Move from Graphic Designer to UX DESIGNER

1. 01 Intro - Becoming a UX designer: Hi, my name is Dan and I'll be showing you how to earn more as a creative by becoming a UX designer. I built this course for web designers and graphic designers, who you've seen all the jobs and all the extra pay out there, but you're not too sure what it is. You know it has something to do with white bullets and post-it notes, but that's it. Let me take you through and teach you all about being a UX designer. You're going to love this industry. CNN named UX the 11th best job in America. The best part is that it builds on your existing creative skills, but the center is almost double what you get from other creative roles. These are the skills you're going to need to become a professional UX designer. We'll talk about the broader range of UX, but also how it applies to you specifically as a creative and a UX designer. We'll create a project together all the way through, so you get a really true sense of your responsibilities as a UX designer. We'll give you the skills as well to run your own sessions, to be able to do the research, to be able to do the wireframing through the mockups and then the testing. Let me show you how to earn more in this truly amazing career change. If you're ready to move out of the ultra competitive world of graphic and web design, then this course is for you. So join me now so we can upgrade your skills, get that better job, and impress your clients. 2. 02 5 Phases for the UX designer: In this video, we're going to look at the five phases for being a UX designer. Now, the first is setting the objectives, then it's doing the research, making a mockup, doing some testing, and then doing the actual build. The objective is the most important part. That's the bit where you're just going to make sure you're asking the right question. It might be for your own work, it might be for a client's work, it's just going back to them and saying, "Does this align with your business goals?". I've done lots of things in the past where I've done a project, got to innovate and realized although it was lovely and it looks good and it works, it hasn't got me any closer to where I wanted to be. So making sure at this time, whether it's with your client or with yourself, is just asking yourself, "Does this get me closer to where I want to be? Does this align with my business goals?". Once you've got that question clear, then it's setting your hypothesis. Make sure you set a hypothesis and use the right language for that, rather than setting things like goals or targets because setting a hypothesis, and say hypothesis a would be, will existing clients pay for photography courses from me? That would be one of my hypothesis for creating a photography course. Now instead of just saying, I want to create a photography course. The problem with that is, I want to sell photography courses, there is a yes or a no that there's a fail or a success there. You can get really dejected. I've launched things, "Great, it's definitely going to work," and it doesn't, and the people that worked on the project and myself, all get a bit disheartened by the whole thing. Whereas if you change language to, I will test my hypothesis that existing clients, the goal of it is to test will the clients actually pay for this? Then you can't lose. Whether it's yes or no it doesn't matter, your job is to figure out whether that will happen or not. It's a win-win and it's a bit of language to have. So make sure when you are dealing with setting goals they aren't all or nothing. Once you've got your hypothesis, then you're going to move into the research phase. Now [inaudible] really impactful research, some people get a little caught up in their research phase, and spend ages making documents about what you should do. Do the stuff that's easy and relates to you if you've got like say my projects that I launch in new courses, I have a lot of data already on existing clients. I have a lot of web traffic that I can get some research done quite easily to test some things. But say you got something brand new, it's a new feature for an app or it's a new app itself. There's not going to be a whole lot of research you can do, so do it. But then move on into the mockup stage and the testing stage is more important. Now for the mockup, it's all about what's called the MVP, so the Minimum Viable Product, what can you get going quickly and get tested? You want to move to the test phase as quickly as you can, so your mockup might be just wire-frames, it might just be Photoshop flats. It could be pressure plates with a bit of envision interaction, it might be muse, it might be a reasonably interactive app. You might need that to get a good mockup through to get tested. It's up to you in the project but make sure it's just enough. It doesn't have to be the best and prettiest with all the features, just the basics in that mockup. Then once you move in the mockup, then it's the testing. Testing is definitely the phase where as a UX designer, that's like what your employer or your client, this is the most value they get out of it. It's actually seeing the testing and actually see people using this thing. Once the testing done, then you loop back to mockup and iterate on that mock up. So you do some testing, there's going to be problems, there's going to be issues, there is going to be things you didn't think about, and they loop in back into that mockup phase again. Once you've gone through and got something working, and tested as much as you can with a mockup, then it's working into the building process and actually making the thing. Now, don't feel like that's the end of your role as a UX designer, there's lots you can do once features been launched or an app's being launched or a new product's being delivered. There's lots of that continued testing and iteration that can go with live data. Again, there's lots of things you can use to check in and work on that. So that's the five phases of being a UX designer; objective, research, mockup, test, and then the build. 3. 03 UX can be broken into 3 fields: Hi there, welcome to this video, and what we're going to do now is look at the three fields that encompass UX. So UX is an umbrella term used to cover a couple of different sections of the UX industry. So they can be broken up into three main groups. One is the UX researcher, another is being a UX designer, and the other one is a UX strategist. Now, if you're working in a small to medium sized company as a UX designer, you're going to be expected to do all three of these. It's the focus of this class is to cover all three. But you might decide after doing this course that you really enjoyed the UX research pot, and you might go off and stick to that, or you might be a designer or strategies. Now, yeah, smaller companies you can expect to do most of it. When you're working in a large organization, not have full teams of UX teams and you can, and you will be, a specialist in one of these three different areas. So research is the bit of the beginning and goes out throughout the design process and it's a more scientific, is the testing, the checking, the probing, and is the research site. It's quite an analytical role and you'll be doing things like the user research, that happens beforehand before the designs get made. Then doing the user testing and working with MVPs and the Mock-ups and making sure those goes, you'll be doing things like surveys and interviews, looking at heat maps and eye tracking and all that fan stuff, that's the research side. Now, as a designer, that's the more creative side of UX, then we'll autistic. So it's more of a Crossman role. You are going to take the stuff that the research it gives you and adapt that to become become physical things. There's a bit of gut instinct mix with observational stuffs, things you've done before, some of your instincts, and some of your experience. But the cool thing about it is that instead of just doing design for design sake, and you're going to have a lot more research to base and like hone and direct your design work, and then you're going to get this lovely feedback loop. Now if you've never done UX before, this feedback loop is pretty amazing. Whereas before, say, I started life as a graphic designer and it was great, I get to do stuff and I seen stuff out into the world and I think it was great and went into more portfolio, but that was that, I had no real like measurement device to say how good was it. Was a bit of relaxing I did? Was a bit of than the guy next to me or was it worse? So with a UX I get to make these stuff based on good research and then get it tested, and have things come back to me and iterate and change things to know if it was good or bad or got as close to what it was meant to do. So that's the design side of things. The next side is being a UX strategist. Now think of the strategist as it's more of a managerial, consultative, overseen, a role. Like a creative director might be in ad agency, they know the tools, they know how it's done, they've done it before, but now they act more as, they work with the business owners, that high-level responsibility, and they look deeper into the project and see other things, and question and push back and see if things align. So the UX strategist is definitely somebody who's a lot more experienced and has a good business acumen as well. Now what you'll find is that as a UX designer, which I consider myself rather than a strategist or a researcher, is that you need to be able to do both. I love the research side, but I love more the design side. I'll love that design process, and I love that as a feedback loop with a research, but I'd be expected, and pretty much all of my roles to do all three. Is to keep the job working, push back, business goals, as well as the research and the design side of things. You might find yourself in that role, or you might find yourself, you might be after doing this course, is you loved the research side, but the design side, it doesn't really excite you. So you're going to go down the research side. So you can come at it both ways. Both sides are kind of the research of design sides that both really useful to the design process, but quite honestly, most people are expected to do a bit of both. So that's it for the three areas. Let's move on to the next video. 4. 04 UI vs UX: Hi, in this video, we're going to look at the difference between UI and UX. UI is user interface and UX is user experience. UI is literally the physical design of the process. It's the opening up Photoshop or Sketch or Experience designer and actually physically making things, adding fonts and colors, drawing icons. That is the UI process. You'll be in charge of picking colors and fonts and deciding things like, how should this be displayed in things like tabs? Should it be a big slide bar? Should it be another screen? It's kind of working out the actual mechanics of the page. That is a UI designer. Now, if you're a web designer or building kind of app designs already, you'd be considered a UI designer. Maybe you don't call yourself that, but that's what you are doing. The UI, it's looking at things like the nav sandwich in this icon here and deciding using words like page furniture and Jumbotron and all sorts of lovely, terrible words that you use when you're designing your design site. So that's the UI. Now, UX is a bigger part of that. If you're a UX designer, you have to have UI skills. You actually need to do the physical work, but you'll be also expected to do things like the research and that informs the UI design and the kind of testing and in the feedback loop, and iterating and changing. That's the difference between being a UI designer and a UX designer. UI is the kind of a really small part of the UX process. You can do that just fine by itself, but if you're going to be UX designer, you need to have an understanding of the kind of pre and post design process. That's the difference between UI and UX. 5. 05 How much can I get paid as a UX designer: Hi. In this video, we're going to look at you and your UX career. Now, looking at this page here, I love this one, CNN Money, it's the best jobs in America from last year. User experience designer comes in at number 14. Just so you know, just in front is a dentist, and just after is an auditing director. I don't know about you, but I don't even know what an auditing director is, and I definitely don't want to be a dentist. User experience design is an exciting field to be in. I'm in it, I love it. What I really like about it is the measurability. It's my creative stuff. It's all my talents in terms of my artistic creativity, but is miserable. I can get better at, I can test it, I can see if people like it or don't like it, what do they like about it, what they don't like about and keep editing and going along. Yes, it's a cool career. The other nice thing is that it pays a lot more as well. Let's talk about senior UX. I've done a little payscale report. This is for a senior graphic designer, this is senior UX designer. You can go through and do this yourself. I've picked a senior UX designer in Austin and I've compared them both in the same place. You put in your town. I haven't put it in lots of qualifications and stuff which can adjust this, but it's just a good guess to see. You see the median here is about a 100K, and the median for a senior graphic designer is about half that. There is a big price difference when you get to a UX designer with some experience. If you are brand new or say, you're a really accomplished graphic designer or a web designer, but you're moving into UX, you're going to have to start at the bottom of the UX pile, which is fine, but you can't expect a big jumps. Say if you're on a certain pay bracket now and you want to move into UX of a equivalent experience, there's not going to be huge pay difference, but you will find is that there's a lot more opportunity out there. If you're looking for a graphic design role, there's very few jobs out there for a pure graphic designer these days, and there is a lot for a UX designer. The payment would be different, but there's a lot more things to pick out off and you'll have a bit more of a choice of where to work and locations, those types of things but when you do get to the senior roles, you can see there's a huge price difference. That'll about live last little bit. UX is hot at the moment, but there's a lot of people training in it. You're doing it but lots of other people are doing it as well and it will become a little bit more saturated and that higher price. Let's have a look. For us the high price is 130K here. Now, this is data pulled. Where they get the data from, it's good metrics and data to use from payscale, but don't pin your hopes on 100K job. If you are living like me in Dublin or an island, the pace can be very different. The other thing is that people are looking for unicorns at the moment. By that I mean that when you see job application at the moment, you see that people want so much out of a job application. They're looking for dirt cheap, they're looking for like 30K a year and they want somebody who's doing all these things, looking for people who don't exist. They're looking for people that can do the UX, but also app development, but also do web development, but also do graphic design, and UX design, and videography, and all these things for low prices. Don't sweat it if you are looking like, man, I can't do that, can do bits of that. Often that's what's happening. I do it myself. I'm looking for a new trainer and I put it in skills I want. I want them to do the graphic design ones, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator. Then I do things like I want them to do web, so I want them to do HTML, and CSS, and JavaScript, and Node.js, and Angular, then I go through and I add, I want to do after-fix, motion graphics and all these sorts of things. There's lots of people to pick from at the moment, and I'm not actually looking for all of those skills, I'm looking for people that have most of them and they might flip flop into one camp. They might be web designers who do a bit of video, but not much graphic. They might be graphic designers who do a little of web, but no video. It allows me to pick from that pool. If you have got jobs and you're like, "I'm pretty close to that, but I don't have any of these skills", still apply because people that just looking for too much these days. If you have got a job and you're like, "I wonder if I can even apply for it", or you don't even know what the terms are, they're asking for something and you're not even sure what that term is. Because we're talking about UX strategist or a senior UX designer, but sometimes they call them lead designers, or middle weights, or if the language isn't confusing for you, if you're not sure if you should apply or how you should get your portfolio together to apply what they'd be expecting, send me a note. Either through the website or on Twitter at Dan loves Adobe, check in at Facebook, there's lots of ways of getting in contact with me. I'd love to have a look at the ad and see what they're expecting if you need a bit of help. There's you and your new UX career. It's going to the next video. 6. 