Embedded Files
Week 13
Week 13
Progress
Progress
This week, I finished creating my low fidelity wireframes, and they are ready for testing. I wanted to make sure I considered the features and opportunities from my competitive analysis.
Some features included:
Sign in with email only
A simple onboarding process
Searching for individual volunteering events
A customizable email newsletter
Volunteer history
Goals for next week: Conduct usability testing
Week 12
Week 12
Progress
Progress
To find a gap in the existing space, I conducted competitive analysis on 3 different sites: Colorado Gives, Open Doors Careers, and Volunteer Match. This helped me figure out which features to add to my own design solution.
Some opportunites I found were:
Presenting community service events by individual opportunity rather than by organization
Utilizing an email newsletter to help users stay in the loop of upcoming volunteer opportunities
Logging in with minimal credentials for ease of use
Goals for next week: Make low fidelity wireframes and prepare for testing
Week 11
Week 11
Progress
Progress
I've made it to the final course of the Google UX Certification, which is divided into 2 main parts: a self-paced UX project and professional development. Course 7 is where I will design a new project from the ground up. The topic I decided to address this time was that users often don't know where to start when they want to give back to the community. My solution would be a responsive user experience to help adults get involved in local community service. As someone who has personally struggled with getting involved with volunteer opportunities, I felt that I could start this project off strong with high empathy about the design problem.
Different ways users find volunteer opportunities
Different ways users find volunteer opportunities
To gain more perspective about the problem space, I interviewed 5 individuals and asked them the following questions:
How do you currently get involved in community service?
What tools, if any, do you use to find opportunities?
What kind of information are you looking for when you search for community service opportunities?
What makes a good or bad experience for you when you try to get involved in community service?
Any specific examples of a good/bad experience getting involved in community service or searching for opportunities?
What, if anything, has prevented you from becoming involved in community service or searching for opportunities?
Any additional information to share about how you get involved in community service?
I gained valuable insights from the responses I received, and I was able to identify both pain points users experienced and important information users look for when considering a volunteer position. Based on the perspectives shared from the interviews, I created user stories to envision what functionalities my product would have to meet user needs.
Goals for next week: Continue working through Course 7
User pain points
User pain points
Information users look for
Information users look for
Design for Social Good and Strengthen your Portfolio | 4 hours
You've reached the final course of the Google UX Design Certificate — congratulations! You will design a dedicated mobile app and a responsive website focused on social good that showcases everything you've learned in the program. To get started, you'll learn about designing across devices by exploring progressive enhancement and graceful degradation approaches and the 4Cs. With all of this new knowledge, you’ll begin your portfolio project. You’ll start with the empathize phase, where you’ll create personas, user stories, and user journey maps. Then, you’ll move on to the define phase, where you’ll identify the user need your project will focus on and build a problem statement. Finally, you’ll make your way into the ideate phase, where you’ll conduct a competitive audit and come up with ideas for your dedicated mobile app design through sketching.
Build a Professional Presence | 2 hours
As the digital world continues to expand, companies recognize that designing good user experiences is a necessity, which is why UX design is a high-growth and in-demand job field. The key to landing one of those UX design jobs is a strong portfolio and online presence. In this part of the course, you'll start to create a portfolio to showcase your upcoming work. You'll also learn about the importance of having a personal brand and building an online presence.
Finding a UX Job | 9 hours
In the final part of the Google UX Design Certificate, you’ll prepare to find a job as a new UX designer. You’ll start by making final adjustments to your portfolio to ensure it’s ready to share in job applications. Next, you’ll examine the UX design interview process and develop strategies to succeed in various types of interview: pre-interview research, an elevator pitch, a phone screen, a portfolio presentation, a whiteboard exercise, a take home design exercise, and more. Finally, you’ll explore the world of freelancing by creating a business plan and learning how to land your first client.
Week 10
Week 10
Progress
Progress
Course 6 is all about designing for different screen sizes, and I was presented with 2 options: Start a new project or continue working on my project and design for a different device. I chose the latter. Since I've been designing in mobile for the past several weeks, I decided to design the desktop version of my app. First, I mapped out the pages of my website using a sitemap and established a user flow to strengthen my understanding of my app's information architecture. Then, I created both the low fidelity and high fidelity wireframes of my app on desktop. At this point in time, I've created all of the assets I need to write a case study about my experience. I'm nearing the end of the certificate program, so I will try to focus my efforts on my second project.
