with Director, Product Design at Dropbox
19 JANUARY - 7 MARCH 2022
DURATION:
6 WEEKS
MONDAYS & WEDNESDAYS
5 PM PST / 8 PM EST
Get ready to rethink your approach to UX Design. Learn Hang Le's step-by-step method for creating award-winning UX Design, live online.
Each week, you’ll apply what you’ve learned in your own UX design project. By the course end, you'll finish with a product design you can't wait to pitch to stakeholders.
Do you see yourself below?
Then this course is for you.
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YOU'RE READY FOR YOUR BIG BREAK
Overcome your barriers to success, whatever they are — refine your process, learn how to interview, and set your portfolio apart.
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YOU'RE FRESH OUT OF DESIGN SCHOOL
Uplevel your work from the basic design school process and find your right fit in the industry.
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YOU'RE LOOKING FOR A NEW ROLE
Influence partners better with killer presentation strategies and make the case for how your designs bring value to the business.
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YOU'RE BRUSHING UP YOUR PORTFOLIO
Add a stellar new piece to your portfolio and sharpen your interview skills as you pursue fresh career opportunities.
Jumpstart Your Career
This course is for anyone wondering where they fit in the design world. Find out what UX looks like as a career and build the hard and soft skills at each design stage to make it yours.
Practice and Perfect
You’ll learn in live sessions with Hang and a peer group of motivated designers. Enjoy a hands-on, individualized learning experience through live workshops, office hours with Hang, and a final course project.
Perfect your skills through practice and frank instructor feedback. Learn how to pull the maximum value from user research and analysis, wireframing and testing, and visual design.
Create a portfolio-ready project, with direct input from an award-winning UX designer. You'll finish this course with a piece of work that speaks to your new design strengths.
Make yourself an invaluable part of the business model. Learn how to look at your design from a business perspective and master skills like UX persona development, user research, and problem framing.
Present your designs — and yourself — persuasively. Learn the right way to present design work and how to clear the first hurdle in your career journey: the interview process.
LE LinkedIn Profile
- Director of Product Design, a Dropbox company
- 10+ years of improving lives with impactful UX and product design
- Growth-oriented design manager for Fortune 500 companies (SAP) and unicorns (Samsara, Earnin)
- Speaker at industry-wide innovation events including FinTech Design Summit and Tradecraft
- Award-winning designer and empathetic mentor for diverse professionals at all career levels
COURSE INTRODUCTION
What makes UX design different from other design practices? Today's class is about where UX fits in the broader development cycle, and why that matters to you as a designer. Then, Hang will help you refine your career vision by sharing some insights into why businesses hire designers (and when they don’t).
- The secret recipe of great UX Designers: Craft, business, communication, prioritization
- Tools and approaches commonly applied within the UX design discipline
- Roles and responsibilities of the UX Designer vs. the UI Designer vs. the Product Designer
Assignment #1: Read at least 3 job postings with a combination of these titles: UX Designer at Google, Product Designer at Facebook, UI Designer, UX/UI Designer. Reflect on what role you align with and an area that you will learn about during or after this course.
This class shatters the biggest myth of UX design: you can focus on design and leave the business to the other guys. First, you'll learn about how a company’s business model, target audience, and success obstacles all impact the type of designs you create. Then, you'll explore the problem of ineffective UX personas and how to do them right.
- Important business concepts & the role of design in business
- Why 90% of UX Personas are completely wrong
- What goes into creating a useful UX Persona
- Types of personas by use case, frequency, and life stage
Assignment #2: Pick a business (B2B or B2C). Next, define the types of users who use this app. What are your assumptions about how they use this app or website?
Tips:
- Pick something interesting that's ripe for UX improvements
- Pick something you can easily find users to talk to
The first step of design is research. In this lecture, Hang will show you some of the tools she uses in her work every day. Then, you'll learn hacks for optimizing the information-gathering process./p>
- Techniques: Qualitative and quantitative
- What to do when you don’t have access to internal systems
- How to uncover needs, pain points, and needed features for a given project
- Demo of user research
Assignment #3:
- Step 1. Write research questions you would pose to potential users. Then, recruit 3-5 users fitting your personas profile and speak with them about these questions.