06 How to get your first UX project: Hey, in this video, we're going to look at creating your first UX project, or at least getting your first project or getting your first job in UX. What's going to happen is, you're going to do the theory like this course here and you're going to need some experience. You're going to have to actually work through at least one project. Now how to get your first project and you've got two options, you can either go off and just do it something personally. Take a project that you might have an idea, a business idea of your own. It might be a project that you'd be meaning to start for a friend or for family. Get that going and turn that into this UX project and take parts of this or all of this theory that you've learned here and put it into practice. So that when you do reach out to say your boss or looking into a career as a freelancer, you can go to clients and explain and have the language and have some experience in the industry to be able to share with them. Now what will happen in smaller businesses at the moment, nobody's valuing UX, the medium to bigger businesses are. But if you run a small business and you're working, slugging away and you want to get into UX, what you probably going to have to do is go off and just do a project and then share the data afterwards. Big for forgiveness, not for permission. Say you are handed a job and you think this should be a good one to do some of this user experience stuff. What you can do is just do it on your own bed, on your own dime, in your own time and share the data afterwards. It might be a new website you building, but you can go off and maybe debrand it. So you're not breaking any confidentiality agreements. Go off and do some user testing, do some research, and then share those results at the end and say, "Look, I wanted to get into this I did this on my own time and these are the results. These are the things I tested against, so I did some AB testing. I did some user testing and I feel like this has got us to a better place than maybe what was originally proposed." Going in with that stuff that you've actually done and you've proven, rather than trying to convince them, you should do it, show them how well you did do it. Now in terms of bigger accompanies, what you might have to do is show them the numbers. It might be that, say you're designing a website for a company and you're doing the checkout page. That could be a really important because a lot of customers are lost in that checkout flow. You might do some user testing and show that people got from searching for products to the actual buying of checkout process in three clicks with one design and five with another. Then you can go and say, "Look, if you have an attrition rate or holes in your flow and you're losing clients on the fourth click you can actually add some dollar values to. At least you can infer dollar values that maybe the business owner can start to see going. Five clicks is whole lot worse than three clicks or it might be that your design changed the fact that people are less confused and you can add attribute, customer service, key calls. There's a cost to a business where they have to reply to emails and have customer care hotline people. You can test designs where people get to where they want to go quicker and easier. Going to them with those numbers can really help cement their wanting you to get more involved with UX and user design. If you're doing the personal stuff, go off and do it and pick projects, and just go off and do it so that you get a portfolio of UX projects that you can talk about, things you've done when you go to talk to employers. The most important thing is getting some experience, any experience, all experience, as much experience as you can. The name of the game is experience, is getting out and actually doing it and doing your first jobs and the first couple of jobs might be terrible, but its all right you have to go through those phases so you learn and get better and be able to go off and be a bit more confident about the industry. All right, that's it for getting your first job in UX. 7. 07 Setting your objectives goals: Hey there. In this video we'll get a look at the objectives. It is the first step in the UX process. Really, it's just a way of just making sure that what you're about to start doing has value, or it has the most value. There's a million things you can be doing in a business. Just checking where you're at and what you're trying to achieve, that this is aligned with what your business goals are is one part of it. Then it's just making sure you use the right language, not sitting out on a succeed or fail path. I'll do it for a new course. Let's launch a new course and if it doesn't work out and we fail, it's a bit of a miserable event. People get discouraged from trying new things and it's all around a bad result. But if you take that exact same task of launching a new course and you set a hypothesis more like a scientist than setting a prize and you rephrase it in terms of, let's test and let's check to see whether people will pay for this new course, then it's a win-win. You're not going to lose. It's a yes or a no, but you have still succeeded in your objective. You've figured out whether people will pay or not. You could do that once you got to that stage there with this UX process, you can move on to the next project rather than having to say, my course is full, the whole course, build all the course-ware, train the trainers, find the room, get all that stuff done, then find out it fails. The nice thing about the UX process is getting this stuff done quick and easily and setting the objective is probably the most important part of the whole thing. So once you've got that nice and clear, then you can move on to the next step and start doing your research. 8. 08 UX Research introduction: Hey. In this video, we're going to look at the UX researcher process. We're now on our second step of our design process now. This is as it relates to a UX designer as well. What you're going to have to do here is, one or two things, if you've got an existing data that you can work with, great, you can do some research and you can make some great assumptions from that research. Now, let's say you've got an existing website that has a new feature or an existing app, and it's an extra little feature. You are going to already have data analytics about the people and their movements and how they are using the site. You can make some judgment from that and do that research from that existing data. If you've got a new idea, it's a new site, say it's a new site but an existing field, great, you can borrow some data maybe census stuff from your industry. But say that it's a new app and it's brand new and it's never been developed before, a website has never been seen before, then there's not going to be a whole lot of research you can do. You're going to find most value out of the actual mocking up and testing loop okay. Don't spend too much time in the research phase, and it will depend on what you have available at this stage. The two main things are going to be looking at competitor research. Just see who else is out there and we'll do that in the next video. Then we'll move on to probably the most important part of the research process, and that is building your persona or your user profile. All right, I'll see you next video. 9. 09 Competitor UX research: In this video, we're going to look at competitive research. Now we're still in our research phase and competitor research can be just as simple as a Google search, just to see who's out there, who's doing. A client might have come to you with this brand new idea that nobody has ever thought about except you find there's actually lots out there that does the same thing. What you might need to do then is look at what can make yours special, what's your unique selling point, what's your positioning compared to the competitors? Or it might be that it's just new to your area. That can be really handy as well. You can go off and find something that might be, you might have a new website, it's a restaurant guide but it's for a specific area and you can find that's currently under serviced or not serviced. There's a terrible one and they want to do a better one, just go out and find the other great ones and look at different countries. If you're in the US, look at different states, look to the UK, look to Europe, Australia, different market, they might have amazing thing doing well there and that you can,we call appropriation, not stealing. Ideas to help inform your designs when you move into the mockup stage. All right, so a competitor research, easy, quickly to do and really can help inform your UI design. 10. 10 UX Personas or user profiles: Hey. Welcome to this video. We're going to be talking about buyer personas or user profiles. Now, they're the same thing, different words for the same thing, and they are key to every UX project. It's a way of keeping everybody on the same page. If you don't have things like buyer personas, then you can have the development guys or girls thinking this is who it's for and they're developing for them. The copyright is thinking it's somebody else, everybody coming up with their own ideas of who this thing is for. You might have a general consensus, without a clear user profile, they can go off and everybody designing different things for different people. Buyer personas look like this. They are super simple, they just have basic details about the person. You need to give it a name. I don't know why, but you got to give them a physical name, just so that when you're talking about it, you're talking about, I'd say some of my user profiles for some of the courses that I do might be Developer Dave. Developer Dave is x, y, and z, but for some reason he is going to be called Developer Dave or Website Wendy is other one, I don't know why. They both have to have the same first letters. You can rock that boat. But you come up with the basic details, not too much detail. I've seen some user profiles that are like a fully full page, maybe two pages long about their profile. Now, you just want what's relevant to your product. You don't want to know what they've had for breakfast, unless your product tell your website about what they had for breakfast. What car they drive is not that useful unless your app is for driving, or racing, or what. It gives sum benefit and really helps understand the person. Keep it short and simple, make sure you print them out, you stick them to the walls around when everybody is. In the meeting rooms, in the kitchens that everybody knows and can be reminded about what you're there for. You're there Their for Developer Dave and what his interests are. Now, the most important part of creating our user profile is actually using them. As a UX designer, know that they are useful, and I use them, and I work too with them. It's great to have conversations and meetings to say, instead of saying I don't think you should be using that, I say, Developer Dave doesn't really like that. You can have these third-party conversations without getting anybody's backup. But as a business owner, I get a little scared of them, because I want to launch a new product or new service and I don't want to narrow it down to the buyer persona in case I'm wrong. I exclude some people. I don't want it to be generic and I make it maybe a bit too much. Everything for everybody becomes nothing for nobody. You need to keep it down to bring it back to this user profile. Don't be afraid two change your user profile. If it's not working, test it. If it's not working, adjust it, adapt it, but don't make them and then fall in a way that will and never use them. Print them off, stick them where people can seen them. In meeting rooms, next to the developers, near the copyright. If it's just you, put them up in your bedroom just so that you can be reminded of your developing for Developer Dave or Website Wendy. Whoever you decide your user profiles are, and the names that you can have those, have them up and around. Now, when you're creating your user profile, you really need to do it as a group. Don't just do it as a UX designer. Do it by yourself and then deliver it to them and say, "Here's our profiles." They might be right, but they won't get what's really important and it's the buy-in from what's called the stakeholders. I hate that word, stakeholders, but it gives you lots in UX and you need to start using it. It's the people that have an interest in the project. It might be the business owner, it might be the CFO, it might be one of the investors, it might be that HR manager because it relates to her or him. Make sure everybody is involved with making the buyer personas, because what happens is, if you do buy stuff and deliver it, they can say, and it doesn't go well. That's like it's your buyer persona. I didn't agree with it. But if you do it together, I'm going to give you some rules and some tips of how to do it together. But you can imagine if you all put this time and effort together, it doesn't have to be long. But you come up with them together, then you have all got an invested interest, or at least everybody's on the same page. Nobody can say later on, "That buyer persona they came up with really wasn't on the mark." You want everybody to be working together to build it so that they've got an interest in it, and when they're tasting it, they understand it fully and really embrace it. Make sure you do it together and build it together. Even if you are sit off to do it by yourself, try and draw everybody back in to build the personas. Now, how many buyer personas should you have? One or two. You don't need five probably, you definitely don't need 10. I've seen them all. You just really want to have just enough, to get a really clear, but without having to many conflicting personas. It's not helpful. I've tried it. It doesn't work. Well, you might have to have, say, three is when you've got a product that has lots of different people coming from different directions. One example is I was helping somebody with, it's like an accounting online SaaS solution for online accounting. Now, they had very clearly different roles for that. It's either just different people using it. Let's say for my business I use something called zero. Zero would have different profiles because they've got me as the business owner using it. I need to use a certain amount of tools and use it for a certain way. I'm looking at reporting, I'm looking at everything really. But one of my biggest things is the monthly reports, profit and loss, those sort of things. Now, somebody else in my business that does the bookkeeping, her roll is just producing invoices and chasing invoices up. They want to use the product very differently from I want to use. I want to use a lot more features, but I don't want to make the invoices. That's not what I want to do. There's that. Then is, say, some of my staff. My staff want to use it differently, they use zero in a way where all they do is put their receipts and just claim expenses. That's all they want to use. They use an app. I use the website version. There's lots of people coming at this bit of software, lots of different ways. That's where you might have a lot more personas, but say it's a website, often you only need one or two, and that's what I try and stick to. Now, there's two ways of making personas. You can do it from existing data if you have some. Borrow some data from other industries, otherwise, if it's quite new and quite unique, you might have to do a biz guess and then test that persona through your user testing process and refine it as you learn more and get more and examine more. Let's go and look at good ways of getting stuff from existing data. Great. Let's go through and see where you can pull information for your persona from your existing data. Now, you might be like me and you might have something like Google Analytics, or Omniture, or the Adobe version, some website tracking software. For me, the nice thing about it is that, and maybe say you're doing it for somebody else, you could ask for access to this. It's not hard to gain access for somebody to share the data with you. What you can do is come in hear under Audience, go to Overview, and under Overview, there was a few little things you can look at. Demographics is the one you want, go to Overview. You can see easily here on this current site who are the age groups, 25-34. Is it mainly male or female? You can see mine is heavily male and mainly in this age group here. What you can do is, you can dig a little deeper so you could know the age. That's the overview part, and you can start to see a little bit of a breakdown. Now, my tracking over here is knocked up on the side here, which is really bad of me. But what happens on other sites that I've got is that, and I know for a fact that even though this is 25-34 is my highest user and I known through other ways of tracking. This 35-44, it's actually the majority of people that actually pay. Even though it's the third smallest group, is actually the people that actually stay the longest on the site. You can see here a lot longer than these other groups. You can see it's it's funny like the 18-24 a lot shorter, longer, and as the age group gets higher, the average duration, that means the staying on the site longer and I know through other ways of tracking the transactions that are a lot higher. If you can get access to this, you can do some nice things and rule out. Use a profile that you might have considered that is like 20, that is just at a university and needs the upskill. I know through my training sites that people that are a little bit more mature in my age group that are happy to pay for good training. I'm saying with gender. This is really interesting for me because I run both classroom training and online training, and classroom is complete flip of this. It's mainly about 70 percent female, and 30 percent male do not enter in class stuff, but in terms of online training, it's mostly male and that's across all the websites that I manage. It really helps me get my persona as nice and clear. Under interests there is another one, good overview. You might be interested in how they get this data and these things in your browser called cookies and all the advertising groups track and try and work out, but it's not perfect but it's pretty good, it's accurate enough. You can seen here my interests, the most interested in my site here is Technophiles, here's really broad. There's some sub-groups over here but that's useful. Shutterbugs because I do photography stuff and can help inform it and everything else. Another big one is Geo. If you are dealing with languages, that might be important, mines is not minds all English on the side here. If I go to location though, and this is really important. Most of my business for the site comes from the US, a huge amount, 33 percent in the next and six from the UK. But if I go in here, well, this really helps me with my persona. It's English speaking and in America, in the States of California and Texas are my biggest ones. It's amazing what details you can go into these things and dive in, and you can start to see in California, which cities are the highest ones, San Francisco, San Jose. What that helps me to do regardless of UX and user profiles, those things are really interesting for me because I do lots of help online. I do video monthly sessions where I jump onto YouTube and do a live chat, and I just make sure my timezones are aligned to these groups. If it was big in the UK, it would bee a very different timezone. Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. Another one, behavior, no, technology is a useful one. The main one that I like is mobile, we've got overview. It's going to tell me some interesting stuff about desktop versus mobile versus tablet. This is a really useful one if you are doing this persona, how are they accessing the site? If it is mobile, say, it's flipped around and it's 80 percent mobile, I'd spent a lot more time testing my mobile version. In this case, because mine is hugely desktop, I don't ignore mobile, but definitely, it's not my main focus. Mainly, people are using my site and interacting with my content, 80 percent of them through a desktop. That's where my first point coolers and when I'm designing, I design desktop first instead of mobile first, which a lot of people like at the moment. If you're dealing with apps, it's going to be obviously different. Everything else, there's little bits and pieces but that's the big stuff. Now, in terms of other existing data, you can go PayScale. We looked at this early, but if you have a profile and you've decided your profile is a woman, she's in communications, she's mid-level, she's this, that, and the other. What you can do is, you can go in here and figure out what salary she's at. It helps to inform whether she has disposable income or PayScale there on. You might be thinking one thing and think, yeah, they own heaps. But then you actually go off and find out that they don't or they do. Use PayScales, is a nice one. Another thing you can do is a YouTube. check that if it's yours or whether you're working for a client, ask if you can access to their YouTube, or you just give them screenshots. They don't have to give you super access. But if I look at this one here, this is my YouTube channel, and under Analytics down here, it's similar to analytics that we just saw before from Google Analytics. YouTube one here has some slight different stuff. This is the people using that content on my site, I give away a lot of free stuff. The things I'm looking for is Overview, I'm looking for Demographics again. You can start to see 25-34, it's a different skew in terms of the numbers of people watching the videos but similar. Male to female, a lot more male, a lot less female. You can dig in a little bit deeper so you can view the gender and what else? Viewer your age. You can dig into these guys here to see. That's my biggest age group, you can start to see it's part of that age group who they are. There's little bits of extra details in here, and this one is quite nice geography. United States is huge, India is huge here but did you notice that all my content on my site, it's actually from the UK. UK was my second biggest one, you guys fourth down here. You got to aggregate this type of information to try and work out your user profiles. The last thing you can do is surveys. Now, I run surveys regularly. When I say regularly, every time I need to ask a question, I'll see in the survey. If you're part of this course, you'll probably get a survey and sooner or later, I probably do, once a month or every two months. What it allows me to do, Survey Monkey is a great free tool, I use this one. It gives you everything you need mostly as long as your numbers are not to low. I don't have a huge amount of people to email, so it's free. What it helps me do is, it helps with the people that fill out the surveys. I ask questions about who they are, what they do, what they like about the site, what they'd like more, and it helps me get that user profile nice and tight and I get an understanding of it. Now, there's a whole science to asking these survey questions. Go off, do some research, send out a Survey Monkey to the people that you might have access to. They, might be signed up to a newsletter, or you might ask from the client to be able to send them an email to the last month's transactions, to see if you can get some feedback for your user profile. All right, one of the last things you can do looking for existing data, if you don't have any specific stuff about your users like I've got for some of mine, I've got Analytics and I've got YouTube, is you can go to things like the Census , or you can go to industry groups quite often they'll sell you traits and reports about a certain industry. You can go and do those ones to get a more generic to look at it. If you can't found anything in there that's useful, just make it up, make some good assumptions and then test them. Come up with user profile based on base case and then go through the design and testing loop and then start to see, who are the people that are engaging with it. When you get your first few clients as well, go through and maybe adjust your user profile, just keep everybody up to date with where you're at. Especially at the beginning when you haven't got any key purchase, it's going to be a bit of a fluid thing until you get a bit more of a solid understanding of who your uses are. 11. 11 Group exercise Creating Personas: All right. This video, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about how to run a group to get your personas. So what you don't want to do is do it yourself, and then deliver them to people because nobody's going to take ownership of them if you just handed them off and told them, "This is what you should be thinking." What you want to do is, it doesn't have to be long, it doesn't have to be crazy organized, it can take half an hour, an hour in the boardroom, pretty ad hoc, it doesn't have to be superficial. But what you need to do is, you need to get buy-in from the stakeholders. The people that are going to be investing their time and helping you. So it might be management, it might be the boss, it might be the developer, it might be the graphic designer, whoever is actually going to be involved, the copywriter. What you do, is you finally get to use post-it notes. We've come along, in so many videos and you've not seen a Post-It note you like. This is not a UX course, I'm sure it's Post-it notes. So we got some post-it notes now. What happens is, you facilitate it, you could take the notes on the post-it notes. What you do, is you describe, you talk about the product that you're going to be building or the thing or the feature, and then you ask the group. You might have to jog everybody to get everybody started, but you ask people who are the kinds of people that might be using it. What you do is, you might have to facilitate and get it going, but after a while, I've ran lots of these groups where people start after a little while, they'll go like, Okay, what about let's say it's for, let's just pretend a mock exercise and I'm doing for my course. I released the course for HTML5 banner ad advertising. So let's say we did it as a group and I suggest something simple like, the types of people are probably from my experience or, you know, and say it's a girl, she's in her early 30s, and she used to do Flash the old banner add stuff and now it's trying to get back into it. So you write down just the basics. So you say give her name and that's the fun part as you give her you say, she is designed to Danielle, and she is early 30s, and she's moving back at that and you just write it down. Okay. Then stick it into your wall or whiteboard. Okay. That's the fun stuff sticking into the whiteboard. Okay, then you ask somebody else and somebody else might say, Oh, it's actually the type of people might be marketing people. It might be a young guy who's getting into it and is doing some freelance stuff and is having to turn down work, but needs to get into it. You write that down and give him a name. He might be the marketer, and you stick him up and you go through, you try and get ready going and try and get something out of everybody. Once you've got it all, you stick them all up on the wall, the white board, and you start looking like a UX designer. Okay, and then as a group, okay, what you try and do then is try and put them into because you might have come up with say, 10 of them or 20 of them or 30 of them, how many of you come up with, and then try and combine them down. You might have some that are really similar. You might find marketing mark and this other person that you've made up is actually they've got very similar traits. So it'd be hard to find them. So what you start doing is you start drawing circles with the white boards around few groups and you start adding them together. What you're trying to do is boil it down to the absolute essentials. So it might be one person, it might be two, it might be three. Don't get more than three, two is good. I find two is a nice wicking number for law the projects, you might have some bigger projects, so justifiably have some old, but that's the kind of numbers. Then what you do is because I guess the processes you'll then later on write up a more detail one that add a flush it out a little bit. Not too far. Okay. My persona is always a paragraph, maybe two. Just that it's memorable and it's easy. Okay. I guess what you've got to make sure is that when you grouping them together is you don't tell people what to do. You asking it with these people who claim to be the same? You let the group chat it out, talk it out because the idea of this process is not to actually get a persona. It's mainly so that people can chat about it, talk about it, and work through the details in their own hits. So that when they're working on their parts of the project member that stakeholders, "stakeholders", okay, is that they are sitting down, and they've thought through why that original idea that head maybe isn't as useful now because they chatted it out, and they had discussions in a half-an-hour of thinking through those problems will save people later on if you hand it to them and them kind of like being resilient to it. So that's maybe the idea of the goal is for you to be a facilitator of getting ideas and having the chat, even if you use profiles that come out on perfect. It's not really about that. It's about getting everybody thinking about the pros and cons and who might be using it so that when they are doing their work, they've got a good idea of what you are trying to hit. So once you've got your post notes all up, you've drawn on the whiteboard with lots of stuff and what you need to do then is make sure you do it straight away. Don't go off and build this amazing report. Okay, that looks beautiful and you deliver it and it's all that special thing, but people they've lost the buzz from it. What you need to do is make sure you do it in morning over the early afternoon. So you've got some time afterwards is to actually draft up a more complete version. So you give them a name add any bits that you think really necessary and molded into a good user profile and then e-mail it out to everybody print it out, stick it around. So it's not like we did this and then next week we did that. Then what was that thing we did again, you want to just do the task really informally. Print it off, stick it up in the lunch room, stick it up and everybody's desk. So you'd get feedback, okay? So that is a bit of momentum and when people are working on it, say they're working on at that time, they're actually really to go and have clarify because they might go off and start thinking and things wander a little bit and you lose that power of that group session. So yeah, go off, tidy it up, make it a pretty if you wanted to add a photo. I sometimes do. I sometimes I find some random on the line that fits a 32-year-old female in marketing. Okay, and I will try and stick that in there. But I go through months where I'm doing it and months I don't because it's ridiculous. Okay, so have a bit of fun with it as well, but don't get too carried away with that user profile at this stage. 12. 12 UX feature list: Now we need to make mockups, and before we actually start doing the wireframing and those types of things, we need to get a features list. What are we going to include in this new app, this new website, this extra feature? You might have a nugget of an idea, but you need the supporting stuff as well. What other features does it need to have to make it work? This is where you do it again as a group team, so you want to make sure everybody's on board and singing from the same song sheet. Now first thing to do is make sure, you could do this in one big group. You could do personas, and then afterwards, maybe after our lunch break, come back and do the features list. This is a bit of a time so you can adjust the persona, or you could do it the following week or something like that. Get everybody back together, and then it's just a matter of making sure they read the personas, they really understand what the features are for, and then come back and get your post-it notes again. We're going to do more post-it notes, and just give people the all-out features. Say, we're using my website as an example. It's an online training site. I'm delivering videos, and you started the ball rolling. It needs a forum. You write that down, stick it to your wall. Somebody else might say it needs a live chat for the trainer. Great, add that to it. It needs a pause button and a play button, it needs some sort of maybe bookmarking or editing notes, and you just get the ball rolling with everybody, and no feature is bad. Just add them all on there, stick them to the wall. Once you've got a group together, a bunch of them together, or you've exhausted your features list, you might have hundreds, you might have 10, there might be loads, there might be only a little bit, so group them all together. Any features that are very similar, stick together on your whiteboard. You can put them overlapping inside that, that's kind of the same thing, so cut it down. Then remove anything are not essential. If my mind's a video training site, there's no point talking about the value of having a video on the page. It's the most important, yes, and that's always going to win, but it's essential, and for me, mine's a paid subscription site. Some login is a feature, yes, but can we exist without it? No, this doesn't exist without some logging in thing for students. I remove that off thing, get it done to the supporting features rather than the core stuff. If you leave them there, and you think, maybe we could be without this, maybe that's arguable, leave it in there. Then you need to prioritize. You might have a big list, and then what do you work on, because the developer might be thinking, it definitely needs this thing, it needs a forum because that's what's going to be really good for this thing. The CEO, they might be thinking the whole reason for this thing is, "I don't want this interaction with students. I want it to be like a zombie website where it goes off and looks after itself." He doesn't want a big support team and people running it. You've got to get all these ideas and then you got to prioritize them. The way to prioritize them, there's couple of ways, easy ways, you just sit around, do it together, and maybe there's the monopoly money way where you all sit down and you buy features. You go through all the feature lists, and try and cut it down to a reasonable amount. If there's some really weird stuff, you might remove it off, but scale it down to maybe 10 or 20, and then you can do stuff. Give everybody some monopoly money, and you get them to pull up one box [inaudible] you stick it there, and you say, "How much people are going to spend on this?" How much value do they think that has? They might get given 1,000 fake dollars. If you don't have monopoly money, you can use anything. It might be trading pins, or coins, or whatever is lying around the office. It makes people assign a value and, in saying that, it makes them take a value away from something else because you can't say that is the top, that is also the top, which people do. They have to be both the top. They can't be. You have to start somewhere to do something. You need some ordering, so that you might say probably a feature, and for me it might be the forum. I think that's really valuable. I might cough up 500 bucks for that one, knowing that I need the 500 if you go around the other ones, and you can just pile the money up, and then count it at the end. Then you've got a party list, you start it. Whoever got the most money and work your way back to that list. Because you've all done it together, it's a really nice way of doing because it means that the developer who had a different idea from the CEO doesn't go well, my idea is better, why isn't he doing it? Because that had that chat by putting the money down, conversation start happening and you start looking at parties and everybody starts getting on the same page. You might disagree, but it doesn't matter because you're being part of why you understand the reasoning why these people have gone this way. It might help things because often a new idea, the idea for these locked in people's head, especially the owner, or the people initiating the project, they might have in the end note that wanted to do, but now that people don't know, so it lists or less sort of conversations. That's one way of doing by money. Problem with that way is in which you can get round is more like a poker, those who know that exact same thing you bought with the money. What you do is you put the feature out and everybody has to put down at the same time because what happens is you get a bit of a boss bias where, say this five-year around a table, the CEO and his employees. What happens is when you do that first example with the monopoly money is that what are the boss does everyone follows along, and you're like, "Okay. Yeah, me too," just to make sure to keep everybody happy whereas if you do more of a poker one where everyone has to be, you're tuning into like a poker style thing, and you try and make a game matter because you don't want people to be caught out or feel bad, it's literally 1, 2, 3 and you put your money down, and then you look around because then there's no boss bias. Everyone's just put down what they think rather than just going around in a circle and just seeing what the balls put down and just got accompanying him. That's a nice way of doing it, nice and easy. What I find the most useful for me when I'm working, I do a lot of startups and kind of one-man band type of things when we're doing UX or a lot of my projects. Pairwise comparisons, we'll do that. I find that it's probably, out of all of them, my favorite that I've ever run. It works the easiest less gamey than pokers stuff, and you can do it by yourself as well. It's really handy. Let's do that in a whole new video, and we'll show you how to do that as a group. 