Goals for next week: Continue to Course 7 and start my second project
Plan a Responsive Website | 5 hours
Get started with the basics of responsive web design. To create a responsive website, you’ll follow the steps of the UX design process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. In this part of the course, you'll complete the empathize and define phases.
Create and Test Prototypes | 3 hours
Now that you’ve created digital wireframes, it’s time to build, test, and iterate on a low-fidelity prototype. First, you'll learn how to build a low-fidelity prototype. You’ll get feedback about your prototype by planning and conducting a usability study. Then, you'll make changes to your low-fidelity designs based on insights from your research.
Participating in Design Critique Sessions | 4 hours
After you’ve empathized with users, defined the user problem to solve, and begun to ideate possible solutions, it’s time to bring your ideas to life in wireframes. Your responsive website will have different layouts, depending on the device and screen size you’re designing for, so you'll create lots of different wireframes. First, you'll explore common website layouts, and you'll create paper wireframes. Next, you'll get to know a few elements and components that are commonly used in responsive website design. Then, you'll transition to create digital wireframes. Finally, you’ll update and refine your wireframes to enhance accessibility.
Document Design Work and Search for Jobs | 2 hours
With your responsive website designs complete, you'll be ready to share your work with others. To start, you’ll learn how to prepare and handoff designs to engineers, who will build the final product. You’ll also add a case study to your professional UX portfolio featuring your responsive website designs. Then, you'll pivot to focus on your big picture goal: getting a job as a UX designer. You'll learn tips and tricks to scan job postings, and you'll create a compelling resume that highlights your new UX skills.
Week 9
Week 9
Progress
Progress
Similarly to my first round of unmoderated usability testing, I wrote prompts to structure user feedback. Since I was testing a high fidelity prototype this time, I had to make adjustments to account for the increased level of detail:
Sign into the app
Search for a gaming laptop
Add 3 potential candidates to your favorites list:
ROG Strix G16
Acer Nitro V
Acer Predator Helios
Access your favorites list. Pretend that you favorited a headset some time prior to looking for a laptop
Select the ROG Strix G16, view its details, and add it to your cart
Go back to your saved list, select the headset, and purchase immediately to go directly to your cart
Let's say you would like to have a favorites list for laptop recommendations. Create a new list called Laptop Recommendations
Add the 3 laptops into this list
View your new list and then navigate back to the cart
Proceed to checkout and confirm order (assume that you've used this app once before)
Any final thoughts about the whole experience?
I have to say, the feedback was much more positive this time around! My prototype was recognized for its visual aesthetic and streamlined purchasing process. Of course, there was a consensus of feedback about the new features I added to the favorites page, which was making lists and organizing items into those lists. See the screenshots below for the main points of feedback I received and the improvements I made.
Goals for next week: Continue to Course 6
Prototype 1
Prototype 2
Reorganizing the favorites page
Reorganizing the favorites page
In my first prototype, uncategorized items were located at the top of the page, and items that were organized into lists were grouped at the bottom. This unfortunately meant that a single item couldn't be placed in multiple lists.
The solution was moving lists to the top of the page and placing each individual item underneath. This way, lists were still easily accessible, and an individual item could be categorized into multiple lists if needed.
Clearer CTA for editing a new list
Clearer CTA for editing a new list
After users created a new list, the original prototype would place the empty list towards the bottom of the screen. Users expressed confusion, as they weren't immediately sure how to organize items into that list.
In my second prototype, I made sure to place the new list at the top of the page with a placeholder to add new items. This would give a better visual cue of where users can click to add items to an empty list.
Prototype 1
Prototype 2
"I think it is a great improvement visually from the last version and I am excited to see any future changes!"
"Overall, it's pretty user friendly. It's also very pretty and straightforward to use!"
"I really like the experience and it seemed pretty streamlined! Nice attention to detail!"
Week 8
Week 8
Progress
Progress
I finally finished connecting my high fidelity mockups together to make an interactive prototype! Now, it's time for round 2 of unmoderated usability testing.
