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0:04
SPEAKER: Welcome to your first course. Anyone interested in UX design can complete this course because you don't need any previous experience in design, and you don't need a college degree. In this first video, we'll cover the goals of the course and the history of UX design. UX designers help make technology easier to understand and more enjoyable to use. So when did the study of user experience, or UX, begin? Let's learn some quick history to get us up to speed.
0:34
The phrase "user experience" was first coined in the 1990s by cognitive psychologist Don Norman as technology use expanded and evolved. Although the term came about relatively recently, the principles of user experience actually stretch back thousands of years, all the way to ancient China where the practice of Feng Shui began. Practitioners believe that the arrangement of a physical space, like how furniture is positioned in a room, could bring someone luck
1:04
or improve their health and happiness. Today, lots of different industries still rely on these same basic ideas. In the tech world, user experience mostly focuses on how people use or interact with products. In this course, we'll explore the foundations of UX design and why it's so important for consumers and businesses. We'll learn common terms, tools, and frameworks that UX designers use. We'll discuss how to plan and participate in design sprints, a common method
1:36
for collaborating on projects, and finally, you'll begin to build your professional presence online, including starting your portfolio. To help keep track of what you're learning, you'll take practice quizzes and complete peer reviews and self-reviews. You'll get plenty of chances to go over the materials in practice. At the end of the week, you'll wrap up the course with a graded assessment to show what you know. So let's start at the beginning and learn the basics of user experience design.
2:13
The user experience is how a person, the user, feels about interacting with or experiencing a product, and a product is a good, service, or feature. It might be a physical product, like a video game controller or a bag of potato chips, or a technology product, like an app, website, or smartwatch. There are many things that can make up a good user experience. In this video, we'll highlight some of them. For example, for a user to have a good experience,
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the product needs to be usable, equitable, enjoyable, and useful. Let's break that down. To begin, user experience is about improving usability or making something easier to use. This means that the design, structure, and purpose of the product are clear to everyone. Think about a ketchup bottle. Historically, ketchup came in a glass bottle. The user had to hit the bottom of the glass to make ketchup come out. Often, no ketchup or too much ketchup would come out of the bottle.
3:24
Today, the ketchup bottle has been redesigned into a plastic squeezable bottle, which makes it easier to use and allows users to control how much ketchup comes out. UX designers need to think about every person who uses the product. This might include nonnative English speakers, people with disabilities, or people with very different life experiences from your own. For example, one user might find an app with a lot of text easy to use. On the other hand, a user with a visual impairment
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might want different features, like sound. Considering the unique needs of many different people is important work, and thinking about equitable design is key. Being equitable means your designs are useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities and backgrounds. User experience is also about making things enjoyable to use, which creates a positive connection between the user and the product. UX designers foster that positive connection
4:29
by taking a user's thoughts and feelings into account when making products. Think about ordering takeout food online. When you search for a restaurant in Google or Yelp, you can see photos of dishes and read reviews from other people who have eaten there. This experience is enjoyable because you can make a more informed choice about what to order, leaving you feeling happier about the product. So how do we figure out what makes a user happy with the product? That's where research comes in.
5:01
To know how users feel, we have to collect evidence on how they're experiencing that product in real time and ask them about it, too. We'll discuss this in a lot more detail later. As humans, we want products that are useful, meaning they solve our problems. For example, if you're lost, a map app telling you how to get home is useful, but if the app can't find your current location, it's not so useful anymore. So now we know what it means for a user to have a good experience.
5:35
Why is it important to business? In 2018, the research firm McKinsey & Company studied companies in three industries, medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking. They found that regardless of industry, businesses that focused on good usability and design perform better than their competitors. Basically, it comes down to this. When people like a product, they use that product a lot, and they recommend it to their friends. And more people using the product
6:06
means better business for the company. Plus, when users have a good experience with the product, they're more likely to have a positive opinion of the company that made it, a win-win for the user and the business. Can you think of a product you love so much that you shared it with a friend? If you did, that's a great example of user experience design in action. Despite all this, a lot of companies don't understand the important role that UX design can play in improving their business,
6:36
and that's where you, as a UX designer, come in. So now you know how to describe user experience and UX design, and you understand why UX design is important for consumers and businesses. Next up, we'll learn more about what UX designers do.