13. 13 Group exercise Pairwise comparison: In this video we're going to look at doing the can pair wise comparison, my favorite. It's literally just comparing two and seeing who wins. It's pretty easy do, write down your examples on Notepad. What you should do is if you've never done this before, is go through and do a test run, do it at home with your partner or friends at work. Just an idea of the time, I move the first time I run it as a group and I didn't taste it. It took forever and everybody just got pissed off in the end. Make sure that if we're going to do four and it'll take us a couple of minutes to do. If you start getting up to like 20 features, it's going to take half an hour to do. If you've got quite a vocal group because it's a bit of discussion that goes on, it can take a lot longer. So just give it a test runner, doesn't really matter how many you have. You've got to be warned, you just got to warn people that if you know it's going to take about an hour to do, just tell people it's going to take an hour. We'll have a break in the middle and we'll go through it all. It takes a bit of time, but it's really worth it, rather they winging it and seeing how long it takes and people getting a little bit annoyed. All you do is you grab one of your features, and you compare it against another one. I'm going to show you, this is a social sharing option, some linky thing, where you can share on Twitter. I'm using my example of my video training site. What features should it have? What you're going to do is give some people some basis to make discussion. There's a mixture of its relevance, how long it's going to take, how much it's going to take, and a wow factor as well. Like there's some things that can be that low value in terms of the cool concept, but they are really high wow factor, and they might be combined with a really easy to do the developer my chip and go actually that's really quick and easy to do. Everyone is that's pretty cool. It might get a bit of a bonus compared to something else that might be not as useful, maybe more important, but we'll take a little longer. Those are the boundaries. Make sure you had your user profile handy as well so that when you arguing, you're not saying, "I think this is better than this." It's you're saying, "Marketing mark thinks that would be bitter because of X, Y, and Z." Then it becomes less of a me verses me you and becomes a discussion about Mark and his interests. Makes it a little bit less than confrontational. What you do is social versus video transcription, where my videos get transcribed into English and other languages. So we compare the two. Now, this is not about getting it done, it's about having the discussion. You will get a nice list to be in, but it's really about having that discussion. But you might just start it, you say social sharing. I think those are not important. What do other people think? People can dialogue about why this versus that end the different teams chipping in. So the developer might go, "That's going to take me about an hour to do." That there is going to take us and that's going to cost us nothing by his time. But this they said we're going to have to outsource. Maybe know who we are going to get to do this? Is is somebody in the office. So we're going to have to go to through up-work or something else. There's a cost and then implementing and developing my guy actually it's pretty easy to implement. You can have these discussions around it because from the bosses point of view, he might be going, "Well, why don't we do this? That's obviously the one." But then he finds out it's going to cost them a whole lot of money to do because the developer said, it's not as easy as you think. It's about this dialogue, so everyone gets an idea of what doing. The long story short is you compare these two, and I think video transcription is more important than social sharing. The social sharing bottoms, so I put that over there. Now, you verses you. Exercise files, downloadable exercise file, I like social sharing. Forum versus social sharing, I think it's still more important even though that's quick. Poor social sharing is done. You sit over there and he does nothing else now. Now you go him verses him. Forum versus exercise files. I think the exercise files is more important than the forum. Great. There you go over there. You can move this guy. I'm going to place them off screen to make it simpler and do that for you as students as well, or the people in your gang. These two compare to two. Forum versus transcription, and this is where I can have a discussion about, I think video transcriptions is better because it's got keywords on the page, it's good for people that are maybe visually impaired or have really low bandwidth and they have to read it rather than watch the video because they can't stream fast enough and you could have this discussion. You say he wins. He's done plural forum. You've got these two and out of these two, I think exercise files. Now you've got most priority, next priority, next priority. You can start working your way down the list. Give them jobs to the different people to go off and do. We've all got a sense of what's important and what's not. Probably what's most important is that discussion that happens when you're comparing the two and it's just amazing what you learn about what people think is important, what it actually costs, and how long things take, especially when you're dealing with webs and apps and stuff, there might be stuff that the development knows, done it before taking five seconds. Whereas you might be thinking, that sounds really hard and it's going to take for a given cost lots of money. That's the pay wise comparison. Let's go into the next video. 14. 14 UX card sorts Open & Closed: All right. In this video we're going to do something called an open card sort. Now, what it means is, like in the last one we did with the features list, and that works for some parts of the UX process for different products. The website was really good and the app's really good. But let's say it's something slightly different. You're rejigging your websites of new redesign, or you're adding lots of stuff to an existing database or website, and you need to group them in certain ways. A good way of doing it is a navigation. Say you've got to navigation in your e-commerce site and you're selling lots. You are an Amazon, eBay type thing. Okay? Imagine them, they have to categorize stuff that people can find. They need to go through, and say I want to buy a laptop, it has to be stored somewhere. It has to be under computers, under laptops. There's kind of a structure to that. It also might be for, developing something for like an Apple kiosk, or say a mall kiosk. Where somebody has to figure out, they want to buy woman shoes, where do you group them? Do they go under fashion? Great. Okay. Or do they go under footwear? It's just a way of categorizing things and put them in order. You might have an idea, but you need to work them out first because it's amazing that projects that I've worked on that I've thought, what they should be in, and then you realize, because what we do in New Zealand, where I'm from is very different and some of the languages are very different. And we're going to do this one where we're dealing with vegetables. And there's some things that , just an example, we call, capsicum. Here in Ireland they're called peppers. And I understand that but I've differently if you New Zealand, there was a peppers category, you'd be looking for things like black cracked pepper, okay, but not capsicums, because they're not pepper. So I have to get the language and ideas and group things out. So if you're doing a navigation for a site, or in the case of this one it's supermarket checkout. The bit we're doing a self checkout, and you're trying to find, you've bought some random muffin, and you can't find it anywhere or you've bought a vegetable and it's just not there. You can't find it. Okay? This kind of thing helps people get them in the right place. Okay. So what you do is, you list out all the things you need to categorize. In this case we're going to use a supermarket analogy. You do yours for whatever you need to do. Okay? I've got loads in here, and what you need to do is break everybody into a group. Okay? So if you've only got three people, then there's going to be just three groups. Okay? And if you've got loads more you might have to break people into pairs, that's probably it. Okay? Because what you want to do is not get them all done. You want them to compare what that group decided the group names on what that group is. It make it a little sense when we do stuff. Now, the problem with this is that you can't see they are a bit small. The ones that I use for my class. This is leeks, broccoli, parsnips, garlic. And what you're doing is, as an example, is you start laying them out. So garlic here, parsnips here. I'm going to run out of space really quick. I understand. Okay. So you, you, you. You're going to group names. You can sit over there. It's parsnips, broccoli, leeks. I still feel like we haven't grouped them. I love that one. Lychees, lychees. I have to google it every time, I have no idea what that is. Okay. And that's a really handy one to have in. Throw in a few [inaudible] because it's fun. Not fun but sometimes people just assume that they're called, okay? And you're like no, no, that needs to be called something else. It's known in this region as this. Okay. So I've noted here's at google. Carrots, and then I'm going to go with parsnips kind of a root vegetable type thing. And this is where you start going, okay, this group here now is going to be called, root vegetables. Okay? So I'm going to grab my marker and I'm going to call him, root vegetables. Okay? Root veggies. And what you're doing is, you're looking for what the other groups call them. They might've categorize them differently. I'm not sure what they would have put other than root vegetables, but they might have. Okay? Mushrooms, where's that going to go? Maybe they've decided garlic and mushrooms go together. Chilies. So maybe chilies and garlic go together and they called this one, maybe spices or you might call this one condiments. What you're looking for is not the right answer, you're looking for lots of variation because one group might come up with spices and the other group come up with another name and that's the beauty of this. You can go through and discuss about what you should be calling them and what things ended up. So I've got onions. They might go in with leeks because in my head as the same family. And this is what you're going to do. Oranges, fruits [inaudible]. We've got loads in here, and you're looking for groups. They'll be a couple of outliers, they'll be like this lychees thing because I don't even know what that is. Okay? Sitting over here and somebody else might put it in a really good group and just renamed it, and included this one here and becomes very obvious. Okay? It might be that names are not going to work. You might find out that it's just too hard. You got so many groups you're going to have to use images as well as names. Okay? And that's what the idea of these cards is about. It's about getting the conversation going, making sure there is separate teams. Okay? You might be doing this by yourself, and the two other people have the same printouts. Okay? Just coming up with different group names and putting together differently and all pairs, and it is about working out what these group names. I could for my supermarket checkout, I could go through and have these home directories, and then you click the home button and then these appear and that's the whole reason for this, or maybe navigation on a website. Yeah. Sorry, open card sort is this way of doing. Now, a closed card sort is something different. What you do is, you give people the group names already. Okay? So you give them root vegetable, spices. And what you do is you say, I'd like you to place these in a group. So you will get them pick the names. Okay? The users have to put them in. They have to try and find out which ones that he's going to go into. Okay? Because you might have an existing navigation that works and you don't want to be rejigging the whole thing. Okay? Because it's too much work. You want to just find it and say you've got all of these things, but these two are new objects, new features, or new things that you're going to include, and what you need to do is find out where their home is. So that way you can go through and that'll include them naturally, and it makes it easy for you to know where they have a home on your website, or app, or thing. All right, so that is a closed card sort, and yeah. It's really useful for integrating stuff into an existing site. I realized my hands wave, I do this when I'm talking. It makes more sense when my hands are wiggling, and you can see my face, but you can not. So hand wiggling it is. All right. I'll see you next video. 15. 15 UX wireframing tools: Here's some of the wireframing that I do by hand. Don't get too excited, it's not super exciting. Now a lot of this particular wireframing is, this is just my journal, had to be a mole skin, to impress you, I know what I'm doing, and these wireframes are often just internal stuff that I'm doing for my business where I don't have to go and present, so the level of quality doesn't have to be too high, but it's amazing to do the wireframing. If you just work on your own project, don't be tempted to skip wireframe and go straight to Photoshop. It's so important, I know because I used to skip and go straight to Photoshop and it's not until I've been forced into it and really embraced the UX process before I realized wireframing it's a really cool part of it, in terms of the wireframes, this is the level that we're looking at. That is a wireframe. Let's have a look at some other wireframes, some other things, but you can see the level of them, It's just to get ideas done. Sometimes I put a bit more care into them, but not much. There ones I like, it's at this level now, would I deliver this to the client? Say I'm working in a process where I've been hired as a UX consultant and I'm going in with wireframing, I'd put a little bit more effort into it, not a huge amount because what I don't want to do is, I've had discussions where board and Photoshop mockups and it's the time to talk about basic features and layout where people have started picking colors and picking fonts or what and what. We can call it that so keep the language out, use Lorem Ipsum, use squiggly text for lines so people, they're just going to really get sense of it, but without getting into too much detail, okay, and if you're super special, you might get a little bit of color. Well, look, highlighting, but that's about it. That's my wireframe, and that really works for me in terms of ideas and the other thing, is that don't just do one wirefram, you go to your features list, and you start adding them into here and don't just do one wireframe. I find I need to do five, even if your first one, you do this one, that was cool, then the second one, then the third one, then the fourth one, and it's not till you get a few through into them that you actually work out a few bugs because you might go, "Yeah, that's great." Then you force yourself to do a second one, you know it's crap because that was the good one. Then you do the third one then you're like oh jeez I'm going through the process. But I know often, when I do all five and I force myself to, number three is the winner. If you'd stopped at number two, you would never have got that amazing layout for number three, so force yourself to go through and do more than just one layout. Then what happens with these wireframes is that you can go in, present to the client or the person you're working with and, it's really easy to talk to these wireframes. On the fly I find pencil ones. If somebody's got a different idea, I can quickly sketch them out in front of them, we can really talk about the ideas and then can actually get it signed off there. You're like, I like this, but you want something else," and then you draw it out because what happens is you might leave a conversation and he's thinking one thing and she's thinking a different thing, and when you come back with your flats, so you're more refined mockups and everybody's a bit surprised and they're like, "Oh, I thought we talked about not having," and you're like, "No, I thought we did" But if you've got a physical mockup and you're drawing it out, people will be like, "Oh no, I don't mean that." Those things happen at that mockup stage which is really cool, and I prefer hand drawing. Now, that's totally like, if you're working in a Fortune 500 and they're expecting fancy stuff, you're charging a lot as a UX designer, and they're expecting fancier things then sure, go use Balsamiq or mockingbird and deliver something a little high-value, but don't spend a long time of it. Explain to them the value in wireframes that they're quick, they're easy, they're dirty, they're not meant to be an annual report level of design, before you deliver them rather than sneaking in and they thinking they're about to get some amazing ad pitch, and you turn up with a couple of hand-drawn things, make sure that they understand that a part of the process is wireframing and wireframing is very crude and it might be done on the fly while we're talking and adjusted, and make sure their expectations are equal to what you're going to deliver before you deliver. It sucks walking into a meeting where you haven't really clarified what a wireframe is and you turn up with stuff like this and it's not super exciting, and