Time to learn something new...
I have had to admit to myself that I am missing many basics when it comes to designing today’s user experiences. I have been creating solutions for companies for decades but not at this level. I never needed to design the general experience. After playing around in Figma, the design tool I wrote about in the previous post, I realised I needed many more basic building blocks before I could go further. So I stopped all of that fun work and went back to school.
I found a course by Google which is hosted by Coursera onUX Design. It is a certificate course which Google says they will honour as a Bachelor’s degree if one comes to them looking for a job. They actually have 100s of other companies signing up on this same pledge. They need trained workers so they put this course together with their best designers for all to learn from. Now, I am not interested in a Google just but I thought who might know a thing or two about User Design but Google. It is a 6 month course (10 hours/week, self paced) with 7 certificates along the way. Writing this now I am finished with #4 after 2 weeks but then I have a lot of time on my hands.
Fast forward now 10 weeks and I have completed the course. That is the reason I have been here on my blog so rarely. It was a 9 week deep-dive into UX designing and exercises and projects. I will share many of the steps here with you over the next few blog posts. Once I finished the course, which was a cool feeling too, I immediately dove back into my work with the startup I am working with. They readily admit that they are very engineering focussed and could use more user or customer focus. They have added a number of new people recently which do not have an engineering background which is fantastic. My role there is to develop the local market for them but also develop techniques to engage client in a new way, one which focusses on the end user.
In my first post from the course, I will talk about UX research and the role it plays. I will also tie that into the experience I made just today where I used that research to our advantage and put what I expect to be a knockout story in front of the client. You will have to stay with me a few posts before I share that. I can say, that it was a great feeling seeing the reaction to the approach and knowing what was likely going through their minds.
“I began my interest in UX in the 80s, yeah those 80s.”
I started my interest in User Experience back in the 80s, yeah the 1980s when I studied cultural geography at university. That was all about how people made use of their landscape, their vegetation, their natural resources and others. It was a study of how people adjust to their environment and make use of it. My research project was in northern Honduras where I spent 2 weeks studying the village of Masca. At that time the village was not on any official map of Honduras. My professor suggested the mapping and capturing of the human development of the village as my project. Google it, it is now on the map and with hotels as well! Then it was a fishing village of mixed races. they took me in as a guest for the time and I slept in a hammock, ate fish from the fire and pot and swam in the Gulf. During the days I walked the area counting my steps in order to map the area. No lasers, no computers only our bodies, paper and pencils. I learned to do the foundational work the hard or old school way. That is what I apply today still.
Stay tuned here and let me know what you think of this process. I am excited to have gone back to the roots and learned a few things from the ground up. Without the foundation, you are building only a dream. Invest the time and it will pay off.
/Andrew
I am redefining my skills at a time where many of us are faced with similar challenges. I dedicate to share everything I know and learn which could be of interest to others. There is no advantage to me to keep anything to myself.