Interactions in the prototype include:
Signing in, exploring the home page, searching for gaming laptops, and selecting favorites
Accessing the favorites list, viewing item details, and adding items to the cart
Creating a new list on the favorites page and adding items into the list to organize favorite items
Accessing the new folder, returning to the cart, and checking out items
Goals for next week: Test my high fidelity prototype and apply feedback
Week 7
Week 7
Progress
Progress
This week, I finished the second two modules of Course 5, and I flushed out my high fidelity wireframes. One thing I'm particularly proud of is how my designs turned out in dark mode. All my previous projects have been designed in light mode, so this felt like a great change of pace. Admittedly, finding the appropriate content for each page was the most time consuming, but it was definitely worth it.
Taking the feedback from my usability tests, I made the following changes:
Added the ability to sign in with Apple
Renamed "saved items" to "favorited items" to better match the heart icon
Added the ability to organize favorited (previously called "saved") items into lists
Added a badge to indicate how many items are in the cart (will likely add more feedback in the prototype)
Goals for next week: Turn my high fidelity wireframes into an interactive prototype and start testing
Week 6
Week 6
Progress
Progress
Course 5 is about transitioning into high-fidelity designs, and I've completed the first two modules out of five. Much of the content covered the visual design elements of a mockup and applying standard design principles. I'm going to apply these concepts to my low fidelity wireframes.
Some common elements of a mockup include:
Typography, color, and iconography to create emphasis and hierarchy
Grid, containment, and negative space to give pages structure
The design principles I learned about were:
Scale and proportion to visually organize a page
Unity and variety to create a balance between consistency and visual interest
Gestalt Principles: Similarity, proximity, and common region
Goals for next week: Continue working on Course 5 and refine my wireframes by adding images, color, and content
Starting to Create Mockups | 6 hours
Turn your focus to visual design, which is how a product or technology appears to users. In this part of the course, you'll start to create mockups, which are high-fidelity designs that represent a final product. To create mockups, you'll use visual design elements, like typography, color, and iconography. Elements are often arranged into layouts using methods like grids, containment, and negative space. You'll apply all of these visual design learnings to build on the mobile app designs you've been working on throughout the certificate program.
Applying Visual Design Principles to Mockups | 4 hours
In this part of the course, you’ll use visual design principles to refine mockups. First, you'll use emphasis to guide users to the most important parts of a page. Next, you'll apply hierarchy, scale, and proportion to organize the elements on each page of your app. Then, you'll consider unity and variety to help elements of your app function together or stand out. Finally, you'll revisit Gestalt Principles, like similarity, proximity, and common region, to help users interpret your designs easily.
Exploring Design Systems | 2 hours
Come explore the world of design systems! In this part of the course, you'll be introduced to the parts of a design system, as well as the benefits of using a design system. You'll examine various companies' design systems, and you’ll have an opportunity to use them in your own mockups. You'll also learn how to use and create sticker sheets in Figma.
Creating High-Fidelity Prototypes | 3 hours
You’re ready to build high-fidelity prototypes in Figma! Following six steps, you'll turn your mockups into a prototype that's ready for testing. In addition, you'll explore two new concepts, gestures and motion, which can help enrich the user experience and increase the usability of prototypes.
Testing and Iterating on Designs | 3 hours
Now that you have a high-fidelity prototype, it’s time to test your designs. To get started, you’ll conduct a usability study to test your high-fidelity prototype of a mobile app. You'll analyze the feedback you receive to come up with actionable insights and iterate on your designs. Then, you’ll learn how to hand off designs to engineers for production. Finally, you’ll turn everything you’ve learned about user research, ideation, wireframes, designs, and prototypes into a case study for your professional UX portfolio.
Week 5
Week 5
Progress
Progress
Course 4 is divided into 4 sections: planning a usability study, conducting the study, synthesizing findings, and presenting insights. The kind of study I chose to conduct was unmoderated usability testing, which differs from its moderated counterpart. This is where participants get to perform tasks and provide feedback on their own time. Some of the main strengths of unmoderated usability testing include:
Respecting a participant's time
Gathering data in a natural environment
Avoiding biases introduced from the moderator
High flexibility
To structure participant feedback, I divided the study into prompts and encouraged users to share their first impressions, pain points, and recommendations:
Sign into the app
Search for a product
Add 6 potential candidates to your saved list
Access your saved list
Select the first saved item, view its details, and add it to your cart
Go back to your saved list, select a second saved item, and purchase immediately to go directly to your cart
Proceed to checkout and confirm order (assume that you've used this app once before)
Any final thoughts about the whole experience?