they're expecting fuller mockups than they might be able to use. That's it for this, but let's look at some other parts of wireframing now, in this video we're going to actually start doing some wire framing. Now, wireframing is as it probably sounds, just really basic sketch. Now, we're trying to avoid getting into too much details of wireframing mode. Now, how should you wireframe? What should you do during wireframe? There's a lot to do with your project, and your style of working, when it comes to wireframing for me, I always do it by hand and pencil and I'll show you that in a sec. I find it's quicker, it's easier, and it stops getting into this big project, I prefer working that way. I know amazing UX designers who use tools as well. You might be a tools person for this step and that's totally fine. Now, the most popular one is Balsamiq, and there's a couple of other ones that get used in the industry, I've never used them, I've used Balsamiq a few times, but there's another one called mockingbird.com and it's gomockingbird.com and mockupbuilder.com. There's loads of other ones as well, but they seem to be the most popular around especially Balsamiq. Now, the other thing is, is something called Adobe com now they all do the same thing. Let's have a little look. You can see their prototypes are here, they're actually really basic. Just wireframes, there's no real detail to them. Using a tool like this does a little bit of stuff, deciding fonts and things like that. You get an idea of what a wireframe is going to be made out of these. You've got a gallery here, you'll start to see some of the wireframes that come out of this thing. Now one of the cool things that Adobe, you all know that Adobe fan boy, Adobe Com has this really cool app for iPhone and for iPad. It only really works on the iPad and I'm not going to go through and do an example because, I show people mainly because it's really cool, though I actually use it in my professional work, but let's have a quick little look, it's bit weird, you're watching a video. Let's watch it together, I'll put this in fast forward, but you can see it turns these gestures. Swipe the lines, put a full stop, turns into a big lumps and bumps, up and down. Can you see these really cool functions in here where you get to use hand gestures and it starts adding type. I'm going to skip along a little bit. Put a cross in it, you can add images. This is where I feel like you lose the value of wire framing when you start adding images and people start, instead of looking at the brute bisect structure, people start looking at and go, "Oh we can't use that image, that text is wrong," and you see these lovely features in this thing. It's a really beautiful app, good work Adobe. But plus, grouping, dividing. I love it. But I don't use it, other than to demo to people. Those are the tools you could use. Let's go over now and have a look at some of the wireframes that I do. 16. 16 Should you test your wireframes: Now should you test your wireframes? I don't mean sitting down and discussing them. I mean actual user testing. I'd say no, but I've seen people do it. I've seen people teach, they do it. They like it and they find value in it and if you find value in it, go and do it. Just so you know, if you've never seen it, it's just a paper stuff. You lay some sheets in front of people and you get people to fake click were they'd go and then you swap out the better paper to over the next page. I find for me, I feel if you've spent the time and money finding good qualified users to do your user testing, then you can put a little bit more effort into doing some digital versions, especially if you're a UX designer. You'll have some creative skills in either Photoshop or even with PowerPoint. You can do a more complete digital version that came with some actual interactivity to do. Can you do testing wireframes? Yes. Have I ever done it? No. 17. 17 Moodboards Inspiration: Hey. In this video, we're going to look at mood boards and inspiration. We've done a wire-frames, now we're going to move into that physical designing stuff in a second. We're going to build a UI now. Before we go and do that, we want to get an idea about what this look and view is going to be. Now the, the general mood boards. It's just a way of getting together, a bunch of stuff that other people have done to give it feeling of what you're going to do. Now, if you're working in a larger company, you might have to present your mood boards. You'll have to actually display them and show the path you're going to go down before you go and do it. If you're doing it in a small team that might be just be, get some stuff to give end to be like an over the shoulder type thing where somebody's just spit balling with them about ideas before you go off and do it. Either way, there's a really cool tool that I use as when here accord niice with two Is and dot co. Niice.co, there is him, all of this is just a mood board. It's like Pinterest. You might use Pinterest, that's fine. I don't like Pinterest for the fact that it has a very, I like this this because it's really strip here. I've got all of these images here, like Pinterest, but it's all like more of a montage than a formal thumbnails like Pinterest does. You could use Pinterest just fine. Now, what you do, is go and sign up, there is a free account. I think you'd get for mood boards you can do. What happens is there's a little icon. In the top here there is this little two lines here. That's the little Chrome plug-in. It's free to install. What it means is you can go to other sites. Let's just say I got to Behance. I am looking Behance as a good way to get inspiration. Say you do a search in here and you're looking for UI. In here you are looking for just ideas and concepts for yourself and say you like and some of these designs on this page. What happens is say you like this and want to use this to your mood boards you like how it look and feel for it. What you can do is you can click this little icon here. It's a little thing pops up in the bottom. What we can do is create new mood board. I am going to add a new mood board and this is going to be for my video tutorial project. What happens is grab this little icon, drag him down here, and he's added to this mood board. Find some other stuff. Say you like that, but you also like this, and you drag this into that mood board. What's happening is you can keep adding things to this mood board. Jump back to niice, and we'll see in here, hopefully, give it a refresh. There's my video tutorial project and click on that. Here's my mood board with these two on here. The free version has some features disabled and, but you can print these, you can print them to a PDF. Once you've got a few of them, watch this, we'll keep adding some stuff as we go along. But you can start to do actually that's quite important one. This one here, you can move around this function and you can build this really nice mood board to get a look and feel. Then what you do is you go to your client or to your stakeholder and say this is the look, I'm gobbling down. Or you might create two mood boards and say this is one option, this is another option which how we feeling about it all before you go off and spin a lot of time designing. That's how you build your mood boards. Now sites you can go to to get inspiration. You probably got some way you go. Well, it's got a place. Now I'll show you mine and it's quite specific to deal with UI and UX. Now the first one is this one called the Webby awards. Every year there's a Webby awards like the Oscars, but for designers, UX, UI designers. There's a bunch of different categories in here, I mean best user experience. A Really cool thing about it is that, it details a quite well in terms of X. You can go through and decide whether it's in the mobile sites and apps category. But you might go into the web design one you can see there's a huge amount of different options in here. What it does, it breaks down the apps and probably photos and really great for mood boards. You might decide that I like the look of this Boomerang app. You'd like to look and feel all of it and you're going to borrow stuff or at least get the mood for it there. There's not much on this one, but anyway, I can open up my niice app now and click hold, drag them in and now it's part of that mood board and just walk you way through the site, webby is quite cool. Another really good one is the awwwards dub, dub, dub. It's a weird base one. There is stuff for both mobile and websites. We find really beautiful stuff Mikey, you inspired for your next project. They have quite cool details who worked on them. Let's look at some other ones. We looked at this one already, Behance's Adobe's version. It has some radical stuff on here. If I go into this and type search and I type UX, they have some really cool UX projects on here. I'm Just playing on Google Images. I'm in Google images here. I'm just going to type UI design. This is just great things to get you started. I love that and open up your app. I'm dragging things in. That's how I get my mood boards or at least my style ideas together in some order or just get a feeling for things and it go back to my clients and say, this is what I'm looking to do before you go off and do because I might be like that looks so 1990s and unlike other like white, quite modern and all that. They've got a really different feeling for it. Mood boards can be really helpful and save some time before you go and actually done UI. All right, that's it for mood boards and giving your inspiration next step is start designing some mockups. 18. 18 Tips for building amazing UI UX designs: Hi, in this video, we're going to look at tips for building amazing UI, UX designs. We are at the UI stage now, where we're actually building some physical things. Now, first of all let's discuss what a mock-up is. Now, we're going to have to build something now that's going to be tested. You can build lots of different ways. We can talk about the tools and techniques in a little bit, but essentially this is some of the stuff that I do. I build things in Photoshop. This is a mock-up of one of my training sites. There is a video thing, the subscription pages, and all these are flats. These are just Photoshop layers. They don't do anything. You can't click any of it, they're no hyperlinked. I use this tool because I'm really quick at Photoshop. That was one of the tools that I use for a lot my UI designs. Now, what I'm going to have to do after here is add a bit of interactivity, and that's done generally through something called envision, and we'll look at that later on as well, so I can take these and add some credibility to do it to get it tested. It could be that you're using Photoshop, and you could be using PowerPoint. You can build your UI Mockup, any which way you like, InDesign, illustrator, there is lots of online tools as well. I'll show you using sketch and experience design. That's what a mockup is. We're going to do some quick stuff, so that we can then get it off and get it tested. Now, let's get into some of the tips for building your mockups. Now, the first thing you need to do if you're new to this online app, we're building stuff is go check at the site here it's material.google.com. The lovely people at Google who put together this really, it's the super manual for UI interaction design, whether it's mobile or web, and just go through it, read it all up, suck in all the information, there's a huge amount of stuff in here. It looks quite simple and it is because it's really beautifully designed. But if you start working your way through it, there is so much valuable thoughtful information in here. Even if you are lost, there's lots of things in here to argue with in terms of the way that they're talking about some of the objects. Even if you don't agree with it, what's going to really get out of it, is you're going to be able to talk the talk, understanding the language when you are trying to express ideas, you're not saying, it's cool, you're using the proper language, and be able to articulate yourself a lot better by going through the site. There's a lot of really key features in here about materials and interaction and movement. There's a lovely good stuff in here. Now, one of the best parts in here that I go back to quite a bit is there is resources option. There's some really cool templates and stuff you can use out of here, fonts, sticker sheets. There is some really cool things in here. It'll take you a long time, and it should be something though that every UX designer goes through and reads. Even if you're not a designer, it has some really amazingly valuable stuff in here. Now our first tip in awesome amazing tips for UI designers, is talking about above the fold. The terminology came from newspapers where they were laying down flat and people pick them up based on the stories that they could say. Anything that was on the front page, but if it was folded down and underneath, you wouldn't see it. You'd have all the top stories, fighting it out, what was really important was above the fold. Is the same for websites. That language is being used where, you can see on my site here, I'm as seeing in the stuff that I can see now is above the fold, anything that I have to scroll down for, is below the fold. Potentially, if you've got your most important message or your, say it's an e-commerce site, the buy now button, the main, I guess headlines or call to actions, that below the fold is not a good place for them, they need to be above the fold. You've got to have to balance out what goes above the fold. You can put everything on the site up here. But the most important stuff needs to be. People will argue that, a lot of people don't mind scrolling. There were sites that do work with that, but if you start looking at research and statistics about where people do scroll and clicktale is a really good one. I'm looking at, I just did an image search for that clicktale. We're going to look at clicktale out later on, but you can see the heat maps for scrolling. You can see, everybody sees the red stuff, and the amount of people that scroll, that colors changed, so it gets down to this blue stuff, that means very few people have gone down to there. If you have really good call to action, it happens to be, right down this blue stuff, and most people aren't seeing it, you not being able to deliver your main message. There's some really cool free information about working on above the fold as well. It has data about how many people scroll down to different pixel links, and the percentage of people scrolling. If you do need a bit of backup in terms of explaining your reasons to have things in places, there are some really good stuff for above the fold there. The next thing to consider is that your homepage might not be the page that gets seen the most. The most important page when you start doing a designing in UI has been ages on the homepage and I do it myself, but there's a lot of time where the homepage isn't the most important. You've got to think yourself, you've done Google searches, and you've ended up with in the site on a page, but potentially not the homepage. I know that's true because I can look at say, data like this. I can go to my analytics, I can look at behavior, site content, and landing pages. Not the most popular pages. I don't want to get too old pages, I want to get the landing pages, this is where people land, where they come directly into my site. The cool thing about it is I can look in here and I can see that actually my homepage, which is this little slash here, is not the most important page. It's not the most landed on page. It's this my dreamweaver responsive bootstrap one. Now this is the page that people land on when they want to do a course for dreamweaver responsive. There's another dreamweaver course, there is my HTML5 banner pages. These are all my overview pages for starting a course. You've got to make sure that you communicate your core goals on old pages or at least all the landing pages. People forget that they'll do everything all their big, hero takes and they really big cell and the call to action on the homepage and then leave that off for the rest of the pages. So you might have to integrate that stuff into lots of pages. I have to do an overview pages, because I know that people land on those more than my homepage. The next tip is borrowed credibility. This one's a bit iffy. It means that we can say in the hand, this is my New Zealand website. We do in classroom stuff and you can see it we're in Adobe Certified Training Center, so I've used that throughout the site. I love the brand, it makes us official from Adobe, which we are, and make sure we use the official logos, and there's a bit of a brand, Adobe's brand rubbing off on us. Down here at the bottom here, these are the companies that we work with. These are some of the companies we've done work for. Now, if you're not from New Zealand, you're probably not going to recognize any of these, but these are the big brands in New Zealand, and there's this inference of they trust us and they have used us before, so maybe I should trust them as well. That's what you're looking to do for this borrowed credibility. It doesn't just have to be logos and brands, it can be things like fonts. I've done it before where I've used the same font as Adobe, so I could align myself with them a little bit more, I don't anymore. Another thing I've done is I've used YouTube's fonts, and they whites and stuff. They add a bit of video to my sites before I've changed from that since. But it's not just colors and fonts and logos, there's lots of things you can do. Now in terms of icons and logos like this, let's have a look at some of the other ones. Wipster is a site that I use, just looking at it, I'm just trying to find examples. You can say these are the companies that they're working with, same with malls. These are the people that are using malls. I just Googled London accountant to find an example. You can see down here they've got they have a gold partner of a Xero, they've won some awards. These types of things add credibility to a site, and something you can think about to what in your industry like I've done work for my accountant, and I make sure he's in a certified accountant, and I make sure that's plastered all over the place, because it's a qualification and it makes it all very official, and it adds value to his site. That brand connection. This is going to be our last little tip and trick, and it's the five second test. I like this because it helps me, when I'm designing, I sometimes get stuck in a bit of a loop of cramming things in, and shuffling it around to make it old feds, and I've figured the purpose of this site is that it needs to be a clear message about what it is, because you've got a really short amount of time. You could argue, you've got five seconds before somebody moves on to the next page, but it's around that sort of time when people make a decision based on your site. What you can do for yourself, is while you're designing is just to get somebody to test, so it might be the person sitting next to you, might be somebody at home, and just so you can flash it to it, and what you do is that it's really primitive. This is the official tool from usability hub, the five second test, and you can sign up and make them do it and it's cool thing, but I do quite primitive, I do this, I watch. See this tab here, I'm going to force you to do a five second test. Ready? Go. What I want you to do is try and recall what you remembered about it. You've only got a short amount of time, but I'm not saying that my example here, this is my arch websites. I'm not saying it's a good example, it's just an example, and it just really helps you get clear about was it communicated? Am I communicating the core values or the main USP, or whatever you need to be getting across? Are you doing it clearly or have you designed it into loads of different things and it's really unclear what it does? The five second is I find is really useful even just to do to yourself. You don't have to get other people involved just to look at it quickly and say, "Am I getting this across, is the hierarchy of information quite useful?" Now, that's it for the tips. Before you get started or while you working. Now we're going to look at some of the tools you can use to start building your mockups. 