An overview of the activities you’ll undertake during a design thinking exercise, with discussion of the benefits of running the session in-house and unleashing the creativity of your own teams.

A deeper dive into each step of the design thinking process, to help would-be facilitators get up to speed with the philosophy and practicalities of running your own sessions.

Need to run a Design Thinking exercise with your remote team? Here’s a companion course to my popular Design Thinking: Implementing the Process training. Includes a Miro template you can download and customize, and loads of tips on how to make such an intensive creative process work at a distance.

Following a user-centered design technique puts you more in touch with your users’ true needs, which helps you develop solutions that really work for your intended audience. Get an overview of the methods taught in the rest of this series.

Learn how to observe users interacting with a prototype or simply performing tasks, build experience maps that depict those interactions, analyze the data, and extract ideas for new products and features.

Create personas using information about the users most relevant to your business. Gather and use data from interactions and site visits to define groups that represent a picture of your user types. 

Ideation helps your team generate a lot of different design ideas in a short amount of time. In UX design, your first idea is seldom your best. The ideation phase of UX design is where you consider all the different ways you could possibly fix your users’ pain points, and then narrow down to some practical, viable alternatives.

Scenarios and storyboards provide a reality check for your designs, helping you identify design gaps and articulate exactly what features you need to build to make users happy. Map the concepts generated during the ideation phase of UX design to a user’s real-world tasks.

Learn how to make paper prototypes so you can validate your ideas before you write any code. This method of prototyping is fast and inexpensive, allowing you to test design ideas early using simple materials: paper, Post-it notes, index cards, and Sharpies. 

Implementation planning happens at the end of the initial UCD cycle. Having a set of measurable goals and a prototype interface makes it easier to plan your implementation and set interim deliverables that you know will deliver value to your users.

The foundational method for user researchers. Learn how to recruit participants, create a study plan and test script, run a series of usability sessions, and then report the results back to a development team in an actionable way.

Writing for products and web sites is different to writing essays or fiction. Learn the key principles of online content creation, and the basics of layered or structured content designed for browsing and information retrieval.

How to design the structure for sites and apps. We cover the basic principles and also show how you can research and test navigation and information architecture structures. 

Content strategists, accessibility experts and information architects communicate their work with the rest of the team through a style guide that covers the visual design, typography, standard colors, and also the tone that content should be written in.

Covers the common types of maps used to depict people’s experiences interacting with a company or its products, what each map type produces, and how it can be used to aid in furthering the team’s understanding and subsequent decision-making.

Guidelines for every part of an ecommerce site, from the homepage, to product pages, to checkout. User behavior when shopping online, multi-device branding and experience considerations, and the importance of designing your site so users can research before buying and seek support after the sale.

Learn what types of questions you can get good answers to in a survey, how to phrase the questions so they give you the information you need, how to create and field a survey, and how to analyze and report the results. 

If you tried your hardest to scrub all memory of stats classes from your brain, but now you need to report UX results, I have just the course for you! No equations to learn, just simple steps to help you plan and analyze your research.

Based on my book Evil by Design. I discuss the science of human behavior, the history of persuasive design, and how design can appeal to emotions. I describe different types of dark patterns and explore the ethical limits of acceptable persuasion.

This course was initially designed to be a jumping-off point showcasing all the UX content in the LIL library. But I wanted to make it more than just an advert, so it takes you through the process of starting out in UX, learning what the different job roles within the discipline are, and how to think about a career in UX.

After recapping the different job roles within UX, this course talks about building your reputation, cleaning up your online profile, getting the experience you need, and building a resume and portfolio.

These days it’s most likely that at least part of your interview process will be conducted remotely. Get tips for phone and video interviews, possible interview formats and questions, and how to follow up after the interview.

A series of short (<4 mins) videos on different techniques and processes within UX. Chapters on research techniques, becoming a better researcher, UX design deliverables, UX job roles, and the politics of getting the work done.

An informal, off-the-cuff chat we recorded at LinkedIn’s studios, covering how to justify UX, work with teams of different sizes, and get the recognition you deserve.

A workbook-based course that steps through the main considerations each small business owner should make for their online presence, helping you create a strategy you can implement yourself or share with your site creator. 

A course for managers who will be responsible for hiring and mentoring Information Architects. Covers the core functions of the role, as well as how it fits in with other disciplines, and how to help IAs be successful.

Just because you have some great ideas about how the interface should look and behave doesn’t mean they’ll immediately get implemented. Learn about the pressures on a team to deliver, and how you can fit in to the process and get the most important user modifications accepted. 

How to sell the idea of usability testing to a team or company that hasn’t done it before. The justifications here are ones you should know for pretty much any situation where you’re advocating for users.

Chris has also created a low-cost, high-quality training plan for self-motivated students looking for a career in User Experience or User Interface Design. It incorporates several of the courses above, alongside other highly practical LinkedIn Learning courses created by other experts in the industry.