Getting Started in UX
Getting Started in UX
Getting Started in UX
Course Worksheet
What Is User Experience?
User experience (often abbreviated to the letters “UX”) is a general term for all aspects of the interaction
that users of a product or service have with that product and the company that provided it. In its narrowest
sense, it refers to the immediate interface design of a product or site. But more broadly, user experience
also encompasses other aspects of the interaction, like any associated paperwork or packaging, marketing
materials and advertisements, or interacting with the company online, via a call center or in a store or office.
User experience also extends to impressions of the company’s brand and general philosophy, and how
that makes users feel about their own lives. If a product makes people feel good or gives them a sense of
confidence, that’s initially down to clever marketing; but sustaining that feeling over time is entirely a result of
good user experience.
Getting the user experience for a product right should be everyone’s job. Product managers, project managers,
developers, testers, marketers, everyone has a role to play in making sure that the product solves users’ pain
points the best way it can, and communicates well exactly how it does that.
But because it’s such a big job, there are several specialist careers that focus on user experience rather than
on other aspects of product development. These are user research, interaction design, visual design, print and
product design, content, accessibility, localization, globalization, and data science roles.
User experience is present at every part of the product development process. At the start is the strategic work.
Why does the business want this product? What user needs will it fulfill? Early user research helps the team
work out what user needs they should solve with the product they are developing.
Once you know that, you can decide what type of structure the product needs to have in order to work
properly. This is where the content strategy and information architecture are incorporated into an interaction
design, which determines how the product behaves.
You can look at strategy, structure, and presentation as layers within the product development process.
Without a strong strategy layer, it’s hard to create a good structure. Without structure, it’s hard to create a
coherent visual design.
Next, we’ll look at the different job roles within user experience, and how they impact on each of these three
layers of product development.
Interaction Design
Interaction design, which is also called “experience design” or just “XD,” creates the mechanics of the interface.
This is based on psychology, physiology, and user research findings to understand the most efficient, effective,
and satisfying way people can interact with your product. David Hogue’s course UX Foundations: Interaction
Design is a good starting point for understanding this discipline.
At the strategy level, interaction designers work with user researchers and product managers to identify user
pain points and desires by watching users perform their tasks and analyzing this data for opportunities. My
course UX Design: 2 Analyzing User Data shows you one easy way to make this happen.
Next up, the team has to decide what they’ll actually build—the structure of the product. This involves phases
of ideation, storyboarding, and early prototyping to nail down the interaction. The iterative process that
interaction designers use to fine-tune this structure is called design thinking. You can learn more about this in
my courses Design Thinking: Understanding the Process and Design Thinking: Implementing the Process.
Diane Cronenwett’s courses Interaction Design: Structure and Interaction Design: Projects and Platforms show
you how to define the full scope of a project and help the rest of your team see the big picture.
If you want to learn more about the psychological principles that interaction designers use to create the
structure of pages and sites, check out my course Interaction Design for the Web.
So now you can see why Interaction designers may not spend very much time doing what we think of as
traditional design work—drawing interfaces. It’s because instead they are busy making sure that future
versions of the product are being created in a user-centric way.
Pretty much any graphics application can and has been used for interface design, but some support it better
than others. Here’s a list of courses to help you learn how to use Photoshop, InVision, Sketch, Illustrator, Figma,
After Effects, and more specifically for UX design.
Let’s be clear—both the interaction design and visual design are essential to a successful product. The two
work together to create a clear, usable, and delightful user experience. Although I’ve separated the two roles
here, it’s not uncommon to see one person who’s responsible for both the interaction and visual design of a
product, especially on smaller teams.
If you’re a visual designer who also needs to do interaction design, you’ll find some of the core interaction
design concepts in my two courses Interaction Design for the Web and User Experience for Web Design and
David Hogue’s UX Foundations: Interaction Design.
