Introduction

I’ve made stuff on the web for almost twenty years. I’ve worked as a back-end engineer, a front-end engineer and now as a product designer. I became a senior in both fields. Though, even to this day, I consider myself a maker more than anything else. I believe we’re at a time of great importance in software making. The opportunities are endless. With hard work, anyone has the potential to bring their own dreams to life and make a good living from it. We are driven to create but it’s easy to forget that what we’re actually doing is providing a service to other human beings. Human beings that have goals, hopes and desires. Your app should be laser focused in helping them succeed.

The field of product design covers many different topics. Research, wireframing, prototyping, strategy, visual design, design thinking, systems and processes. If the role was to be boiled down to a single purpose though, it would be to simply care about the user.

We all love to make things. But with the rise of the no code movement you can get pretty far without touching a line of code. With more visual web design tools and styling frameworks becoming available every week, getting something looking good is easier than ever, too.

But something that can be lost is that what we’re actually doing is creating an experience for people with a beginning, middle and end. If we can nail that experience though, we’ll not only be making something people think is great but they’ll keep coming back and tell others about it, too.

By putting the user’s wants, hopes and desires centerstage means we naturally become attuned to the emotions these people are feeling when using your app. If done right, this results in a positive experience. It results in excellent UX Design.

This course doesn’t teach you the entirety of UX Design. It’s a vast subject that could take a university course to complete. But there are a few techniques and methodologies that I deploy professionally which I believe are distillable and actionable enough to be applied to what you’re working on today. I am to make this jargon free and I’ll use terms that I believe will help better understand what’s going on under the hood. My hope is that the introduction of these topics will make you see the true value of UX Design and get you excited to dig in more.

It was these very topics that got me interested in design, in the first place. They ultimately made me switch from engineering to design. I hope you like them, too.