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UX designers come from a lot of different backgrounds-- marketers, artists, teachers, small business owners, cashiers, or anything, really. Rather than sharing similar work histories, UX designers tend to share common skills and interests instead. A lot of UX designers have a good sense for visuals, which means you recognize when an image fits or doesn't fit in a space or what colors complement each other, but you don't need to know anything about graphic design or even be able to draw
7:31
to be a UX designer. UX designers tend to be curious about people and like thinking about how people's minds work. They also enjoy figuring out how people use products and how to make those products easier to use. UX designers are empathetic, too. Empathy is the ability to understand someone else's feelings or thoughts in a situation, and it's a major part of UX. Remember earlier when we mentioned equitable design and designing for everyone? Well, in order to design for everyone,
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we need to understand how a person might feel or what they might think in any situation. Just like a lot of UX designers don't share work histories, they don't always share educational backgrounds, either. A lot of UX designers learn on their own by taking courses like this one and teaching themselves the skills they need to get entry-level jobs. They're pretty resourceful, too, tapping their experience from other jobs or hobbies to build the foundation for their new careers.
8:35
So we've covered common characteristics of people drawn to UX design. Now let's explore what those UX designers actually do. When you think of the word "design," you might think it's all about the visual aspects of a product, but it's only one small part of what UX designers might do. In fact, there are many different kinds of UX designers-- interaction designers, visual designers, and motion designers. Let's start with interaction designers, who focus on designing the experience of a product
9:07
and how it functions. They figure out how to connect the user's needs and the business's goals with what's actually feasible to build. As an interaction designer at Google, my team and I are responsible for defining the user experience for security and privacy-related tools. In my world, users always come first. There are also visual designers, who focus on how a product or technology looks. They might be responsible for designing logos, illustration, or icons.
9:40
They might also decide font color and size or work on product layouts. Motion designers are another common type of UX designer. They think about what it feels like for a user to move through a product and how to create smooth transitions between pages on an app or a website. Similar to UX designers, there are also graphic designers, who create visuals that tell a story or message. Graphic designers usually work on the appearance of a physical product, like an invitation or a poster,
10:14
while UX designers focus on how users interact with the product. Outside of design, there are many other roles in the field of UX. Collaboration is an important part of a UX designer's job, so let's talk about a few of the most common colleagues a designer might work with. UX researchers conduct the studies or interviews that help us learn how people use a product. Then there are UX writers, who think about how to make the language within a product
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clearer to make the user experience more intuitive. This could include writing labels for buttons or adjusting the tone to be formal or friendly. Next up, we have product designers, who often act as a bridge between interaction designers and engineers. They make sure the first and final designs match in the finished product materials and that the assets are ready to be handed off to the engineering team. The assets are everything from text and images
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to the design specifications like font style, color, size, and spacing, which brings us to the UX engineers, one of the groups that UX designers work with most frequently. UX engineers translate the design's intent into a functioning experience, like a website or an app, and finally, UX program managers ensure clear and timely communication so that the process of building a useful product moves smoothly from start to finish. This might include setting up goals and writing project plans.
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Have you ever created an account on an app and had no idea what to do next? Or have you pressed a button only to find out that what you thought was going to happen didn't? Predicting user roadblocks and potential design mishaps is what good UX design is all about. In this video, we'll explain what makes a user experience design good or poor. It might seem like a good design is based on personal preference, but most designs that are considered poor or unpleasant for the user
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don't reflect the user's needs. Think about a product as simple as a door. Have you ever tried to leave a room, pulled the door handle, but the door didn't budge? That's because you were supposed to push the door handle, not pull it. As designers, we have to think about how to improve the user experience with the door so that we can easily exit and enter. Doors with this kind of poor user experience are called Norman doors. Remember Don Norman who invented the term UX?