- Step 2. Revisit the business case, if needed (such as new pain points or areas of focus that aren't important to the user). Then, form a business hypothesis.
If you haven't framed the problem correctly, your end product won't be right, either. In this class, you'll learn how to analyze your user feedback and narrow down the problem your design needs to solve.
- User journey maps
- Forming a goal
- Framing and solving problems with “How Might We”
Assignment #4: Fill out details in personas based on your real interview data. Then, do the following:
- Form "current" journey maps, highlighting differences and commonalities between personas
- Form your "How Might We" statements
- Pick the top "How Might We"
Today’s class is fully hands-on as we learn quick ideation techniques and tips for narrowing down the right one. At the end of this class, you’ll be equipped with a full toolbox for tapping into your own creativity.
- Rules of effective brainstorming
- User journeys and ideation
- Use case methodology
- RICE or Value/Effort framework: How to prioritize
- Breakout room: Ideate with classmates
Assignment #5: Ideate on your chosen "How Might We". Pick the best idea to move forward with, either a quick win or a larger project. Then, form a list of use cases for this chosen idea.
Today, you'll lay out how to build a great wireframe and prototype. I’ll share with you lessons I’ve learned in my years of doing this for B2B and B2C businesses and my techniques for enhancing product quality.
- What’s the point of prototyping
- Why early-user responses to the MVP matters for UX decisions
- When to use low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes
- How to use wireframing tools for maximum end-product quality
Assignment #6: Form a "new" journey map with wireframes.
You have a great design, but do users like it? Today, you'll get a thorough introduction to usability testing: you'll explore methods, tools, and hacks for performing it and learn how to interpret the results. Then, you'll workshop a test step-by-step in class, with a student volunteer as a "user".
- Qualitative vs quantitative testing and common methods
- Hot to formulate testing goals
- How to run effective tests and ask the right question
- How to analyze and document usability testing results
Assignment #7: Test your prototypes with 3-5 people. What surprised you about their experience? Change your design based on that feedback.
Design rarely gets implemented as-is. Today's workshop is about determining if your design helps you achieve your original business goals and how to move forward.
- Workshop: Test your improved designs on each other and provide feedback.
In this class, you'll turn from the practical aspects of design to the beautiful. Hang will walk you through key visual design principles and demonstrate how to apply them in a real project.
- Elements of visual design
- Tips in making great looking and polished design
- Hang will demo how to make visual designs
Assignment #8: Design your screens in high-fidelity.
It's a well-accepted fact in the design world that the first UX to get launched is never the final. This class teaches how to articulate measurements of success for your MVP and continue learning to improve it down the road.
- Minimum Viable Product
- Measuring design & business success
- Phased releases & iterative learning
Assignment #9: Form the success measurements you'll use to evaluate your design. Then, create the MVP.
Great design speaks for itself, right? Wrong. Designers trying to move up the career ladder quickly learn that there is a right way and a wrong way to present their work, and today you will, too. You'll learn about the differences between presenting for stakeholders and for interviewers during a job search, and how to tie everything together in a presentation.
- Impact, not effort
- Storytelling, speaking patterns, and getting to the point
- Product presentation strategies and how to explain technically complex data and/or details
- Questions every UX Designer will face
Assignment #10: Form a deck of between 5-10 slides. Write “the point” of each slide (3 bullet points per slide). Hang will give feedback on your deck and bullet points. Next week, 3 volunteers will present their deck at the final class and get live feedback from the class.
This class simulates a UX feedback session in a company. Three of your classmates will present their projects, with the rest of the class providing feedback on how their designs could better meet their objectives.
- Workshop: Final presentation and feedback
This special bonus class prepares you to master the complex mix of technical talent, design thinking, and soft skills that is the UX design interview. Hang will share her best strategies to prep for each type of interview. Then, she will walk you through some of her favorite portfolio examples and why they caught her eye as a UX design manager.
- Understanding the room, roles, and what each person is looking for ​
- Common interview questions (and what they’re really asking) ​
- How to get the job when you're not the perfect match
What our students say
"The assignments really help lock in what Hang teaches us in class. Practical application helps me learn better than simply listening to a lecture."
"I love how practical this course is! It’s not your typical cookie cutter bootcamp, it actually shows you what the current workforce looks like in the UX world! I’m really enjoying it so far :)"