Circuits | User Experience Design

USER EXPERIENCE
DESIGN CIRCUIT
Student Handbook
Circuits | User Experience Design

STUDENT HANDBOOK
USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Over the next 6 weeks, you’ll complete the entire cycle of user experience design, beginning with the
discovery and research phase and ending with packaging your design for your portfolio.
You’ll start off conducting user research and defining product strategy. You will then learn how to
synthesize that research and leverage your findings to identify your target users and the the central
problems they face that you will design for. From there, you’ll brainstorm and develop a solution for
your target user, taking your design through the sketching, wireframing, and prototyping stages.
You will leverage current design conventions and best practices for iOS, Android and Web design to
ensure your design is up to date and market ready. Finally, you will conduct usability testing on your
proposed design, both to improve and validate the design.
At the end of this course, you’ll have created a clickable prototype that will become a key piece
in your portfolio. You’ll learn how to package that design into a presentation that you can use
to communicate both your process and the value of your design for users in an interview or job
presentation.
Key Takeaways
»» Use user research to drive the design process
»» Identify your target user and competitors
»» Brainstorm through hand-drawn sketches
»» Build out ideas using paper and software that you can test with your target audience
»» Leverage design patterns and conventions to strengthen your design
»» Create and test a clickable prototype
»» Package your design for your portfolio and job presentations
Circuits | User Experience Design

STUDENT HANDBOOK
COURSE STRUCTURE
The User Experience Design Circuit consists of a series of 6 week-long units, each with a project that
contributes to the design of your final project. Each of those units consists of videos, quizzes, slideshows, and
review guides. You will also have a weekly 1:1 session with your mentor, scheduled at a time that’s convenient
for you.

»» Videos & Slideshows

Introduce new concepts and allow you to see them in action through images and screencasts. We walk you through
new skills like affinity mapping and even model those skills in practice for you, like conducting user interviews.

»» Quizzes & Review Guides

Make sure that you’re remembering all of the important stuff. Plus, we’ve packed the review guides with loads of
further readings. For those of you who want to go above and beyond, we’ve provided resources for you to learn skills
well beyond this class.

»» Weekly Projects
Once you’ve learned and practiced the skills taught in each lesson, you’ll get to apply them to a real-world task that
UX designers do on a frequent basis, then get personalized feedback on it from your mentor. All the weekly projects
are cumulative. From week one you will be designing key components of your final project.

»» 1:1s with your Mentor

Every week you’ll attend a 1:1 session with your mentor, where you can ask questions, get feedback on your project
and work together through any material where you’re stuck or confused. Our mentors are professional UX designers,
and they’re great at breaking things down for beginners and helping you get through any concepts where you get
stuck on your own.
Circuits | User Experience Design

SYLLABUS
Each unit is intended to follow one week in the course (ex: Unit 1=Week 1, Unit 2=Week 2). While the
course is meant to be flexible to work around your schedule, it’s important to stay on track with the
class so you don’t get behind. Each unit builds upon the previous unit, so once you fall behind, it can
be very difficult to catch up.

UNIT 1: DISCOVERY AND RESEARCH Project:

Objective
Unit 1 introduces the UX design cycle and how to
conduct user and product research.
Concepts
»» Learn the UX design process
»» Learn user research strategies and conduct user
interviews
»» Learn how to develop a product strategy through
competitive analysis
Project:
Develop a research plan, conduct user interviews,
and complete a competitive analysis.
UNIT 2: SYNTHESIZE RESEARCH AND DEVELOP
A DESIGN STRATEGY
Objective
Unit 2 focuses on the synthesizing your user
research, identifying your primary persona, and
defining the key problem your design seeks to
answer to inform ideation and product design in
Unit 3.
Concepts
»» Understand the predominant method for
synthesizing research to find trends (Affinity
Mapping)
»» Learn to build out the primary persona for your
project
»» Identify your primary user goals and learn how to
create user flows that support them
»» Define the problem your project will address and
develop a hypothesis for how to solve that problem
»» Learn the common frameworks used to prioritize
features that align with a product vision
Build a target user persona, identify the needs and
goals of that persona, clarify the key problem your
design is targeting to address, complete a feature
prioritization.
UNIT 3: PLACEMENT AND LAYOUT DESIGN
Objective
Unit 3 examines methods for organizing complex
and diverse types of content using key techniques
from the field of information architecture.
Concepts
»» Practice sketching techniques in order to
illustrate and communicate the elements and
structure of user interfaces
»» Learn to sketch by hand and using software
»» Test a paper prototype of your design with users
»» Learn more about the field of information
architecture and how to improve the usability of
your design
»» Explore navigation options and understand how to
select the navigation structure that will optimize
your content
»» Understand the importance of building out your
sitemap with user input
»» Map out the flow of your user through your sites
content
Project:
Develop all the elements of a the sitemap of your
product, identifying the user flow of your persona
through the content and the navigation strategy
that will support that flow, conduct a test with users
using your paper prototype.
Circuits | User Experience Design

SYLLABUS
UNIT 4: EXECUTION (WIREFRAMING AND UNIT 6: PACKAGING AND PREPARING TO
PROTOTYPING) PRESENT
Objective Objective
Unit 4 explores responsive & native design and
Put together everything you’ve learned so far into a
familiarizes you with design patterns. From here,
packaged presentation that tells the journey of your
you build out wireframes drawing on conventions to
design process, beginning in the discovery phase and
ensure maximum clarity of concept and usability.
ending with the findings from your usability test. Learn
Concepts the value of communicating this narrative in order to
»» Understand the difference between native and demonstrate that your product clearly solves target
responsive design as well as design patterns for user needs and that your user research and testing
iOS, Andriod and web design was incorporated in your design, key components of the
»» Learn to break down your design concepts in a story you would tell in presentation of your work.
more detailed way that support user goals
»» Learn the difference between sketches, low-
fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes
»» Understand the difference between wireframing
and prototyping
Project:
By hand and using the software Sketch, build out lo-
fi and hi-fi wireframes.

UNIT 5: USABILITY TESTING (AND HI-FI

PROTOTYPING)
Objective
Unit 5 introduces usability testing as the most
important step for validating design and making
improvements to a proposed design.
Concepts
»» Develop your prototype into a clickable hi-fi
prototype using InVision, integrating design
changes based on the previous usability test
»» Understand the value and key components of
usability testing
»» Learn how to take this clickable prototype, write
out task scenarios, and conduct an advanced
usability test
»» Conduct a usability test to validate your designs
and test your project with users
Project:
Practice conducting a usability tests on a prototype
that you build in InVision. Learn to synthesize and
communicate your findings in a usability report.
Circuits | User Experience Design

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
»» Any computer with a strong enough internet connection to play videos online should work great for this course.

»» We recommend using Google Chrome as your browser. You can download it here and check out this video to learn
the basics.