12:57
In his book "The Design of Everyday Things," he first describes this phenomenon, and he explains how a user's experience isn't always considered in a product design. All right, so doors are just one example of user experience. Let's think about UX design in technology. Well-designed apps aim to save space on the screen by using icons instead of texts, so more information can fit. Icons are also pleasing to look at and easy to understand no matter the user's native language,
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but sometimes, the meaning of an icon is impossible to figure out unless you tap on it. In that case, text would be a lot more useful. Good design considers the user's needs. For the user to have a good experience, the product needs to be usable, equitable, enjoyable, and useful, among other things. For example, the purpose of a shopping app is to buy things. If you put a pair of shoes in your virtual shopping cart, you expect to be able to buy them,
14:03
but if you add the shoes to your shopping cart and are then told they are out of stock, that is not a good user experience. And good user experiences should create products that are intuitive and easy to use. Each product should be designed to make the user feel a certain way. A key task for UX designers is to tie a specific emotion to the experience of using the product. So start paying attention to the things you use every day, the direction you have to turn the faucets in your bathtub,
14:33
the way your baby's pajamas button, what error messages on your phone mean, and which way to open doors. You start to recognize both positive and negative aspects in each of their designs. Use your own experiences to think about what makes a design good or poor. What could be made better? What's already working?
14:59
So far, we've explored the different types of UX designers. Over the course of this program, you'll become much more familiar with the most important tasks that UX designers do. You might even be drawn to a particular path or specialty. To get started, let's identify some typical responsibilities of entry-level UX designers-- researching, wireframing, prototyping, creating information architecture, and communicating effectively. Entry-level UX designers start their careers
15:31
by doing a lot of tasks to learn the basics. One of those tasks might be research. UX designers use research to understand audiences and learn about their backgrounds, demographics like age and location, motivations, pain points, emotions, and life goals. There's a lot to learn about users and their preferences, and UX designers want to discover as much as they can in order to inform the product's design. An entry-level designer also creates wireframes. A wireframe is an outline or a sketch
16:03
of a product or a screen. It helps the designer figure out how a page is arranged, where each piece of a product fits in with the others, and how users will likely interact with the product. Wireframing is one of the first steps designers take when building a new product or feature. It's done after or at the same time as the research. We can wireframe by drawing on paper or digitally on a computer. Here are some examples of wireframes I've done.
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This is for a web page on Google's transparency report. Notice that they're just basic drawings, but you can tell what goes where. These wireframes were designed to demonstrate the basic structure of the page to gain support from key stakeholders, people with a business interest in the final product. A UX designer will also create prototypes. A prototype is an early model of a product that demonstrates functionality like a wireframe but a lot more advanced.
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While a wireframe gives you a general idea of where things go and how the product will function, a prototype illustrates a progression from one screen to the next. We can draw prototypes on paper, create a physical prototype, or build a digital prototype. Here's a prototype for Google's transparency report that I created, and here's the final version.
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The purpose of wireframes and prototypes is to figure out the best design for a product inexpensively and quickly. Another responsibility of an entry-level UX designer might include creating the information architecture, which is the framework of a website or how it's organized, categorized, and structured. For example, when you click the File menu on a word-processing application like Google Docs, you expect certain options like New or Print to appear in the dropdown menu.
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Or when you click on the company's home page, you expect to find a link to an About page. That structure is the website's information architecture. Finally, an entry-level UX design job, like many jobs, also requires a lot of communication, like meetings with colleagues, writing emails, creating proposals, or pitching clients. So in short, entry level UX designers should know how to research, wireframe, prototype, create information architecture, and communicate effectively.
18:34
Your exact responsibilities will vary depending on where you work and how specialized you need to be for your particular job. Up next, you'll learn about being a generalist or a specialist and what that means for your career options. Intrigued? Let's go.