19. 19 What tools can I use to build my UX mockup: Hey there. It's time to actually build your high fidelity, high raise mock-up. There are a few different tools to use. The most popular are XD, which is Adobe's experience designer, XD. There is sketch, another super popular one. There's other ones like Framer and Azure, Envision [inaudible] , Envision Studio. A lot of people also use just plain old Photoshop and Illustrator to do the UI and then use something Envision's web app. They've got a website that you can use to add interactivity. It doesn't really matter which one you use. My favorite is Adobe XD. I've got a full course on that as well. There's UI and web design using Adobe XD course, go check that went out. So those are the tools. They all have pros and cons. Sketch gets used more popular before using for apps, XD is quite new from Adobe. There's no clear winner and it doesn't really matter in terms of user testing. As long as you can build the graphics and whatever you're [inaudible]. You can use things like InDesign. If you are really fast at doing kind of UI designs in there and add interactivity with something like Envision, up to you. But my advice is if you're going to learn any of them, it's probably XD or Sketch. Go check those out. Yeah, that is it for this video. Bye now. 20. 20 User testing tools InVision: Hi, in this video we're going to look at user testing tools, and in particular this thing called InVision. Now InVision is an online tool, where it's like some of the other things like Photoshop and Sketch and User Experience Designer is an app you download and use on your computer. This thing here is an online one or assess product. What I really like about it is that there is a free option and it's pretty amazing. I love that it's so sophisticated for an online website version, assess version website tool. Now, you sign up for its login, and what we've done is in Photoshop, we've created these three flats. Now if you've never done Photoshop for web design before, go off and do a course, you could use mine or somebody else's for building website base or app base using Photoshop because there's some really cool stuff you can do to make your life easier. Now in this case it's three apples and they're just flat. The big thing to notice is that, you can see here's my three groups so they're actually just flat, they don't do anything. I've exported them as PNGs, you can see them here, there's 1, 2, and 3. They don't do anything. What we need to is as in your activity, and you're going to have to do this. We're going to be using Illustrator or InDesign or Photoshop because they produce flat graphics at the end. Now we need to add some interactivity. Why would you do it? It's so that we can then send it off to users to get tested. Instead of building a full website, we just design some flat graphics, add some interactivity to get it tested there. The user doesn't really know it's a website or not a website. They just need to use that. Remember that MVP that is just enough to get them convinced that it's working so you can work on some tests. That's what we're going to do. InVision, we're going to hit this little "Plus" button him. We're going to call this one UX Project. You can see, you can test. We're going to do a website, but you can do Apple Watch and phones apps. We're going to do step 1. We're going to drag some images in, we'll drag these three guys. You, you, you, drag them in. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go into this first one here. What I've done is I've built three sides where this is the video page you click on it to go to the signup page, and then once you've picked up, what do you call it? The style of account you want, you then go to the payment page. I'm going to come in here, maybe the screen. When you're in here now, InVision have amazing tutorials on this. I'm not going to go through a full tutorial here, I'm just going to go through the basics so that you can get running up and quickly. Down the bottom here, there are your four options. Now preview mode is where it starts, you want to go into build mode quite quickly. What we're going to do is add interactivity, because what we want to do is when this button is clicked, "Paid Membership Required", I'd like it to jump to this other. Come over here this is the other PNG that I've uploaded. I'm going to click "Save". Maybe when this play button is clicked, it's going to go to a different page. I don't have many pages in this example here so I'm going to get it to go to the pricing page as well. Save it, same to this one here. Actually no we'll do that in a second. Let's go back into preview. We're in built, go back to preview. What it does is, watch this now. If I hover above this can you see the little hand? It just means when I click, it jumps to this one. We're just adding this real rudimentary interactors so that we can get our used tester. Back to this page paid. This is how you shuffle through your different designs. There's this little option down the bottom here. I'm back to the beginning here. What I might do is, where of us have I gotten us? I might have a sign-up page here. Actually, let's jump to the next page. Let's go to you. When people get here I want them to click this button, and when they click that button, I'd like them to go to the last Mockup which is our payment screen. Same with this one here when this one is clicked, you can see I'm pretty rough with this. It's okay. Payment. Great. This got to preview now. Actually I'm going to go and preview this first page. They get here, they click on the "Paid Subscriptions Required". They get to here then I pick annual or monthly, and click on "Join". Then they get to My payment page. It's just a way of adding a directive did flats, and where it gets a little bit more sophisticated is you can fake it quite well, watch this. I can go up here and say actually, this is not my nerve that I faked up the top yet. What I want to do is, I want to do the same thing. I wanted to go to my pricing page, but I want to say I want to include it in a template. I can create a template here, I'm going to create a new one, and this one's going to be called my UX project template. Cancel my project there you go. I click "Save", and it goes green. Then what you can do is, you've got this template and you got to go through all the pages and apply now that's the way, but as you go to this page, you say, "I would like the same template applied to it." You see the green button there. Then go to this one, I want to apply the template to this as well. It just means that, when I start adding things, say it's this courses page, I'd like this to go back to my first page of the video. I want to include it in my template, the UX project, click "Okay", and it means it's going to be on all of these flats now. You can see him there and he's on this last one as well. It means let's go to preview now, let's check it out. I can go back to courses, then go to this other page. I can click on this to go to my payment page. Adding this lovely a bit of interactivity. Now let's go into tiny bit more detail, only because I think it's so awesome. You can have a fixed header, you can decide way this fixed header is. Can you see I can design this line on the slide here? What it means is, if I go back to preview now, can you see? Watch this. Can you see slides up underneath, whereas before it was sliding all the way up? If you didn't see it before, if I tuned fixed header off and go back to preview you can you see the courses disappear. It's really common now to have a fixed heading, so you can do this in just this quick little Mockup here, fixed heading. You have a fixed footer as well. You've added some basic interactivity now what you're going to do is to often share it. Now we're going to go through more official user testing ways in a second, but let's just look at the basics here. Click on "Share". Maybe the last thing about you're just sending somebody a URL. Watch this I can just copy that, and I could just send it to people. Just get in an email, and there you open it up and this is what they get. They get to see this user experience built into a website, and it's nice and clean but a little junk. What happens is they can start working with it. They can go to the signup page and click on this and start working through it. If you're working internally with Teams, you don't have to really present it. As a side you're just showing people where you're at. They can use this quite easily if you're using that sharing function. Let me go back to this. You can share it actually via email, I can send an SMS, maybe if it's a mobile version you want to SMS it out, the link, or you can download it and bid it on your own side if you really want to take control of the hosting of it. Sharing is cool. There's an options down here, like the history, this will go through if you've made updates to it. Because what you can do is you can download a plugin for Photoshop so when you update the Photoshop file, it actually connects in here and updates the graphics in this and this can be quite cool as well. What will happen is, you'll end up with this version control. Then the last thing is live sharing. So if you are, say you going to do a Skype call between you and a couple of the stakeholders, instead of sending them off a link and you're all trying to do it together, just go to "Live Share" sec share screen, share my screen, watch this, click "Okay", and it means that I can now call everybody in Skype, share my screen. Actually no, coolly, you can call everybody within this app here as you can see in the link and they arrive here, and there's some cool tools. Watch this. I can go through and point to stuff and they will see your mouse with the Unix to it. The other people within the team, you'll be able to see without waiving the e-mails, and can all be talking about it. You can start drawing on it as well. You can say actually we need to call this something else. So we're just going to call it paid subscription, but not this. This is what I'm talking about, Dave. Why is this red? It should be green. You can add type boxes and you can add comments, and at the end of it, you can save this thing, which is quite handy as well. Now there are lots of other features in InVision, but those are the real cool ones, just adding functionality to them. If you're doing an app rather than a website, there is a really cool app you can download from InVision that help you do the same thing. We can add interactivity, but it's a native iOS app. There's nothing for Android at the moment. Check them out of change since I wrote them before recording this video, but there's an app that you can actually turn into interactivity and to that as well. So that's InVision, and that's one of the, especially one of my key tools when I'm doing a user tasting before I go off and make the thing. 21. 21 Finding users for your UX testing: Now we need to find users for our testing. We've done the flats, we've added some interactivity, now we need to find some people to actually do the testing for us. Now you need to find the right users and this is quite important. You have a site that is for people sharing stuff, Instagram, style, what's at type thing and you're getting your grandma to do the user testing. If that's not the target market, there's going to be the big disconnect between what experience is and who the target market's going to be. Just make sure that those people are aligned. The ways to go find them is if you're going to do in-person things, you're going to have to think locally. It might be Craigslist or some an advertising that's working in your country to go and say, "These are the people were looking for. Are you interested? This is how much it's going to be." Can you convince people to come in, or it might be, I find it's quite useful to look at things like Meetup. If you've never seen meetup.com, often there's loads of people that identify themselves as certain kinds of uses, and often if you talk to the person who owns or runs that Meetup, you can say, "Hey, I'm looking for people to come and help." There's a payment or some gift that you can give them, or maybe it's already passionate group and they'd be willing to help out for free. You just want to find some people that you can meet up with and do some over the shoulder testing. We're going to talk about what to do in the testing later on, but now we're looking at how to find them. I might be advertising. In terms of what I tend to do the most of is I wish I could do a lot more over the shoulder in-person testing, but what I do is a lot of online testing, and probably the most useful is this thing called UserTesting.com. There's a few other alternatives for it, but this one here I really like and the service is brilliant. You pay about $50 per user and you can say what kind of user you want, age group, you can get it down to a reasonable equivalent of who might be using your site. What happens is, you set out a bunch of questions, and what they do is they automate the service. I'll show you the things you get back. You signed up, here is the thing you're going to get back. This is what you're going to get for you a $40 or $50. I've asked the questions and they're going to respond to them. Watch this. Let's listen to a little bit, we won't go to far through because it's a long video. It's about 12 minutes. I want to show you a scenario. You're going to learn what this is. Sounds interesting. I'll be showing a web page for five seconds and then provide answer to your questions. Do not go to Test 2 until you answer these questions. Courses for visual people. Answer the questions out loud. What do you remember, something about visual people? What can you do on the site? It looks like you can learn how to do graphic things that I can share. I'm not going to get through it all, but you can decide on the questions that get asked. The different things is this quite a few little tides at tastes and things you can do for users. It's brilliant for getting feedback. I find it quite odd is the designers to get feedback. It's a little awkward at the beginning, but you get past that where you can go off and just set tasks. You can do things like I would like you to go through and book a Photoshop calls, and go all the way through until the end. But don't put your credit card in, or at least don't put this a bit button in. I'll go and do it, I'll go through it. Then you can watch and see, did they get lost, did they find out where they're going? Are your assumptions of putting that there working out? Calling at that, did that make sense to people and was it really clear what I meant? You can ask as many or as little questions as you need. The cool thing about it is you can go make little iterations and go back. It can costs you like, I feel like the $50 per user is fine for any level. If you're going to spend any money on a UX designer or be charging as UX designer, you need to make sure that this is part of your budget, because this type of stuff is the feedback loop on your project. You can go through and change things and design things and trying to them really streamlined. Let's use a testing. You can just go off and buy them. Another good way to go off and do it and I use this quite a bit is something called Fiverr. Fiverr.com is what you can get time for $5 up. What you can do in go in here and there's people that do user testing. What I find is quite user testing that will go off and give you feedback and videos and stuff and it can be a lot cheaper. I like to save us from usertesting.com but say you're on a super budget is go check out these ones here. Now, these are, I guess people that are self qualified as usability people. You might find somebody go on, you're looking for. What you're looking for is can you see up here, the green pioneer is, it's got five stars, 80 reviews. I love those review service here. You can know that people like using them, they're good. If I've got low numbers, you might not use them. The other thing you can do in here is that instead of just finding specialized user test is just fine people. If I've got, so I'm looking for a graphic designer. Say my user as a graphic designer, I can just type in graphic design and find an actual graphic designer and hit them up, go into here. Instead of them to getting to me doing graphic design for me, I can send them a message. Contact them to say "Hey, I've got this weird thing where I'd like you, instead of doing graphic design, I'd like you to go through and review this." You send them the link to you envision test, or it might be a link to your sketch and project, or your experience designer project and get into video themselves is just awesome. Will you do it? Will you do screen capture with audio and how much for it? Seeing it a done for $5. Yeah, they just do it and seeing the tune, and do it for enough people, do it for four or five of them. It's not going to cost you a fortune. Some of them would be good and helpful and some would be terrible. But it's a nice, easy way to do it. There's another site here called Upwork. Upwork I use a lot but maybe not for user testing. There's some good user testing in here. I find Fiverr is a little bit and UserTesting.com is the best, but Upwork is another site to go look at for finding people that can go do that same thing to do the testing is hiring a freelancer. This is the odesk if you ever use of that. Another one is Freelancer.com. You go use him as well. The next useful one is finding existing users. What I've got is I've got people that have done my courses before. I've got hundreds of people that have done my courses before, thousands. I can go through to them, I'll go, they conduct the dolls and I can see that bulk e-mail and say, "Hey, I'm looking for a few people to help me out with user testing. You'll get a free login and password or free course or a discount on course or some sort of incentive." Cool thing about that is that they are definitely in the right zone. Say it's, you're doing this UX course, I might send you an e-mail saying, "This other course to do with UI design, would you help me test it in terms of the user testing and in terms of the web pages." Often existing uses can be really good for user testing. The last one and the really trixie one and the one that has really good value and it's harder to sit up is using AdWords. If you've ever used AdWords before, what you can do is, if I do a Google search for, let's do Adobe training. Up here, a paid ads. That's one of my paid ads, that's Adobe's paid ads. You can see it says add here. What you can do is you can start putting ads up yourself. There's a lot more to jump through hoops. In case if you've never done it before, it's not something you whip up in an afternoon. But if you're already using AdWords then what you can do on an existing site, you can set up an ad, special ad group to do some testing. You put up a mock website, so it might be one of the ones that we've done or a new site. You've seen ads out. When people are searching for Adobe training, I guess they are not doing user tests that are recorded and feedback, but they're actual people that are looking for courses. They might get pissed off because you've got to use Adobe training, and I actually want to pay for Adobe training and I've clicked on it, and they'll find that it's a broken website or it doesn't get very far. But what you can do is you can add tracking to the different buttons and click, or say you made a quite complete user testing like muse. I do that all the time where I build a full website, quick full website, and actually see where people go and see if people will actually click. You might not have the payment gateway working it, but people go and click the button? You might have a bit saying, sorry, the services aren't available at the moment. But you just by them clicking that pay now button or that click here for prices, you can see people are actually interested in that. There were potentially prepared to click on that button and go through and payments. It's a little bit harder using AdWords. But if you are already using AdWords and know about it and on an existing site it can be a really useful way of finding users. 22. 22 Methods you can use to do a UX test: Hi there. Welcome to this video. We've arrived at the most important part of the whole thing, it's actually doing the testing. This is where the user experience thing happens. We've done our research, we have built our mock-ups and we've found our test subjects. Now, we're going to go do our testing. We're going to talk about the different methods you can use. We're going to just skip lightly over the using the digital online one because there's two ways of doing it. There's doing it online or doing in-person stuff. Now, the online stuff is where we talked about Usertesting.com or there's some other alternatives like InVisionApp has stuff built into it as well, and there's another one called Usabilla.com, go check that out. But that is literally sending them a mock-up and them sending you videos back, so we've covered that. Let's talk about the other methods and let's start with the most important and that is observational testing, also known as interview testing. It just means in-person stuff where we actually sit down together and work with our users to see what they're doing. Here is our tester and our testee, smiling, looking good, using a laptop. But let's go through the different techniques for running a successful interview. Now, doing this observational interview where you set tasks and you watch the person do it, this is by far the most value you'll get out of your user testing. It's the best I've ever got. The online stuff is cool and they send you stuff and you can watch the videos, but really, a lot of extra stuff comes out of this interview stuff. It takes more time, it costs more and there's a lot more work involved, but you do get a lot more benefits out of it. Now, the first thing you need to do is make sure that it's a test of tasks and not of opinions. What you're going to do is you're going to write down some tasks on a piece of paper and hand it to your test subject. You don't want to start talking to them and give it to them that way because often you turn it into a bit of a sales pitch. I know, I try not to, but it's really hard not to. What you do is you draft out your tasks beforehand, so it's very clear and you've got really nice control across different people that you're testing. You're less likely to turn it into a sales pitch and try to convince them of what they should be doing. Tasks, not opinions. When you're doing things, a task example would be book an intro course for photography. That's a task. In terms of opinion, you don't want to be asking questions like, "Would you pay for this?" Because what's going to happen is they're going to tell you what you want to hear. What you want to be doing is actually watching them use the site. Give them tasks to do, but don't ask them what they might do or might not like because people won't to be honest. What you want to see is actually set a task, hand them the bit of paper, and say, "Go do this, " and then watch them. It's amazing the nonverbal stuff you get from them by watching them. You set them a task, you say, "I want you to book a photography course." They go off and try and click and scroll and find. It's those kind of things that they might not tell you or be able to communicate when they're voicing over, like say some of the digital ones that is the real benefits for these interview questions. When you are writing down your tasks, make sure you don't use terms that are on the side. An old site that I used to build, well, my New Zealand site, one of the first ones is I named the topics- What did I call them? Instead of calling it Intro, I called them Jumpstart, the advanced stuff I called Master class, just to be fancy with it really. What I do with my tasks, as I'd say to them, "Go and book Photoshop Jumpstart," and then go and do it really easily. Because I gave them the language and accidentally I didn't really think about it, but what happens is they go off and they find something called Jumpstart and they book it. If somebody said to me, "Why are people booking Intro courses? They're like, "Wow, Usertesting said it was fine." It's because I led them into what I told them what to go book. Instead of saying, "Go pick the Jumpstart", I'd say, "Go and pick a photoshop course that's at your current level." I'm not giving them hints of what I want them to do. I just want to give them a general sense or a general task, but without using too much of the language. Because if you use the actual language, they'll find that pretty easily and makes the test pretty useless. Now, list out all your tasks on a separate bit of paper when you hand it to them. That way that if you've got a user that's really slow; and it happens, some of them are going to be really fast, some of them really slow. You just don't have time to get through all 20 questions. You don't want to feel like that. If they can see 20 questions and you know you've booked them in for an hour and they're only at question two, they're going to start stressing about, "Oh, I'm slow." What you want to do is just have them separate, keep them away from them, and just give them a new task and when they're finished, move on to the next one. Some people are going to get through them all, some people are only going to get through half of them. But keeping them separate means that you're not going to stress anybody out. The other thing is that sometimes you find that you've put this person in but they're totally the wrong person or they're super hangover or something is not quite right about them. What you can do is you can call it after a couple of questions, so you don't have to endure an hour's worth of testing that you know is not going to work for what you need it to do. Now, what you're looking to get out of this is answer to the questions, but really you're looking for other non-verbal stuff. We talked about it earlier, but looking at their attitudes and their impressions, it really helps you, especially for your persona, refine that persona. You might know it, but this might be the first time you've ever met somebody in this zone. If you've got a website for elderly potters and you've never met an elderly potter, this might be your chance to [inaudible]. You've come up with a persona, but it's not until you actually meet them to realize, "Okay. I didn't realized this." It's that nonverbal stuff that you'll pick up and impressions about them that'll really help you both with your testing and redefine your persona. Now, when you hand them the questions, explain to them, you're going to hand the questions and then you're not going to help them out. You just want them to carry on until they either get to an end or they say, "Look, I'm stuck." You don't want to be cuing them and get them to go along. So just watch them do it. What you're looking for is just watching them, just casually next to them. Explain that you're going to take some notes and scribble your notes down. You get to use your Post-It Notes again, which is awesome. Keep everything on Post-It Notes because what you can start to do is group them afterwards. Once you've gone through a few users, you can actually start grouping those together to get a consensus for your ideas or what happened or common problems or common successes. Now, where to do it? Just do it in your office. It's the easiest way. Get them to come along to your office on a certain day, at a certain time, and make sure you do a practice run first. With your first one, what you'll find is you'll get the person in and you don't want to waste it getting used to how to run a user test. Just make sure you practice with a colleague or your partner, just so you understand the types of problems you might have and explain to them. It can be quite awkward because you're going to hand them notes and not talk to them that much. But explain to them in the beginning, say "Look, you know, I'm a user experience designer and how it's going to work is that to make this successful for me, I need to stay quite quiet through this exam. I'm going to give you the paper and I'm going to take notes." It helps me at least. I'm naturally a teacher and quite bubbly, but during user testing, you've got to be an observer rather than coach them along and help them out. Just make sure that you tell them at the beginning and often that can make it a lot easier. Now remember, this is not a sales pitch. That's probably my biggest thing is I really want them to like it. But if they leave hating the product, it's a bit of a blow to the ego, but actually that's a really successful user test, and actually the most useful [inaudible] of a user test. Because if they don't like it, and they can't make it work, and they don't get way too on it, you can go off and really quickly iterate. You could do it that afternoon. Just go and make a new markup and do some more user testing. That will take you all of half a day to reset up, whereas if you go off and build this thing without any user testing, you could spend months building a product or an app or a website and for nobody to like it because you've just got some basic things wrong, you called it Jumpstart, like I did, instead of Intro, or Masterclass instead of Advanced. Those sort of things here and now are really useful. That's it for interviews. Now, just so you know, out of the interview observational testing, I do that probably once in every ten or 15 user tests, maybe even 20. Mainly because big new projects require them and you can do them and they're awesome, but then you end up doing iterations and smaller changes and I find the types of clients that I deal with maybe is that it's just easier to go out to a really quick online test, though not as useful. But at the beginning of a nice project, great, let's do it, let's invest the time and the money. But once we get into the smaller changes, I often use either Usertesting.com or I find existing clients to get them to test. I've got some super-users and some people that are quite involved with the website or the business that are quite good as personas, so I use them quite heavily. Don't worry if you're not doing too many interviews and you're doing a lot more online things, it's okay. Lets go and look at some of the other user testing [inaudible] We've done interviews and we've done digital stuff. Let's look at some of the other ones that you might get involved with. 23. 23 More detailed UX testing Ethnographic Eye tracking Expert review Diary Studies: All right, so let's talk about some of the other testing methods. The first one is ethnographic testing, think of it as in context testing. Just means that there's no point getting somebody introducing user testing of your app in your office if it's a mapping app or some sort of rock climbing app or something, so you probably need to do some ethnographic testing in contexts, so you have to meet them where they are going to be using it. It might be at their home, it might be in your office. But you might have to look at your particular case and you might have to be using it in a special place. Another one you can do is eye tracking, and it's out of the scope of a lot of people when UX, where you can buy stuff online with your actual glasses that actually have cameras pointing and tracking where people are looking on the screen. I've never been involved with a test where we've been able to afford the glasses, you can rent them, but nobody is renting them in New Zealand or Island where I'm working. In the US you might be able to find places that links them to you or rent them to you so you can use them just for one off type things. The one thing that are similar is something with mouse tracking. Now mouse tracking is correlated with looking but it's not the same, but it's really cheap often free Clicktale we looked at earlier, they did the scrolling heat map. Have a little look at this screenshot, and what you'll see is you see a little colored maps. It tells you where people are moving their mouse, and often it's correlated to where they're looking. It's really interesting to see where they're going, which buttons that clicking, you might have different navigation going into different parts, and you want them to go to here but that clicking on those other button, and it's really interesting to see this heat maps. There's just a bit of code that goes on the page you might need to developer to help you, and if you know a little bit of design of web stuff it's quite easy to do, and things like Clicktale have a free trial to get going and a reasonable price compared to the eye testing. Another one is called a heuristic test. Now, think of it just that it's an expert test. Nobody uses the word heuristic is just what's listed as one of the testing methods, but it's really just asking other UX experts what they think. We looked at it earlier with Fiverr. How qualified are they as UX experts? You just trying to find people in your field. You can find loads of people in your area doing your stuff. There are so many conferences now on Meetup, and if you want to get involved, do those types of things you'll meet other people and then you can send it off to them. Do the same favor for them, and do some sharing. It's not the same as user testing. But often once you've got experience you know what works, what doesn't, and you can add some value to other people's projects that are quite new. As part of this training here, I'd love to see some of your projects. If you've got some envision stuff send me a link. Check out the website there is contact details there. I'd love to see what you're up to and I'll totally give you my opinion about your testing and what you can do and what I can help you with. I'd love to do that for you. The other one that's quite specialized is a diary, so it means that you might give the person, say it's user testing for a new phone or it's an app, but it's related to eating. What you could do is ask them to fill up the diary whenever they use that thing. It might be a product but generally your user experience stuff is going to design thing. It might be an app or a website, but you want to find out what the thinking or what they've done or what they have eaten at a certain time, so you can ask for a diary test rather than watching on the use a website it might become more practical for you, so that's a diary test. 24. 