How to Empathize, Define, Ideate: Google UX Design Course 2
What’s in the Google UX Design Course 2? Learn How to Empathize, Define, and Ideate
If you’re interested in becoming a UX designer, you might have heard of the Google UX Design Certificate program. It’s a series of seven courses that teach you the essential skills and tools for this exciting career path.
You might have also completed the first course of the program: Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design. If so, congratulations! You’ve taken the first step towards your UX design journey.
But what’s next? How do you actually start designing a product that meets the needs and goals of your users?
That’s what you’ll learn in the second course of the program: Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate.
In this course, you’ll learn how to apply the first three phases of the UX design process to a mobile app project that you can include in your portfolio.
These phases are:
- Empathize: This is where you research and understand your users and their pain points. You’ll learn how to create empathy maps and personas to represent your users.
- Define: This is where you frame and articulate the problem that you want to solve for your users. You’ll learn how to write problem statements, hypothesis statements, and value propositions to define your design challenge.
- Ideate: This is where you generate and explore lots of ideas for possible solutions to the problem. You’ll learn how to conduct a competitive audit and use brainstorming techniques like How Might We and Crazy Eights to come up with creative solutions.
By completing these three phases, you’ll have a solid foundation for creating wireframes and prototypes in the next courses.
This course is designed to help you develop practical skills that UX designers use on the job. You’ll complete hands-on activities and projects that simulate real-world scenarios. You’ll also get feedback from your peers and instructors to improve your work.
To get the most out of this course, you should have completed the first course of the certificate program: Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design. If you haven’t done so yet, please go back and finish it before continuing with this course.
Each course of the Google UX Design Certificate program is broken into weeks. You can complete courses at your own pace, but the weekly breakdowns are designed to help you finish the program in about six months total.
Here’s what you can expect to learn and do in each week of this course:
- Week 1: Empathizing with users and defining pain points. You’ll start the design process for a mobile app by conducting user research and creating empathy maps and personas.
- Week 2: Creating user stories and user journey maps. You’ll continue to empathize with users by writing user stories and developing user journey maps. You’ll also learn about accessibility and how it affects design.
- Week 3: Defining user problems. You’ll move from empathizing to defining by creating problem statements, hypothesis statements, and value propositions. You’ll also learn about psychology and human factors in design.
- Week 4: Ideating design solutions. You’ll start generating ideas for design solutions by conducting a competitive audit and using brainstorming techniques like How Might We and Crazy Eights.
To obtain the Google UX Design Certificate, you must complete all graded materials in all courses of the certificate program and earn a score of 80% or higher. Graded materials are located at the end of each week and are indicated with the name “weekly challenge.”
I hope this post has given you a clear overview of what you can expect to learn and do in the Google UX Design Course 2. This course will help you develop the essential skills and mindset of a UX designer.
I wish you all the best in your learning journey!
