User Experience Course

As mentioned in the blog, I took the Introduction to UX course form Futurelearn. I also read through the course on Figma and worked on the challenges set there and am currently going through the design learning material on Hackdesign. During my time on the Figma and FutureLearn courses,I came to what should have been a rather obvious revelation: I have in a sense been training in User Experience to begin with, from the moment I embarked on my education in Games Design, because what are you designing when you try to create a game? An experience, for users other than yourself. I also realised I was auditing UX when I worked as a Quality Assurance tester, technical faults that ruin an experience, performance issues, faults in conveyance and navigation, I had to find those, and I needed to be good at not only finding them, but reproducing, documenting and re-testing them with every new build to make sure issues never percist or return. More things I learned, not on this page are here.

Framing a Design Challenge

In this task, I had to work on a design challenge for a mock site, product or service, I covered this in my blog post with the full notes I took for the task, link here.

2nd Task:

Creating a Persona

This was for the task revolving around user interviews and personas. As they recognised we wouldn't have the interview resources for the first part, we were briefed on how it works and asked to create a personal based on some basic assumptions revolving around the site we conceptualised in the first task. More information about the persona in my blog post, link here.

3rd Task:

Creating an Empathy Map

My next task involved thinking around the persona to create an empathy map of how they might respond to scenarios when using the site being mocked up. This was particularly difficult since the persona itself was quite undeveloped.

4th Task:

Journey Maps

These were something I did not get on with. What was described vs what was presented left me a little confused. They're described as a step-by-step mapping of a user's journey to their objective, but what I was shown was a grid that seemed more focused on business goals than user desires. I imagined it being more like this storyboard challenge from Figma

5th Task:

Brainstorming

Once getting past more reading material, it was time to brainstorm. Mine had to be distilled down to what ended up in my project notes so far with a few minor additions and ideas sprinkled in.

6th Task:

IA Overview

No image this time, this was all notes. The task was to plan out the Information Architecture of my mock-site, by setting out the goals of the service, analysing competitors, defining the type of content to be presented and what features pages on the site will have. Full notes in the blog post linked here.

7th Task:

Preparing a Wireframe

Probably my favourite task of the whole course, a good mix of creative and technical exercise. I planned out a mobile version of the site I had been mock-planning this whole time, a mobile-first approach to designing a website, also learned about not far prior in this course.

All the tasks, reading and research, leading to a quick three-page storyboard of navigating from the homepage to a search result. Yes, the storyboard part wasn't necessary, but I wanted to wireframe the main types of pages you would encounter if this were real and this fit.