Then, I created an affinity map to organize the data and find patterns. I found that users wanted more visual feedback while checking out, more organization options for saved items, and more sign-in methods.
Goals for next week: Finish the last module in Course 4 and continue to Course 5
Planning UX Research Studies | 5 hours
Learn how to plan a UX research study! There are seven elements that your plan should include: the project background, research goals, research questions, key performance indicators, methodology, participants, and the script or questions you’ll ask participants. You'll explore each of these elements in detail, and you'll create your own research plan to test the designs you developed in the previous course of the certificate program. You'll also learn how to respect user privacy and data when conducting UX research.
Conducting Research with Usability Studies | 3 hours
Conducting research with participants to get feedback about your designs is critical. In this part of the course, you'll conduct a usability study, which is a research method that assesses how easy it is for participants to complete core tasks in a design. You'll also explore how to reduce bias and be inclusive when conducting usability studies. And, you'll take notes while observing participants in a usability study.
Analyzing and Synthesizing Research Results | 2 hours
After you conduct a usability study, you'll have a ton of feedback from participants. In this part of the course, you'll analyze and synthesize all of the feedback from your research. You'll gather data and observations in one place, organize the data using an affinity diagram, find themes, and come up with actionable insights.
Sharing Research Insights for Better Designs | 3 hours
It's time to let your hard work shine in the spotlight! You’re ready to share and promote the insights from your research. In this part of the course, you’ll learn techniques for presenting insights to various audiences, and you'll improve your presentation skills to grab your audience's attention. In addition, you'll iterate on your designs, which means making revisions to create new-and-improved designs, based on insights from your research.
Week 4
Week 4
Progress
Progress
I finished creating the low-fidelity prototype for my app. Transitioning from wireframes, I noticed that my navigation relied heavily on icons. On mobile screens, there is less room to add page elements, so icons provide an easy way to convey navigation without taking much real estate. A box with an "X" through it is the standard semantic to convey an icon. However, if people are going to test my prototype, I felt that the navigation icons needed to be flushed out for clear understanding. In terms of the user flow, I wanted to incorporate what it would look like to use saved items to help with deciding which product to purchase. Saved items provide a way to collect potential candidates and rule out options before spending a lot of money.
I've just started Course 4, which is all about conducting research and testing my prototype. The modules will guide me through planning, conducting, synthesizing, and promoting a usability study.
Goals for next week: Keep working through Course 4
Week 3
Week 3
Progress
Progress
From the previous course, I finished creating a competitive audit, where I evaluated the first impressions, interactions, visual design, and content of 4 other websites. This way, I was able to find gaps in the market that my app could fill. Course 3: Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes is where I'm taking insights from my UX research and using them to inform my design decisions. Through paper wireframes, I was able to rapidly iterate between different versions of a specific screen and choose different features that would address user needs. Then, I refined my wireframes and brought them into Figma.
Goals for next week: For Course 3, I need to finish the last module, which is building low-fidelity prototypes. Course 4 is when I will need to test my designs, so I will need something to test with. Once my prototype is ready, I will continue to the next.
Storyboarding and Wireframing | 3 hours
Welcome to the world of wireframes! You'll start by learning how to use research findings to inform ideation during the design process. Next, you'll create two types of storyboards: big picture and close-up. Then, you'll draw your first wireframes, and you'll explore the benefits of wireframing. Keep in mind that at this point in the design process, you should have lots of ideas for designs that address real user needs. You want to refine those ideas, and wireframing can help you do that.
Creating Paper and Digital Wireframes | 3 hours
This is an action-packed part of the course where you'll draw wireframes for a mobile app! First, you'll draw lots of wireframes on paper. Then, you'll transition to digital wireframes in the design tool Figma. You'll even learn directly from Figma about how to best use their tool. Finally, you'll apply Gestalt Principles, like similarity, proximity, and common region, to your wireframes.