We’ve got a lot of courses on different aspects of user research in the library. Let’s start with the basics. If
you’re completely new to research and you’re not sure you could tell the difference between quantitative and
qualitative research, check out Andy Schwanbeck and Peni Acayo’s course Learning Design Research. This
sets the scene for designers who have to work with researchers and who might also have to conduct their own
research.
Amanda Stockwell’s UX Foundations: Research provides an overview of many different user research methods
that you can use. Also, watch her course UX Research Methods: Interviewing. And I’ve produced the course UX
Foundations: Usability Testing. Interviewing and user testing are two central methods to learn because they
give you the skills to then run many other types of research studies.
Design thinking is a popular term right now. The tools used in design thinking exercises all come from UX, so UX
researchers are often the best-placed people on a team to facilitate design thinking sessions. I made a series of
UX design courses that step you through the process of turning user needs into a user-centered product design.
• UX Design: 1 Overview
• UX Design: 2 Analyzing User Data
• UX Design: 3 Creating Personas
• UX Design: 4 Ideation
• UX Design: 5 Creating Scenarios and Storyboards
• UX Design: 6 Paper Prototyping
• UX Design: 7 Implementation Planning
Later in the development process, user researchers will conduct regular usability testing sessions on the
product as it changes, to give the team feedback on what’s working and what confuses users. Amanda
Stockwell has created the course UX Research: Lean Experimentation, which shows how to perform research
fast enough to suit even lean and agile teams.
It’s often the case that teams aren’t funded to conduct all the research they want to. Amanda’s course on fast,
low-cost research techniques (UX Research: Going Guerilla) shows you how to conduct valuable research on a
tiny budget.
As soon as users start working with beta releases of the code, it’s possible to capture metrics on their behavior
and use that to help guide design decisions. Doug Rose’s courses on data science are really useful here because
they are aimed at user experience people and other team members who will be working to understand and
present data rather than becoming a full-time data analyst themselves.
• Statistics Foundations: 1
• Statistics Foundations: 2
• Statistics Foundations: 3
As a team or company grows in UX maturity, more and more of their decisions and direction are determined by
their users’ needs. The business also needs to communicate this strategy to development teams in a way that’s
easy for them to put into practice. UX researchers and strategists are most often the people who provide that
translation service, moving easily between the strategic, business-oriented world of product management and
the operational, technology-oriented world of development.
Content strategists are responsible for the upfront planning of how content will be created, stored, displayed,
maintained, and updated. They look at any existing content model and create a roadmap to get to the ideal
future state. Morten Rand-Hendriksen’s course UX Foundations: Content Strategy takes you through this
process.
Information architects use the principles of information science to present data to users in a way that meets
those users’ expectations and best helps them to complete their tasks. They start by building a top-down
view of the information space. What information is being presented, what’s missing, what should be removed?
This view defines the structure and order in which information should be presented to users. You can learn
the basics of information architecture in my course Understanding Information Architecture. If you will be
responsible for creating the information architecture for your product, check out my course UX Foundations:
Information Architecture for a step-by-step guide.
In order to ensure you are making your content available to all of your users, you need to consider accessibility
and inclusive design. Derek Featherstone’s UX Foundations: Accessibility course shows you how easy it is to
lower the barrier to entry, by providing equal access and opportunity to people with a diverse range of hearing,
movement, sight, and cognitive abilities.
One way that content strategists, accessibility experts, and information architects communicate their work
with the rest of the team is through a style guide that will cover the visual design, typography, standard colors,
and also the tone that content should be written in. These days, more companies are also moving to a design
system, which takes the concepts from the style guide and creates a set of design and development resources
that are easy for designers to mix and match as they create interface designs. I’ve made a course that covers
the strategic elements of creating Style Guides and Design Systems for your organization, Tom Green has a
Once the content strategy, information architecture, and style guide are in place, someone needs to actually
create the content that will be used in the interface. That job might be called content designer, UX writer, or
content producer. Or, the job might fall to whoever is most responsible for user experience on the team. We
have a couple of courses that can help you out.
