually mentorship. So during the program I my goal is to help as many people go from students to junior designers as possible And I've covered in the course every single step in the process that we just talked about So this is just a little example of what we're going to what we could do together So over the course, I teach you all of the fundamentals of UX More than this. So we go on to every single step in the design process We talk about research, information, architecture Then we talk about what new like pop it into face design Analytics how to analyze websites and apps how to prototype them and we then talk about really important things like accessibility So we go over every step in the process. So you have a solid foundation of knowledge So that's those two ticked off then The two main tools in the industry that everyone's using now is figma and fig jam So they're both the same company and they've both been bought out by adobe recently for enormous amount of money So fig jam is what you use to make It's not prototypes, but it's different parts of the user experience design So I'll show you now. So during the course We create loads of different things that you can find a case study that shows every single part of the process So we create a person. So during the course we actually make It's an app for finding the local farms market. So we take it from concept to Delivery, basically. So we start off I give you some example data that you can use and from that data you create a persona in fig jam So that shows that you to hire a manager so you can analyze data and then you can create something useful out of it Then you'll create a user flow diagram in fig jam as well That's where you show the journey of someone going through the app to complete a task So it's how they log on to the app and then they find the local farmers market That's really useful for when we build out the prototype later. Then we talk about information architecture That's how apps and websites are structured. So you do something called a card source during the course. That's where Basically at every page on the website and you organize them into groups And then you give the groups names and then you can test out with your friends and family And that basically shows how to organize like a top-level navigation of a website So that's something that not many junior designers are gonna have in their portfolio So now they'll let you stand up there Then we take basically all of this and create a wireframe for the journey We do that in fig jam then we move over to figma, which is great for creating a high fidelity prototype And that's gonna be something you can test on your phone. It's gonna look like a real app We're gonna do all the interaction and we're gonna do over 10 pages in there So you'll design something which looks beautiful and I'll teach you everything I learned from some of the world's best art directors Have a how to design Professional looking websites and apps so it's gonna look great because you're gonna actually watch me Design in Sigma. I'm gonna explain my four processors go along And that's the best way to show someone how to design is by observing and then just replicating your own version Then after that we take our high fidelity prototype We understand about user tested and then you can take this and test it with your friends and family And then you'll get some feedback and you can improve your design and then finally We look in the analytics of the testing so we've improved it again and then we talk about accessibility So we take the prototype and we make sure it works for everybody So 8% of the pop 8% of the men actually are colorblind It's only 0.5% of women I don't know why but 8% of men are colorblind and we make sure that your app Cater stuff all of them and we improve it again So all of these you can show in your portfolio at the end of it You'll understand the whole process and then you can replicate this out a couple more times and you'll have a portfolio So the length of that course is actually appearing on screen now So if you want to check it out, that's great Hopefully we can build your portfolio together and you'll become a professional UX designer and it's not then you can It's fine. You can go ahead and you can do it all or yourself you can walk through it But by doing it with me You kind of have some accountability like I'll be there and you can watch Someone who's actually been and done that I haven't been in UX for three months. I've been in there for 15 years I'm not gonna tell you you need a flashy website I'm gonna keep things very very simple and explain to you exactly what you need So hopefully you can join me on the mental program And I hope this is just giving you a glimpse into what a career in UX should be like It's amazing. It's enabled me and even Wales with my wife and two children You can work from anywhere in the world. It's a great salary. It's no stress It's it's just I couldn't think of a better career So I really hope this isn't giving you a some energy and passion towards your career and Hopefully I'll see you in the course Let's go