During this course you will learn how to research the circumstances and needs of different types of users, to design and prototype interactive products that are both usable and useful.

In particular, you will get familiar with:

• User eXperience (UX) design principles and patterns
• Qualitative and quantitative user research
• Competitor analysis
• User personas, user stories and user journey maps
• Interface design: paper-prototyping and wireframing
• Rapid prototyping tools
• User-testing: face2face, A/B testing and analytics
• Motivational copy-writing for stickiness

What this course is NOT

1. This course is NOT about honing your coding skills.

   Whilst you are welcome to prototype your ideas using HTML+CSS+JS, there are many tools that will get you to similar results without touching code (or very little of it).

• This course is not about Photoshop or Illustrator wizardry.

  You will be introduced to several tools that enable you to wireframe and prototype user interfaces quickly and effectively.

  

• In this course Lorem ipsum is banned.

  If a Web product aims to deliver valuable content and facilitate meaningful interactions, we should be designing content-first for the best possible UX.

  Lorem ipsum is gibberish that conveniently fills the available space like an expanding gas. It is inert, meaningless and lacks context, revealing nothing about the relationship between your design and your content.

  Using Lorem ipsum is a missed opportunity to do good UX design.

Plan

Term 2

Term 3

Projects

NMMaps

On this team project you will learn the methods and tools of user research and iterative design, by working on a real-world project for the National Maritime Museum (NMM) in Greenwich.

All the project material is here.

Filter bubbles

On this individual project you will design and prototype a digital object that helps people become aware of their filter bubbles and/or burst them.

All the project material is here.

Learning goals

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

1. Understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative user research and be familiar with a few techniques to perform both types of research.

• Research and analyse competitor services to gain inspiration and insight from them.
• Identify and use design patterns effectively in your projects.
• Produce user personas, user stories and user journey maps to communicate and validate your design decisions.
• Understand the importance of motivational copy-writing in interface design, and write interface copy that is appropriate for your audience and their task(s) at hand.
• Use paper-prototyping and wireframing techniques to visualise your interface design ideas and explore alternative solutions.
• Use rapid prototyping tools to quickly test solutions to specific UX problems.
• Understand the differences between various user-testing methods and practice them at a basic level.
• Document your design and development process, from the exploration of ideas to their practical implementation. Including successes and failures.
• Communicate your ideas both technically and in an engaging way.

Rules of the road

• Be present. If you happen to be late (even by 5 minutes) or absent, make sure you email me about it before a session starts. We'll deduct 2% from your grade for each uncommunicated tardiness or absence (aka the 2% Tardiness Tax).

• Participate in class debates and workshops. We'll make sure that your ideas have space to be heard and that nobody makes you feel uncomfortable about sharing them.

• Present your work during formative and summative assessments. If you can't make it those days then you'll record your presentation and upload it to YouTube (or similar).

• Be responsible for what happens in class. Organise with your peers to get class information and material that you may have missed.

• Meet the deadlines. If you submit your work after a deadline, your grade will be capped at D- (bare pass).

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License