Building Low-fidelity Prototypes | 4 hours
You've gone through the first three stages of the design process: empathize, define, and ideate. Now, you'll enter the fourth stage of the design process: prototype. First, you'll create a paper prototype of your mobile app. Then, you'll transition to a digital low-fidelity prototype in Figma. In addition, you'll explore ways to recognize potential bias in your designs and learn how to avoid deceptive patterns.
Week 2
Week 2
Progress
Progress
Course 2: Start the UX Design Process is all about empathizing with users, defining user problems, and ideating. I finally got to start my case study project, which feels like the class is starting to pick up pace. The problem I decided to address was that purchasing gaming equipment is a significant time and financial investment. My solution would be an app and responsive eCommerce website that enables gamers to purchase gaming equipment. While I don't identify as a gamer myself, I know that quite a few ATLAS students are, and this problem would be a good challenge to tackle.
First, I conducted a survey with students who I knew were gamers, and asked the following questions:
How do you currently shop for gaming equipment?
What are the most important things to you when you shop for gaming equipment?
What kind of information are you looking for when you shop for gaming equipment?
What makes a good or bad experience for you when you shop for gaming equipment?
Any specific examples of a good/bad experience shopping for gaming equipment?
If you shop for gaming equipment online, which sites do you use?
Any additional information to share about how you shop for gaming equipment?
Using the information from the responses I got, I created personas to represent the needs of my users and made a user journey map to show what the customer experience might look like as users interacted with my app. What I liked about this process was that I was able to better empathize with users based on research. When I tried to create personas before, it just felt like stereotyping and bad practice. This time around, I felt that my understanding of the product users was better informed.
Goals for next week: I will need to finish creating a competitive audit for my app with direct and indirect competitors for Course 2. This way, I can have a starting point for my design decisions later. Then, I will continue to Course 3: Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes.
Empathizing with Users and Defining Pain Points | 8 hours
Get ready to begin the design process for a new portfolio project: a mobile app! This part of the course will focus on empathizing with users, which is the first phase of the design process. You’ll think through the needs of your potential users to build empathy maps and create personas. These hands-on activities will help you understand user perspectives and pain points.
Creating User Stories and User Journey Maps | 3 hours
In this part of the course, you'll continue to empathize with users of the mobile app you'll later design. You'll craft user stories and develop user journey maps. You’ll also learn about the importance of considering accessibility when empathizing with users.
Defining User Problems | 3 hours
All of your work to empathize with users will help you define the problem that users are facing. In this part of the course, you'll move from the empathize phase into the define phase of the design process. To define the problem your designs will solve, you’ll build a problem statement, a hypothesis statement, and a value proposition. In addition, you’ll explore how psychology and human factors influence design.
Ideating Design Solutions | 6 hours
You're ready to move into the third phase of the design process: ideate. You'll consider everything you've learned about the users you're designing for and the problems they're facing in order to brainstorm ideas for design solutions. To help you come up with lots of ideas for design solutions, you’ll conduct a competitive audit and complete design activities, like How Might We and Crazy Eights.
Week 1
Week 1
James Tran | Creative Technologies | 1/23/2025
James Tran | Creative Technologies | 1/23/2025
Progress
Progress
I was able to get through all of the content from Course 1, which was broken up into 4 modules. Each module consisted of videos, readings, quizzes, and online activity plugins. Some main takeaways I took from the lessons was what UX looks like in different work environments, equitable design, the design sprint process, and different UX research methods.
Goals for next week: Continue to Course 2: Start the UX Design Process
Some Notable Points
Some Notable Points
In any work environment, it is good to be "T-shaped" which means that I have a broad range of skills and also specialize in 1 specific skill area. Startups typically have generalists while large companies have more specialists
Paying attention to accessibility and historically excluded minority groups will make designs better and more usable for a larger customer base. Equity means designing appropriate accomodations to produce fair outcomes for a wide range of users
Understand > Brainstorm > Decide > Prototype > Test
Research methods:
Surveys, Interviews, Usability Studies
Primary vs Secondary research
Foundational, design, and post-launch research
Watch out for confirmation, primacy, and recency biases
Introducing User Experience Design | 4 hours
User experience (UX) designers focus on the experience that users have while using products like websites, apps, and physical objects. UX designers make those everyday interactions useful, enjoyable, and accessible. In the first part of this course, you'll be introduced to the world of UX and the factors that contribute to great user experience design. You'll understand the job of a UX designer and teams that UX designers often work with. You’ll also get to know more about the expectations of the Google UX Design Certificate.
