- Starting the UX design process: empathize, define, ideate
- You've reached the final course of the Google UX Design Certificate — congratulations! You will design a dedicated mobile app and a responsive website focused on social good that showcases everything you've learned in the program. To get started, you'll learn about designing across devices by exploring progressive enhancement and graceful degradation approaches and the 4Cs. With all of this new knowledge, you’ll begin your portfolio project. You’ll start with the empathize phase, where you’ll create personas, user stories, and user journey maps. Then, you’ll move on to the define phase, where you’ll identify the user need your project will focus on and build a problem statement. Finally, you’ll make your way into the ideate phase, where you’ll conduct a competitive audit and come up with ideas for your dedicated mobile app design through sketching.
- Creating wireframes and low-fidelity prototypes
- In this part of the course, you’ll take everything you’ve learned about the user problem you’re trying to solve and come up with a basic version of your dedicated mobile app. You’ll start by creating paper wireframes to come up with lots of ideas. You’ll take the best parts of your paper wireframes and create digital wireframes in Figma or Adobe XD. Next, you’ll turn your digital wireframes into a low-fidelity prototype. Then, you'll plan and conduct a usability study to get feedback about your low-fidelity prototype, and you’ll make changes to your designs based on insights from your research.
- Creating mockups and high-fidelity prototypes
- Welcome to the world of high-fidelity design! In this part of the course, you will create mockups for your dedicated mobile app that incorporate visual design elements and principles. Along the way, you’ll save elements and components in your design system, which you'll be able to reuse when you design a responsive website in the next part of the course. Then, you’ll turn your mockups into a high-fidelity prototype. Finally, you’ll have the option to plan and conduct a usability study to gather feedback about your high-fidelity prototype. By the end of this part of the course, your dedicated mobile app designs will be complete, and you will be more than halfway done with your portfolio project.
- Designing a complementary responsive website
- With completed designs for your dedicated mobile app, you'll take what you learned about your product and users and apply that to design a responsive website for social good. To begin, you’ll learn how to design for different experiences and screen sizes. Next, you’ll review the importance of information architecture and create a sitemap for your website. You’ll also sketch lots of ideas and potential layouts for your website. You’ll create wireframes on paper, digitally, or both for different sized screens. And you’ll develop a low-fidelity prototype and test it through a usability study to improve your designs. Then, you’ll move into high-fidelity designs where you'll create mockups for different sized screens of your responsive website. Finally, you’ll create a high-fidelity prototype of your responsive website, and test it one more time. By the end of this part of the course, your cross-platform designs will be complete and added to your online portfolio!
- Finding a UX job
- In the final part of the Google UX Design Certificate, you’ll prepare to find a job as a new UX designer. You’ll start by making final adjustments to your portfolio to ensure it’s ready to share in job applications. Next, you’ll examine the UX design interview process and develop strategies to succeed in various types of interview: pre-interview research, an elevator pitch, a phone screen, a portfolio presentation, a whiteboard exercise, a take home design exercise, and more. Finally, you’ll explore the world of freelancing by creating a business plan and learning how to land your first client.
