Introduction to UX Design for Beginners by a New York Product Designer Course

I have been teaching and teaching the "Introduction to UX Design for Beginners" class through a platform called Tal-ing. And recently, I have started an online lecture called Infraon. I have been working in the field, but I have never thought that I would be teaching.

But I would like to talk a little about the process of how I came to open the class and conduct the lecture.

"I felt the need for a UX design orientation for team members."

It started like this.

The company I work for operates as an agile organization. What this means is that the people I work with most closely as a team, as a product designer, are product managers and engineers. And this is not only in our team, but also in the teams next door. This type of team organization is called a squad.

There were a lot of junior product managers, interns, and new engineers coming and going on our team. In these cases, they had little basic knowledge of UX design, and in some cases, they had never heard of the word UX before. The problem was that I had a lot of work to do with these people.

Problem identified: The new employee who has to work with me doesn't know UX or UX design.

In order to proceed with UX and UI design, there are many decisions made through numerous communications and discussions with team members. In fact, this part was big. If we had to work together and they didn't know what I did, I couldn't convey what I was talking about in more depth. And they couldn't do their jobs better either.

As I've said before, in a lean organization, product managers, engineers, and product designers create and collaborate on countless things together. In such a situation, there's nothing more fatal than not knowing what each other is doing.

So, to make it simple, I started making UX design orientation materials to help people understand what UX is, what UX design is, and what role a product designer plays in our team. I made it very simple at first.

> UX design orientation materials I created at my company

As I started giving orientations about what I do, two things started to change.

First, it became easier to collaborate with team members who understood UX and UX design.

"This is how our team members have changed"

This orientation material contained the thought process that UX designers go through to make decisions about design. When the other party understood this, they understood better why I had to design the product this way. And there was even a change in the team members defending and defending the design from the perspective of UX and UX design.

Second, I was able to reorganize what I do and redefine it so that beginners can easily understand it. When I tried to give an orientation, I actually had a lot of difficulties. Terms like UX and UI, which I understand so daily and in my bones, were difficult to explain to beginners. I needed to refine these parts and redefine them so that they could be understood from the perspective of someone hearing them for the first time. To do this, I read books, searched Google, English YouTube (unfortunately, there are many good YouTube channels about UX and UI in the US, and not many in Korea), and articles, and reorganized them. This work helped me to be able to easily explain what I do to anyone.

This is how I started teaching UX design. I never thought I would teach in my life. I only worked in companies, and I never thought I had any talent for teaching. However, because of this need, I tried various things to do my job better, and I ended up experiencing and starting a new field called "teaching."

In the following article, I will tell you how I came to teach an introductory UX design course to not only my team members but also others, especially non-majors and UX beginners.