Thinking Like a UX Designer | 1 hour
UX designers always put the user first. In this part of the course, you'll be introduced to user-centered design and one of the design frameworks that UX designers use on the job. You'll also learn about design best practices, including the importance of inclusive design and accessibility when designing. In addition, you'll learn how to think across platforms to design seamless user experiences.
Joining Design Sprints | 3 hours
UX designers often participate in design sprints to define the direction of a product. In this part of the course, you'll explore the world of design sprints, including the phases of a design sprint and how to plan and participate in one. You'll also learn about retrospectives, which is a way to constructively reflect on a design sprint and identify areas of improvement to implement next time.
Integrating Research into the Design Process | 3 hours
As a UX designer, it's your job to put the user front-and-center in everything you do. In this part of the course, you'll explore the role of research in the design process to help you better understand and empathize with users. You'll also learn about the benefits and drawbacks of common UX research methods. And, you'll identify and account for biases that can arise when conducting research.
Course Outline
Course Outline
James Tran | Creative Technologies | 1/16/2025
James Tran | Creative Technologies | 1/16/2025
Progress
Progress
After contacting Dylan Mark from CU Career services, I finally got access to Coursera, the platform where the Google UX Certificate is hosted. The certificate is a 7-course series (each with sub modules) that should take around 14-16 weeks to complete total.
Learning Objectives
Follow the design process: empathize with users, define pain points, ideate solutions, create wireframes and prototypes, test and iterate on designs
Understand the basics of UX research, like planning research studies, conducting interviews and usability studies, and synthesizing research results
Apply foundational UX concepts, like user-centered design, accessibility, and equity-focused design
Create a professional UX portfolio, including end-to-end projects, so that you're ready to apply for jobs
Course Outcomes
Prepare for a career as a User Interface / User Experience (UI / UX) Designer
Receive professional-level training from Google
Demonstrate proficiency in portfolio-ready projects
Earn an employer-recognized certificate from Google
Qualify for in-demand job titles: User Experience (UX) Designer, UI Designer, Interaction Designer
Course 1: Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design | 18 hours
Identify common job responsibilities of entry-level UX designers and other teams you might work with.
Understand foundational concepts in UX design, such as user-centered design, the design process, accessibility, and equity-focused design.
Explain why design sprints are an important and useful part of a UX designer’s work.
Course 2: Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate | 21 hours
Empathize with users to understand their needs and pain points.
Develop problem statements to define user needs.
Generate ideas for possible solutions to user problems.
Course 3: Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes | 16 hours
Create storyboards to come up with ideas about solutions to user needs.
Create wireframes on paper and digitally in the design tool Figma.
Build paper prototypes to create interactive designs.
Design low-fidelity prototypes in Figma.
Course 4: Conduct UX Research and Test Early Concepts | 20 hours
Plan and conduct moderated and unmoderated usability studies.
Synthesize observations from usability studies and come up with insights.
Share research methodology and insights using persuasive presentation skills.
Modify low-fidelity designs based on research insights.
Course 5: Create High-Fidelity Designs and Prototypes in Figma | 28 hours
Build mockups and high-fidelity prototypes in the design tool Figma.
Define and apply common visual design elements and principles.
Demonstrate how design systems can be used to organize, standardize, and enhance designs.
Understand the role of design critique sessions and feedback while iterating on designs.
Course 6: Build Dynamic User Interfaces (UI) for Websites | 21 hours
Apply each step of the UX design thinking framework (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test) to create a dynamic website.
Plan information architecture and sitemaps for website designs.
Apply common layouts for web pages.
Complete a design project and include it in your professional UX portfolio.
Course 7: Design a User Experience for Social Good and Prepare for Jobs | 25 hours
Apply each step of the UX design thinking framework (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test) to create a project focused on social good.
Build wireframes, mockups, and low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes for a dedicated mobile app and a responsive website.
Prepare to successfully interview for an entry-level UX design job.
Gain a competitive edge by learning AI skills from Google experts.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse