This course introduces students to the user experience process of Human-Centered Design for designing and solving business problems. By the end of the course, students will have an understanding of the process that drives UX thinking and fosters skills for collaboration and problem-solving.
Weekly Schedule:
Week 1
Framing a problem – As a first important step to applying human-centered design, we’ll do an exercise on framing and providing context to a problem, and defining goals in a project.
Week 2
Human Centered design stages – Discuss user research, synthesis, ideation and prototyping. Discuss what human-centered design can and can’t do for a business and how to set expectations when working with a client.
Week 3
User Research – Learn what qualitative and quantitative research is and the difference. Discuss user research techniques.
Week 4
User Research (Continued) – Deeper dive into qualitative and quantitative research. Discuss how to organize a research plan.
Week 5
Synthesizing user research – How to distill research data. Learn how to derive insights from research. Discuss Journey Maps and Personas as other tools for synthesis.
Week 6
Ideation – How to take insights to ideas. Sorting and selecting. Visualizing ideas with sketching and storyboarding.
Week 7
Prototyping – Introduction to Prototyping. Fidelities, tools and uses of prototypes. How to present prototype ideas to a team or client.
Week 8
Testing – Usability Tests are a tool for testing prototype ideas and functionality. Recruiting participants for tests.
Week 9
Presenting Human-Centered Design work – Storytelling and presentation decks in presenting design work.
Week 10
Usability Test findings and Final Presentation Workshop – Final workshop for final Presentation
Week 11
Review and Critique / What’s Next / The Future of UX
Week 12
Review and Critique / What’s Next / The Future of UX
