UX Design Principles

Program Overview

This hands-on UX design course provides practical skills to enhance your work. Through user research, prototyping, and collaboration, participants will learn the UX design process. Taught by experienced industry professionals, the course emphasizes in-person studio work and utilizes Figma software. Participants will gain the knowledge and skills necessary to create user-centric products and applications.

Program Outline

Degree Overview:

This practical short course will teach you how UX works and how to integrate it into your work today. You’ll be part of a design community; one that promotes collaboration and experimentation. With a limited class size you'll have the one-to-one attention you need to ensure you gain all the right skills to apply your new knowledge to your profession. Benefit from learning with tutors who bring established links to the profession and current design research to the course.

Outline:

UX Design (or User Experience Design) is a research-based design discipline that places the user at the centre of the process. During this course, you will:

• be introduced to the UX Design process
• extract patterns and trends from your research
• create exciting new tools and features that will your help users
• learn how to prototype and test your ideas

Session One: Introduction

• Defining UX Design and its importance in the success of a product
• UX Design principles that make a product effective and easy to use.
• Competitor analysis – learning about the existing market landscape for your product

Session Two: Design research, user testing and research analysis

• User testing – learning what works and what doesn’t in the existing marketplace using live interviews
• Making sense of your research to generate the best design ideas.

Session Three: Ideation, flow and sketching

• Learn new design techniques to generate ideas that meet the needs of your user
• Formulate how the user will use or ‘flow’ through your product

Session Four: Wireframing and prototyping using Figma

• Create digital wireframes for each screen state of your app
• Add controls and buttons to turn your wireframes into a clickable prototype
• Learn how to test your prototype and the next steps in developing it into a live product.

Teaching:

The course will be taught via lectures, group discussions, practical exercises and project work. We will use Figma software to develop your ideas. No prior experience of Figma is required. You will receive four days of intensive, quality tuition with your experienced tutors. Manageable homework assignments will be set.

Tutor profiles:

• James is a Senior Research Fellow in Design and Manager of the Design Matter group, a product design and research consultancy at NTU who help businesses of all sizes develop new products.
In addition to the day-to-day management of the design group, his primary role is to engage with businesses on their new product development projects, working as a hands-on product design engineer, design project manager or adviser, depending on the nature of the project.
• David is a Senior Research Fellow in Design, also from the Design Matter research group.
David works closely with commercial businesses, delivering new product development projects across a wide range of industries spanning consumer electronics, medical technologies, industrial equipment and scientific equipment.

Careers:

The course is designed to prepare you to succeed in the design industry, adding valuable new skills to your portfolio.

Other:

You’ll be based in the Nottingham School of Art and Design on the City Campus, working in our design studios and IT suites equipped with industry-standard software.

The fee for this course is £895 (including VAT).