18:57
So far, we've learned about some of the tasks an entry-level UX designer might do each day. You've also mentioned that your role might differ depending on where you work. In this video, we'll explain the differences between generalists, specialists, and T-shaped roles in UX design. A generalist is a UX designer with a broad number of responsibilities. Most UX designers begin their careers this way doing various tasks. For example, you might do a bit of interaction design work,
19:30
a bit of visual design work, and more. One benefit of being a generalist is that you get to try out roles and find a specialty that you're passionate about. Generalist UX designers are common at smaller companies with fewer employees, as these companies don't have big design departments, so you might have to wear many hats. A generalist might be responsible for a combination of user research, branding, user flows, UX writing, visual design, prototyping, production design,
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information architecture, and usability testing, among other things. Most generalists start their roles knowing about one or two of these topics. They learn about other areas on the job from their colleagues or mentors. UX generalists can also continue their education through professional development, doing their own research to keep up with industry trends, and participating in online UX communities to learn from other designers. On the other hand, if you become really interested
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in one part of UX design, you might find your niche as a specialist. A specialist dives deep into one particular UX design role, like interaction, visual, or motion design. While a generalist has a breadth of knowledge, a specialist has more depth of knowledge in one kind of UX design. Specialists usually work at large companies where the organization can afford to have a big team of UX designers. At Google, we have thousands of specialized UX designers. Take me, for example.
21:05
I specialize in interaction design. We covered some specialist tracks earlier in the course. If you need a refresher, check out the glossary. As you advance in your career, you may become a T-shaped designer. A T-shaped designer specializes in one kind of UX design and has a breadth of knowledge in other areas. This is called a T-shaped designer because your skills look like an uppercase T. The vertical line of the T is the kind of UX design you specialize in, like visual design.
21:39
The horizontal line across the top of the T includes your complementary skills. These skills might come from other fields, like interaction design, that cross over with your specialties or soft skills that help you work more effectively. Becoming a specialist or generalist isn't always a conscious choice. It might be based entirely on where you work and what skills are needed. When I started in UX design, I was a motion graphics designer.
22:06
Then I worked on video games, apps for businesses, and apps about financial technology. Now that I work at Google, I focus on privacy as an interaction designer. The more experience you get in the industry, the broader your perspective. You'll be exposed to a lot of different companies, design principles, and work styles, and you'll learn how each one can better inform your designs. As a UX designer, there's always room to grow and opportunities for change, so whether you
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become a generalist or a specialist, there are plenty of options.
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So far, you've learned about common responsibilities of UX designers and the types of roles that UX designers might have, but like many people, UX designers don't work alone. They work on cross-functional teams that might include other designers, engineers, researchers, product leads, or program managers. In this video, we'll discuss how these cross-functional teams work together to build a product. Imagine you're working on an app for ordering food.
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You and your team want to build a new feature that shows users restaurants that offer allergen-free meals. The product lead decides the scope of the project. The UX researcher tries to understand user trust, like whether users will trust the information about allergens or trust the app itself. The interaction designer figures out the flow for ordering, like how to include allergen-free foods in the search filter. The visual designer thinks about how to make it easy for users
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to find allergen-free foods in the product. These UX designers create wireframes and prototypes to show the experience that users will have in the app. The engineers bring these wireframes and prototypes to life and create ways for restaurants to each add information about their allergen-free options. As you might have noticed, it's important for UX designers to collaborate with engineers because engineers build the final product. This collaboration happens throughout the entire process.
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There are multiple opportunities for UX designers and engineers to provide feedback to each other to make their changes together. There are a lot of moving parts here. This is where the program manager comes in to ensure clear and timely communication across the team, so the process of building useful apps moves smoothly from start to finish. Every team and team member has a different task to complete, but ultimately, they all have the same goal,
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to build a product that's usable, useful, equitable, and enjoyable for users and businesses. Coming up, we'll discuss the types of companies UX designers work at. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how many options you have.