24 How many people do I need for my UX test: All right, in this video, we're going to talk about how many people do you need to get a good test. Now, the magic number is five, turns out. Now, do your own research. What you're looking for is not looking for statistically significant numbers, you don't need 100 of them to prove something. What you're looking for is just roadblocks to your desired task. It's better to sit down with five people, or get a couple of online tests done, and figure out because quite often, there's lots of matrix online. You can check out other websites how they get this number, but 90 percent of all problems are found within those first five people, or the first couple at least. You don't need to keep going out just to really prove that there are really a block because you, as a UX designer, you are just looking for the major blocks and try to tidy them up, do another city use. If you've got budget for loads of testing, do lots a little small groups and go back and reiterate rather than try and get a huge big test. Five is the magic number, do your own research though just to make sure for what you specifically doing, but you don't need many at all. 25. 25 What type of UX reporting will your be expected to do: Hey. In this video, what we're going to talk about is reporting your UX projects. You're going to have to report to somebody whether it's to a larger company, we're going to expect maybe a slightly higher level or maybe it is working with one other person, even if it's for yourself, you need to correlate your data in some way. Now best is to take notes while you're doing it rather than try to observe, say you doing it in-person or on observational tests. You still write notes as you're going along. Write it on post-its, we get to write more and post-it but it means it out afterwards it becomes really easy to just to group them together. Say if you are going to do a really ad hoc, rough presentation to the gang right off after the user testings. You can start putting some of the post-its together that are quite similar. It makes it really easy to kind of group them and deliver those without having to go off and rewrite it and retype it and add a bit of extra work that might not be necessary. Now on the post-it notes, you'll be writing things like maybe questions they had or just quotes, things they might have said that might be useful to the team. You'd be checking things like how many clicks it took to get to that task, where they ended up instead of. Maybe they went somewhere else instead of and just the language that they use when they were talking or verbalizing some of the problems or things they liked. Now it's really important with the reporting not to turn it into something that's maybe bigger than it needs to be. A really good idea is just to schedule in a meeting right after your user profiles are in. If you're doing in-house stuff, just make sure you know when your last person finishes and everybody's ready to meet an hour after that or an hour and a half so you've got time to have something to eat and just really sketch up the ideas because it always gets fuzzy afterwards and you start thinking about it and you start adding your own kind of layers to it and it's better just to get it out while it's raw and fresh and it's really easy to recall certain people, certain things they said. It starts getting a bit blurry and a bit messy if you leave it too long so do it straight away is my advice. That includes the online testing as well. Know that if you use usertesting.com, they're going to give you a response time and time it takes. You can tell when people are being picked up in terms of starting it and when they're expected to finish. You can really tie that down to a really specific timing as well to meet with your team, even if it's online, just to get the results out. Now for maybe a more formal presentation, you'll be expected to produce a summary. Now, a summary should be really short and brief and to the point. Do not have a couple of pages and my advice is one A4 page but keep it still quite light even I don't want a full page of text. What I want to see is more like a magazine layout. If you're a graphic designer and this might come naturally and you're going to use things like pull quotes so some of the quotes to kind of liven it up, add some of the questions that they might have asked in larger bolder type, photographs or screenshots with highlighted areas of the problems they might have been having and just keep it to a brief summary, it will depend on your project but the best ones are ones that people are actually going to read. So 200 words is fine, if you start getting to the 1,000 words and 2,000 words. It gets to a point where people are going to grab it, they're going to say great and then they are never going to read it. You want it to be more like a magazine rather than a textbook. You want people to pick up, grab bits out of it and be able to refer to it quite regularly. Now what you should also do is print it off. Print it off as a poster as well, tape it together and stick it up places and you can always refine this. Make sure what the expectations are set by everybody that the summary is not going to be this lay the bound thing. It's going to be a quick, rough understanding of the project and then you're going to go round the edge [inaudible] remember, it's all about the MVP. The minimum viable product and that includes the testing it's about just getting enough done to get stepped forward and then go back and test and then step forward again, you might end up with five or six summaries that get closer to the end and they become super-helpful. All right, let's go check out the next video. 26. 27 How should it actual be built: So in this video, we're going to talk about to build. We've been faking up until now, we've building flats and then we've been adding interaction just to kind of get the user testing going. You might have a slightly more complete website, but it's still, often at this stage, you've done it quick and dirty and now you got to go and build it. If you're working at a bigger a company, you wont be building it, you're be part of a development team and that'll be taking it over from here and actually doing some of the building. That will be a bit above you. If you're working on a smaller team or working with a project, say you're doing the UX design for a smaller company and you've got to really advise them on what to do next, this is where I could potentially help. I've got a lot of experience in this area. I've written a lot of courses about it. There's lots of my other courses on building websites now. Reach out if you're not too sure were to go. Tell me what your options are and what your tasks are. I can tell you what your options might be. You might be doing apps, do I do it an Android or iOS,? Maybe there's some sort of bridging. One way you can do it in both to get it out like Phone Gap, maybe it's a website, is it static? Do I do it in Dreamweaver? Do I do it in Muse? Maybe it needs to see me, so it need to login and things. Do I use a hosted one like WordPress, or Joomla, or Drupal, or do I use a Sass solution, Sass coup? Because he has to login to the website and make a website presto, like Shopify or Eventbrite, they're good Sass solution. So do drop me a line if you are at this build stage and you need a little bit more advice, alright. I'll see you in the next video. 27. 28 Post project testing A B testing search bars & live chat: All right, so you've built your project and what happens now? Now you're crossing over into maybe a little bit of that of your UX Project and into more just caring for the business. It'll depend on the size of your team. Now if you're working with a large organization, there's going to be people are going to pick up this optimizing and testing after the fact and no train the business product. If you're working in a smaller team or working on your own project, this is totally part of your UX project because it's testing but it's with live sites with actual customers. Let's look at some of the things you can do. Now probably one of the nicest and easiest tests you can do once you've got something live, say it's an upload or website is you can start doing multi-variable testing, so we call AB testing, well ABC testing. It's just a way of having two visions, you grab some of your visitors and you stick off them on one side and half from doing other thing and then you compare the results. Now the trick with it is that you need to keep it small. You don't want to go change a lot of things and then compare it with that old version because you're not going to really know what's going to be. It takes quite a long time. So what people tend to start with this call to actions and maybe pricing, those are the big, easy things to test and then later on you start looking into small parts. It might be some of the headlines and then working through to some of the strap lines and things like that. In terms of testing, you're going to need a tool to do it. There are three main ones. There's this one here, Optimizely, and this one here, VWO and Google does one called Content Experiments. Now I've Content Experiments the most because it's built into Analytics and it's super easy to get going. If you've never used it before and Google Analytics then you might have to go around these other two. These other options here, I like more, I've used both of them. VWO here has lots of other resources, so does Optimizely. They're both really good. Have a little look at for me already comes down to the pricing plans when I was looking at it. But are being used by other than that, it's really good that both do AB testing, but they do AB testing plus other stuff and have a look at the other stuff, that might be some of the things that convinced you one of the other. Content Experiments is free and Google get away with loads of free stuff, but you need to have an Analytics account running if you don't have that, it's also free to get going. But that can be a little bit of a headache where these are really quick and easy to get set up. What they are is this one here has a really good example. Let's have a look at the little video, say Look example that moved it to the right. There are two versions, the original versus the other one, and then you have hundreds of thousand dollars of sales come in. In a nutshell, that's what you're doing. You're looking at conversion rates and they're never going to be this dragging it one side is never going to give you another $150,000 in sales. It might do. But normally it's small things and often it's really hard and unless you have good traffic. Say one of my sites like the site I working on this morning, has 5,000 people coming in per month, which is cool, but it's huge to get statistically significant changes. I do an AB test and it takes ages to run because, it gets quite anecdotal in terms of, "I had a sale yesterday, I has sale this afternoon, I have a sale tomorrow." Was it better than last month? It's hard to know because of so many changes, so you need good numbers to make this work. If you've got a brand new site, it's not time to be AB testing. Well, it could be, but in terms of statistics, it's quite tough. You might have to make some big broad changes and that's fine. Maybe its pricing, that's a nice, easy one to taste with small numbers. But when you start changing the color of a button, from blue to green, it's going to be a little bit hard to measure that statistically if you don't have a good amount of customers. All of them are easy to implement. I have a look at which one of those is going to work. So one of the other things that are quite useful in terms of you've got a product and you're trying to figure out some testing, is installing a search bar. This search by here, and you can install any search bar if you're using a CMS like Joomla or Drupal WordPress and you can use that. They've got such functions. I'm saying with Google, what you want to do is you just don't want to install any old search bomb. What you want to do is you want to have a search bar that gives you details because you might have a site, and say you're selling widgets and great, you've got your red, green, and blue widgets on their great and they're selling. Then you go and add a search bar, and what you might find out, but people keep coming to you site, unknowingly, you haven't been selling yellow widgets because you like, "Who buys yellow widgets?" But people had been using the search bar, searching for where your yellow widgets are because they're found the red, green, and blue, but they can't find the yellow ones. It's great because you can get data from that search engine to go. I didn't consider the yellow ones. That's some really good tasting that people offer up what they want. I do it for my ones where people come to my site, they'll be searching for something that's maybe outside of the scope of what I've gotten what I think is popular and people are searching for it so I can go off and build that cool. So build that training because people are looking for it. I'm like now that's what the my skill say. Like I make something like that. Search buyers are really useful. Just make sure they give you some data about who were tracking. There are lot built into CMS, if you don't have a site that has a CMS as Google the one called CSE K customs site search. They allow you to use the power of Google on your own site. It's a little bit Googly and you do have to pay for it, but it's the base in terms of tracking. You can hook it up to advertising and do all cool stuff with it. Anyway, that's the one I use. One of the last things you can do, this launch, you can do in post in terms of UX. But in terms of the nice low-hanging fruit, another nice one is Live Chat. Live Chat, if you're responsible getting toward project to its launch, be part of that Live Chat. So Live Chat is, let's look at one of my sites, it's the little badge on the bottom here. It says, "Hey, you want to chat with Dan?" By clicking there and entering in something here, I get a message either on my phone or through my browser saying that somebody wants to chat. What I've found it really useful for is that what people might not say, they come to the site because when you're tracking data and analytics and those things, it's lovely, but you don't really know what they're thinking. This here opens a window to peoples to asking questions. It's funny when I had my first language, this thing here, this cancel anytime. Since I've added that, man, my launcher has dropped. I was sawing people were asking me, "There's a free trial, can I cancel?" In my head I like that's free trial. I'll see you can cancel. It's not just a free trial and then I force you to pay at the end of the 10 days. But so many people wanted to just end with check. Live Chat really told me quite quickly and that I needed to change the language on the site. You will see canceling time everywhere now. It is a bit anecdotal because I don't have that tens of thousands of visitors but it has been important for me and to know these things because people might have just left because there is no channel, the people who didn't want to get the hustle of going to the "Contact Us" form. They were doing that as well, but Live Chat is really just opened up a door to my people. The cool thing about it is you continuing to use the tests. People might ask "Can I cancel anytime?" It's part of Live Chat. I can see what pages they've been looking at, it's a bit creepy. What I tend to do is they'll ask about a question and I'll ask them, "Hey, what are you doing with HTML5 Banner Ads or After Fix or UX? They'll stop to telling me a bit about them, what they've been doing. I get this scenes from people, one at a time and what they're doing, what they looking, what their hassles are, what their problems are, what their liking about the sites. I find Live Chat, even though it's not a UX tool specifically, I'm finding it, using it for user experience is an amazing little extra. All right, that's it for this video, I'll see you in the next one. 28. 29 How stay current in UX: Hello, we're at the end. I hope you enjoyed the course, but what are you going to do now is, how do you stay current? What do you got to do and what's the next steps? It might be that you need to go off and learn some skills, it might be you need to go and do, my Photoshop for web UI course, or my Experience Design or Muse is a bunch of ones that I've got, but regardless of who you do it or where you do it, go off and maybe get your skill level up. That might be something you can do. But now, you need to stay current. How do you do that? Easiest way is this, podcasts up there. I listen to them while running. There's not one that I really like enough to put my weight behind but download a few of them. Some of them are good, some are bad, they are free, you can even listen when you are traveling. I think the thing to sign up for is obviously, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, follow good people on Twitter. If you want to follow me, I'm @danlovesadobe on Twitter. Those are good social media things just to get snippets of when you going. What you can do though, one of the nice things to do is meetup.com. Meetup.com, there's lots of things on there and look for specifically UX groups, and they are popping up all over the place because it's quite popular now. The one here in Dublin, it's really strong. A 100 people that turn up once a month. They have presenters and sometimes people that are on book tours, and it's, it's really well done and it's genuinely really good presenters. It means you get to mingle with other people at your level. There will be loads going but I really know what UX is, that's why I'm here. You can help them, they can help you find more experienced people. Meetups can be a really good way to get involved, and one other thing is newsletters. Okay. I like UX for the masses.com. That's the one I read t the most. They've got some really good stuff that comes out. Yeah,where is my was my post it notes? You get to [inaudible] where you post it notes, stick them all around your desk show people you mean business when it comes to UX. That's going to be the end of our course. Hidy day, good people. I'll see you in my next videos.