UX for Beginners: A Crash Course in 100 Short Lessons

In today’s digital world, any product, app, or website requires a professional User Experience (UX) designer to ensure success. With this book, new UX designers will learn the practical skills they need to get started in the field, skills that can be immediately applied to real-world UX projects. UX for Beginners is broken into one hundred short, illustrated lessons, a user-friendly approach that makes learning fun and gives you the foundation you need to succeed as a UX designer. This book is based on the popular UX Crash Course blog at The Hipper Element, which has more than 400,000 readers.

Table of Contents

I: Key Ideas
Lesson 1: What Is UX?
Lesson 2: The Five Main Ingredients of UX
Lesson 3: Your Perspective
Lesson 4: The Three “Whats” of User Perspective
Lesson 5: Solutions versus Ideas
Lesson 6: The Pyramid of UX Impact

II: Before You Start
Lesson 7: User Goals and Business Goals
Lesson 8: UX Is a Process
Lesson 9: Gathering Requirements
Lesson 10: Building Consensus

III: Behavior Basics
Lesson 11: Psychology versus Culture
Lesson 12: What Is User Psychology?
Lesson 13: What Is An Experience?
Lesson 14: Conscious vs Subconscious Experience
Lesson 15: Emotions
Lesson 16: What Are Motivations?
Lesson 17: Motivation: Sex and Love
Lesson 18: Motivation: Affiliation
Lesson 19: Motivation: Status
Lesson 20: Motivation: Justice
Lesson 21: Motivation: Understanding (Curiosity)

IV: User Research
Lesson 22: What Is User Research?
Lesson 23: What Isn’t User Research?
Lesson 24: How Many Users Do You Need?
Lesson 25: How to Ask Questions
Lesson 26: How to Observe a User
Lesson 27: Interviews
Lesson 28: Surveys
Lesson 29: Card Sorting
Lesson 30: Creating User Profiles
Lesson 31: Devices

V: The Limits of Our Minds
Lesson 32: What Is Intuition?
Lesson 33: What Is a Cognitive Bias?
Lesson 34: The Illusion of Choice
Lesson 35: Attention
Lesson 36: Memory
Lesson 37: Hyperbolic Discounting

VI: Information Architecture
Lesson 38: What Is Information Architecture?
Lesson 39: User Stories
Lesson 40: Types of Information Architecture
Lesson 41: Static and Dynamic Pages
Lesson 42: What Is a Flow?
Lesson 43: Users Don’t Go Backward

VII: Designing Behavior
Lesson 44: Designing with Intention
Lesson 45: Rewards and Punishments
Lesson 46: Conditioning and Addiction
Lesson 47: Gamification
Lesson 48: Social/Viral Structure
Lesson 49: How to Create Trust
Lesson 50: How Experience Changes Experience

VIII: Visual Design Principles
Lesson 51: Visual Weight (Contrast and Size)
Lesson 52: Color
Lesson 53: Repetition and Pattern-Breaking
Lesson 54: Line Tension and Edge Tension
Lesson 55: Alignment and Proximity
Lesson 56: Using Motion for UX

IX: Wireframes and Prototypes
Lesson 57: What Is a Wireframe?
Lesson 58: What Isn’t a Wireframe?
Lesson 59: Learn Skills, Not Tools
Lesson 60: Avoid Convenient Examples
Lesson 61: What Is a Design Pattern?
Lesson 62: Z-Pattern, F-Pattern, Visual Hierarchy
Lesson 63: Layout: Page Framework
Lesson 64: Layout: The Fold, Images, and Headlines
Lesson 65: Layout: The Axis of Interaction
Lesson 66: Forms
Lesson 67: Primary and Secondary Buttons
Lesson 68: Adaptive and Responsive Design
Lesson 69: To Design or Redesign?
Lesson 70: Touch versus Mouse

X: Psychology of Usability
Lesson 71: What Is Usability, Really?
Lesson 72: Simple, Easy, Fast, or Minimal
Lesson 73: Browsing, Searching, or Discovery
Lesson 74: Consistency and Expectations
Lesson 75: Anti-UX
Lesson 76: Accessibility

XI: Content
Lesson 77: UX Copywriting versus Brand Copywriting
Lesson 78: The Call-To-Action Formula
Lesson 79: Instructions, Labels and Buttons
Lesson 80: Landing Pages
Lesson 81: Readability
Lesson 82: The Persuasion Formula
Lesson 83: How to Motivate People to Share

XII: The Moment of Truth
Lesson 84: The Launch Is an Experiment

XIII: Data for Designers
Lesson 85: Can You Measure a Soul?
Lesson 86: What Are Analytics?
Lesson 87: Graph Shapes
Lesson 88: Stats—Sessions versus Users
Lesson 89: Stats—New versus Return Visitors
Lesson 90: Stats—Pageviews
Lesson 91: Stats—Time
Lesson 92: Stats—Bounce Rate and Exit Rate
Lesson 93: The Probabilities of Interaction
Lesson 94: Structure versus Choice
Lesson 95: A/B Tests
Lesson 96: A Multi-what-now Test?!
Lesson 97: Sometimes A/ B Testing Is the Only Way to Know

XIV: Get a Job, You Dirty Hippy
Lesson 98: What Does a UX Designer Do All Day?
Lesson 99: Which UX Job Is Right For You?
Lesson 100: What Goes in a UX Portfolio?