UX Design Edge

This three-day course—targeted specifically at software professionals who aren’t experienced designers—will give you the practical essentials to understand:

• Why user experience matters
• Using an efficient, user-centered design process
• UI design principles and guidelines
• Making a design intuitive, simple, and delightful
• Visual design, layout, and designing for scanning
• Designing tasks, task flows, and pages
• Mobile design (and how it differs from desktop)
• Design communication techniques: sketching and prototyping
• Evaluating designs, giving and receiving effective feedback
• Performing informal usability studies

Covers mobile, web, and desktop design. Includes 30 hands-on design exercises. Taking UX Design Essentials will give the essential, practical knowledge you need to create great user experiences and make better design decisions quickly and confidently.

Prefer an onsite workshop to train your entire team? Be sure to check UX Design Essentials Workshop.

Course cost is $1800, with an “early bird” discount of $200 up to 45 days before the class.

We offer a 45% discount to registered students and a 25% discount to 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations. Please contact us if you would like to have User Experience Design Essentials presented somewhere else.

While there is no one right way to learn how to design a great user experience, here’s our approach:

Top goals: Learn an efficient, user centered design process to help you make good design decisions quickly and confidently. Learn how to make designs that are intuitive, simple, delightful, and easy to scan. Learn effective design teamwork and how to give and receive effective feedback.

Design process, avoiding the classic mistakes: Understand why smart people who are masters of technology create poor UI designs. Learn to avoid the classic mistakes that everyone tends to make. Having a clear understanding of why design goals are important and when they are worth doing.

Effective communication: Many design decisions ultimately boil down to communicating to your target users effectively. This is true for both interaction and visual design. The heart of the course is learning how to use the language UI to communicate to users in a way that’s concise, natural, and intuitive.

Users are people: We are interacting with people not robots, so it’s important to understand the human emotion and perception side of UX design. Issues like value, simplicity, personality, delight, trust, and performance must be part of the design equation. Many inexperienced designers overlook these important issues, and design purely from the mechanical point of view.

Software teams are people too: The design process is a human, and therefore political process. Learn how your team’s culture determines what actually gets done. To impact design, you must make sure your effort matches your team’s culture. Learn the different team UX cultures and what they require to affect change.

Practical: UX design is a practice, not a subjective art. UX design isn’t hard if you use the right tool for the job. You can do this! You will learn practical techniques that you can actually use on your project (no exercises use sticky notes!) And you’ll get straight answers to your questions. (No, it doesn’t depend!)

Audience: Software professionals who are inexperienced with UI design. None of our courses require any prior design training or experience, and we strive to achieve the above goals without getting too wonky. (If you can’t use it, we don’t discuss it!)

While there are similar UX design courses, none of them take this same approach. See for yourself:

• Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum
• Nielsen Norman Group’s Application Usability
• Adaptive Path’s Elements of UX
• Human Factors International’s The Science and Art of Effective Web and Application Design
• Infragistics’ Essentials for Software Professionals Training

Detailed course content

Day 1 (8:00 am – 5:00 pm)

• Part 1: Why user experience matters

Using an efficient design process

• Part 2: Use a good design process
• Part 3: Design principles
• Part 4: UI guidelines

Using a user-centered design process

• Part 5: Value propositions
• Part 6: Scenarios

Day 2 (8:30 am – 5:00 pm)

• Day 2 Introduction: Who are you really?

Using a user-centered design process (cont)

• Part 7: Personas
• Part 8: Branding
• Part 9: Using data

Making a design intuitive

• Part 10: UI is communication
• Part 11: Make it intuitive
• Part 12: Use the right controls

Making a design simple and delightful

• Part 13: Make it simple
• Part 14: Make it look great
• Part 15: Make it delightful

Day 3 (8:30 am – 5:00 pm)

• Day 3 Intro: Changing your team’s culture

Putting it all together

• Part 16: Task flows
• Part 17: Mobile UX

Communicating design

• Part 18: Design communication techniques: sketches and prototypes

Evaluating designs and usability

• Part 19: How to evaluate a UI
• Part 20: Informal usability studies
• Part 21: Giving and receiving feedback
• Part 22: Workshop
• Course review and wrap-up

What is the cost?

$1800 per person, with a $200 “early bird” discount 30 days before the class.

Who is the instructor?

All course material created and presented by Everett McKay.

How large are the classes?

All sessions are limited to a maximum of 20 participants.

What is your cancellation policy?

For public courses, full payment is required at registration. For onsite courses, we require a non-refundable 50% deposit to schedule your course. But don’t worry—if the unexpected strikes, you can reschedule the course for a nominal fee.

What materials are provided?

All participants receive a bound copy of the course materials for their personal use.

For more information and availability, please contact training@uxdesignedge.com.

This training was excellent!

I found UX Design Essentials to be very helpful in my day to day work. I highly recommend this training to anyone who wants to understand UX/UI and why it’s really important to design your product for your users and not for yourself.

Rinal Trehan
Coventry Health Care

I can’t say enough to recommend Everett McKay’s UX Design Essentials course for anyone that wants to learn more about what makes a user interface “delightful.” The course is an informative blend of practical, boots-on-the-ground advice you can apply to your website right now interwoven with engaging stories and anecdotes about the successes and failures Everett has encountered throughout his career. There are also some great philosophical insights about the art of design and what makes one product succeed where another product fails.

The course material is well organized and structured in a sensible progression that leads you through team exercises so you can practice the techniques you’re learning. Even a design veteran will discover new, useful tools to add to their design toolbox.

I have always wanted a book that was focused as sharply and as astutely on this topic, and now I have Everett’s incredible course (and his PowerPoint deck!) to guide me. It was the best three days of training I’ve ever experienced, hands down.

John Smick
Pearson

I just completed Everett McKay’s UX Design Essentials course and I highly recommend it! Everett’s knowledge and passion for UX kept the class engaging and energized. I am a Visual Designer but the course is appropriate for all disciplines on a UX team. Everett shows how to orchestrate design and information for a great UX solution. It’s practical knowledge and guidelines for User Experience professionals. Well worth it!

Greg Burns
Visual Designer