I registered a great webinar “Intro to User Experience” on eventbrite, and it was organized by Ironhack Miami from Ironhack. Ironhack is the number 2 ranked coding, UX/UI design and Data Analytics school in the world, and they provide intensive boot camp programs for the students. In addition, they already graduated more than 5000 students in Miami, Madrid, Paris, Mexico City, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Lisbon, São Paulo, and Berlin. Also, their UX grads work at different companies such as Facebook, RoyalCaribbean, American Express, HBO and etc.
We started this webinar through zoom at 6:30 PM, I think this was a great opportunity to meet each other from different places throughout the USA and it was a pretty cool experience that we all had different backgrounds, but were interested in the same thing. Additionally, David Fast was the UX instructor for this webinar, and he is a UX/UI instructor at Ironhack in Miami who was focusing on human-centered design and user experience. In addition, he had over 12 years of professional experience leading design for global brands and startups in the US, Latin America, and Europe.
In addition, David Fast introduced the user experience into three parts: Why UX?, What is UX?, and UX Artifacts. UX provided a great opportunity in the future and we can see through the data for the total number of app downloads. The annual app downloads was 128.1 billions in 2017, it growed to 205.4 billions in 2018, and it will grow up to 258.2 billions in 2022. Also, the data of the total number of apps in Jan 2017 in Apple’s iOS app store was up to 2.2 Million. Additionally, the average number of apps used daily for each person was 9, and monthly was 30. So from different data of growth, I really saw there was a great chance increase in the UX business, how important the UX design in the industry right now. Through my experience, I knew many of our design students turned to UX/UI design in our Department of Communication Design.
In addition, UX design is concerned with all aspects of the overall experience delivered to users including the user research, information architecture (IA), interaction Design (IxD), visual Design (UI), web development, and other disciplines. In addition, there were five plane models which are strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface. First the strategy is where it all begins. For example: What do we want to get out of the site? What do our users want? Second, scope transforms strategy into requirements such as what features will the site need to include? Third, structure gives shape to scope, how will the pieces of the site fit together and behave? Fourth, skeleton makes structure concrete, what components will enable people to use the site? Lastly, the surface brings everything together visually, what will the finished product look like? For the user experience, there were five levels of the process including surface visual, skeleton wireframes, structure site map / screen flow, scope requirements / content, and strategy concept / user research.
Also, UX is the way our experience the product, the service, the entire system, within the context of our life. So as a UX designer we should be business and development-minded, white their approaches should be user-centric. Additionally, we can use some of the professional words to explain the user experience to clients such as usable, useful, accessible, credible, findable, desirable, valuable, etc.
Finally, I learned a lot from this webinar about the user experience and how important it was and the future of UX design. Right now, there are many careers such as architecture, human factors and ergonomics, electrical engineering, sociology, cognitive science, and etc. They all need the UX/UI designer in order to provide a better user experience for their clients and users. So this webinar was a great experience for me to learn the process behind this UX design and how steps by steps to build up the final product from strategy to surface. It brings me the knowledge to another design perspective.