Morten Rand Hendriksen’s course UX Foundations: Logic and Content shows how human thought and
computer logic are different, and how these differences can be used to improve communication by writing
clearly and concisely. My course Learning to Write for the Web is actually applicable for apps as well. It covers
the basics of how people process information so that you can write in the way that people respond best to.
My course Making the Case for Usability Testing should help you get buy-in to run user research. Then, it’s up
to you to run the types of research you feel are most necessary to help the team learn about their users. You’ll
probably conduct some site-based ethnographic style work but you’ll be under pressure to also measure how
well the current product works.
If you’re working as a consultant or freelancer, Andy Schwanbeck’s course Design Research: Enhancing the
Designer-Client Relationship shows you how to create strong collaborative partnerships with clients so that
they can contribute subject matter expertise and feel ownership of the solutions you develop together.
UX people are often the go-betweens on a project. Because we work with everybody, we can become a kind of
translator between the different languages that product managers, project managers, developers, testers, and
operations all speak. Our common language is the voice of the user. It’s not always easy to get people to listen,
but Brian Wood’s course Freelance UX: Managing Clients and my course UX Foundations: Making the Case for
Usability Testing can both help here.
Of course, UX needs to be able to speak technical language too. You need to be aware of the capabilities of
the types of technologies you’ll be working with. Without that knowledge you’re likely to make silly design
mistakes. IT skills change so fast that it’s hard to even specify what tools to check in to. I’d suggest watching
Technology for Product Managers by Cole Mercer if you want to brush up on your tech vocabulary, and Web
Programming Foundations by Morten Rand-Hendriksen for an accessible overview of how web development
works. I also think Morten Rand-Hendriksen’s Mapping the Modern Web Design Process course is essential
viewing if you’re trying to fit in on a web development team.
In her course Job Interview Strategies for UX Designers, Diane Cronenwett draws on her experiences as both a
designer and a hiring design manager to walk you through each step of the interview process.
Diane’s course Building and Maintaining Your UX Design Portfolio shows how not just visual designers but also
experience designers, content strategists, and information architects can create a compelling portfolio that
walks prospective employers through the decision-making process you followed to help a team create great
designs.
Rather than working as a company employee, another option is to set yourself up as a freelancer or consultant.
As Cory Lebson says in his course Freelancing and Consulting in User Experience, this gives you the freedom to
choose your clients and projects.
Working as a freelancer can be great if you can build a reputation and client base. Doing work for several
different clients can give you variety. But it’s up to you to keep your skills up to date, plus you will have an
administrative overhead dealing with running your own business. Cory’s course Strategies for Successful UX
Freelancers will show you how to enhance your workflow so that you can keep a full pipeline of new work and
still produce high-quality deliverables for the teams you support.
Other Resources
There are several industry associations for different UX disciplines.
• The User Experience Professionals Association serves user researchers and other people with
usability in their job title.
• The Interaction Design Association obviously focuses on interaction design.
• The IA Institute is primarily for information architects and content writers.
• The American Institute of Graphic Arts is one of the largest associations focused on graphic design.
Of course, you can follow more than one of these groups depending on your interests. Each of these
associations has an annual conference. Most have local chapters you can join, and their sites have good career
advice, job boards, and links to other resources.
It’s worth checking out the weekly series videos that Drew Bridewell and I have created. These short weekly
videos each cover one aspect of user experience. My weekly course videos (UX Insights Weekly) focus on user
research and user experience. Drew’s Practical UX Weekly 2017 and Practical UX Weekly 2019 cover UX design
principles by applying them to real-world projects.
The best way to move forward is to get involved. If you’re just starting out that might mean joining local
meetups or local chapters of industry associations. If you’re working in a large organization, make friends
with the UX team—they are always looking for champions on product teams. If you’re in a smaller company
that doesn’t have dedicated user experience people, consider ways that you can enhance your product
development process by gathering more user insights, working from smart interaction design principles, and
considering the effect that clear, concise content creation can have on your customers.