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Say you're hired by a startup or a small business. First, what's a startup? Well, in simple terms, a startup is a new business that wants to develop a unique product or service and bring it to market. Startups generally have tight budgets and few employees, so each person has to perform a variety of jobs and move quickly. If you're a UX designer at a startup or other small businesses, you'll likely be a generalist. Designers at companies with fewer employees
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get involved in many parts of the business. You might be responsible for both interaction and visual design, conduct user research, or even help with marketing. Talk about having a lot of jobs to do. Working at a startup or small business can be stressful but also very rewarding. You'll learn quickly, so it can be a great way to launch your career. Another job a lot of UX designers start out in is freelance. Freelancers work for themselves and market their services
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to businesses to find customers. As a freelancer, you get to pick projects that interests you, make your own schedule, and work with a lot of different brands. Another common place UX designers work is at advertising agencies. Advertising agencies are teams of creatives hired by clients to build marketing campaigns. For example, a beverage company might hire an ad agency to create a campaign for a new soda. As a UX designer, you might be responsible for developing
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wireframes and designs for digital products for the new campaign. You may also do work that's outside of the usual UX design tasks, like graphic design or writing. Working at an ad agency is a lot like freelancing in that you get to work with a bunch of different brands, but you'll be employed by the agency instead of being self-employed. And you'll be part of a team. Design agencies and design studios are another option for jobs. A design agency provides a one-stop shop
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for the look of brands, products, and services. They're usually more specialized than ad agencies because they focus on design and branding. Your average day working at a design agency is a lot like working at a startup. You'll probably be a generalist and the only designer on the project. You'll be exposed to a lot of different industries and get to solve unique problems, but since design agencies work with multiple clients, you might not work on a project from beginning to end.
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UX designers at design agencies regularly move between teams and work on different stages of a product's development. Finally, you can work as a UX designer at a big company, like Google. Big companies have thousands of employees working on lots of different projects. UX designers are typically specialized in their work and focus on one project from beginning to end. Working at a big company is a great way to learn about a specialization within UX design.
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Plus, you get to learn from other experts. One trade-off is that you might have fewer options to gain skills outside of your specific role, so a desire to specialize is key. Now that you know what's out there, which types of companies are you most excited about working at?
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An internship is a great way to start your career. An internship is usually a short-term job with limited responsibility. You often work closely with a supervisor to learn more about a job or industry that you are interning in. It's a fantastic way to get real job experience. Plus, an internship might lead to a full-time job in the future, so you'll have to decide if taking an internship is a good option for you and your family. Another way to start your career is an apprenticeship.
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Apprenticeships provide on-the-job training to help you develop real skills. Apprenticeships are similar to internships because you work closely with an experienced professional. However apprenticeships generally lasts longer than internships, around one or two years instead of a few months, and apprenticeships are always paid. You could also explore freelancing, which we discussed earlier. You may recall freelancers work for themselves and market their services to businesses to find customers.
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Working as a freelancer can help you gain experience on real UX design projects. A good way to get started as a freelancer is to offer your services to a small business or a nonprofit in exchange for a good recommendation in a project to include in your portfolio. Once you have a couple of projects under your belt and some references, you can begin charging customers. If you're excited to explore freelancing, we'll discuss it more in detail at the end of this program.
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The most common way to start your career in UX design is an entry-level job. Entry-level jobs are roles that do not require prior experience in the field. The skills and portfolio pieces you'll develop in this program will help you get started as an entry-level UX designer. Plenty of companies might be interested in hiring someone who's completed this program and produced a portfolio of outstanding work, someone like you. A job that says it requires a year of experience
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might instead accept your certificate and portfolio as proof that you have the skills for the job. It clearly communicates your value, so don't limit yourself. OK, we've sure covered a lot this week. Let's quickly recap what you've learned. We've explored how this program works, the definition of UX design, why UX design is important for consumers and businesses, the different roles within the field of UX, what makes a user experience good or poor, an entry-level UX
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designer's job responsibilities, how a UX designer works with cross-functional teams, differences in UX design jobs depending on company size and industry, and how to pursue a career in UX design. DAVE: Congratulations on finishing this course from the Google UX Design Certificate. You can access the full experience, including job search help, and start to earn your certificate by clicking on the icon or the link in the description below. Watch the next video in the course by clicking here,
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