CAREERFOUNDRY: THE UX DESIGN PROCESS FOR BEGINNERS
TUTORIAL 1: AN INTRODUCTION TO USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Hello and welcome to your free UX Design for Beginners Course! You’ve taken the first step to exploring
your new career path and we’re glad to be here for it.
This course is designed to give you a solid introduction to UX design—what it is, why it matters, and the
basics of how to do it. You’ll also get a good look at how (and why!) to kickstart a career in UX design.
And the best part? You’ll get a taste of what it’s like to actually be a UX designer with the hands-on
exercises we’ve included along the way.
Each tutorial should only take around 30 minutes to complete, depending on how deep you go into the
exercises and additional resources linked throughout. We recommend completing one UX design
tutorial per day, and at least one hands-on exercise (some tutorials give you more than one option).
We’ll send you daily emails to help keep you on track for that goal, but feel free to work at your own
pace and complete the course in more or less time!
But before we get there, let’s make sure you’re set up for success from the start. This first UX design
tutorial lays the foundation for the rest of the course. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll:
Understand the demand and career outlook for UX designers
Know what UX design is, and the basics of the Design Thinking process
Get an overview of the course content and structure
Here’s what we’ll cover:
1. Start with the basics: What is UX design and what does a UX designer
actually do?
2. Outlook and Career paths for UX designers
o How much do UX designers earn?
UX career paths
o
3. The Design Thinking process
o 5 Stages of Design Thinking
Empathize
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
4. Course overview (what’s coming next)
5. What to do now
1. Start with the basics: What is UX design and what does a UX designer
actually do?
User experience (UX) design is the process of designing effective, efficient,
highly usable, inclusive, and even delightful experiences for human beings. In
the context of the field of UX design, this typically relates to digital product
experiences—meaning mobile apps and websites.
To put it even more simply, UX design is the process of designing great
digital product experiences that work well for the people who use those
products.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zICP8XADfs
So what do UX designers actually do? UX designers are empathetic critical
thinkers and creative problem solvers who:
Take the time to understand what people actually need in a digital
product experience
Identify problems and pain points in the user experience
Design to meet users’ needs and solve problems and pain points
Design in ways that also meet business needs and constraints
Test and iterate on their designs to ensure that the experience
continuously evolves to meet users’ needs (even as those needs
change!)
In short (because you’ll learn more throughout the course), this means that UX designers spend their
time:
Conducting user research
Synthesizing their research and extracting actionable insights
Meeting with stakeholders to understand their priorities and any constraints that affect the
project (budget, deadlines, etc.)
Leading workshops and creating key deliverables (journey maps, personas, etc.) that help
communicate insights and cultivate empathy across their team and the company as a whole
Distilling user research and business needs into their work as they use any variety of design tools
to build wireframes and prototypes
Test their prototypes to ensure that their design solutions actually work well
Hand their designs over to UI designers and developers to polish it all up and turn it into an
actual live product that people can use
As you can see, a UX designer’s skillset is broad and varied! To get a fuller picture of the skills you’ll
cultivate as you build your UX design career, read about the key skills you’ll need to be an amazing UX
designer. And to learn more about what it’s like to be a UX designer, check out our complete guide:
What Does a UX Designer Actually Do?
12 Crucial UX Designer Skills You'll Need
What UX designer skills do you actually need to kick off a successful career in the field?
UX design is an incredibly diverse field full of designers with multi-faceted backgrounds and varying
skillsets. With the growing popularity of careers in UX design, even with the most amazing UX design
resume, it can be hard to determine how to best set yourself apart from other applicants when you’re
trying to land a job.
Furthermore, since the position of “UX designer” can still be quite elusive to potential employers, it’s
important that your skill set encompasses (and demonstrates) your full potential as a UX designer.
In addition to solid UX design skills, there are many other attributes UXers have that highlight their
valuable position on a design team or within a company.
By the end of this article, you’ll have a good understanding of the different skills you’ll need to be a
stellar UX designer and how you can go about acquiring them. There are many “soft” skills you’ll need
alongside the industry standards expected of most designers.
In addition, we’ll highlight some skills you may carry over from other professional positions that have
the potential to boost your worth as a UX designer.
Here are the skills we’ll touch on:
Soft skills
1. Interpersonal, collaborative, and communication skills
2. Empathy
3. Curiosity and continuous learning
4. Critical thinking
Industry-specific UX designer skills
5. Wireframing and prototyping
6. UX writing
7. Visual communication and UI
8. User testing
Crossover skills
9. Business acumen
10. Research skills and analytics
11. Customer service
12. Coding and development
For a brief video overview, here’s CareerFoundry mentor Tobias’s summary of important UX designer
skills:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_YWjH08-h8
We’ve got a lot of skills to cover so let’s get started!
