Google UX Course Progress. Designing User Experience for Social Good

Update: 45% in and I enjoy every step of the Coursera course provided by Google.

Last year I think it was November or December I signed up to take the course Design a User Experience for Social Good & Prepare for Jobs by Google and ever since I have tried to pace my work around it including freelancing and content creation.

I applied for financial aid for the course and I got it! 🥳 I guess practising writing and expressing yourself can really help you achieve great things in life. Why I took the last course? Well, I started exploring and learning about User Experience way earlier in 2021 through online video courses, books about design, events, tv series, articles, Youtube videos, and of course smaller UX-infused projects. Yes, I have started applying UX practices in my web development (no-code CMS platforms) and design projects, because the best way to learn is through practice. That’s my niche, creating websites with UX attention. Slowly, but surely I would love to focus primarily on the UX Design process and work on projects which require more research, testing and why not even travelling.

The course was more like a framework I needed to complete a passion project I started also earlier, as soon as I quit my last job. I started sketching redesign options for the Zagreb City Library website before I even knew what the Crazy 8 exercise was. The sketching started with me figuring out different information architecture because the website has lots of unnecessary pages in the menu bar, and I mean too much. So I started by following my intuition.

Crazy 8s Timer - Solve big problems and test new ideas in just 4 days.

Even though the level is beginner, and I have already learned lots of the terminology and parts of the design thinking process, I found the course well-organised and engaging. As I said, I am almost at the end of week 3 (edit: started week 4!) of the course and have learned so much already.

Here you can check one of the high-fidelity prototypes for the book reserving mobile app: Figma link. Other prototype flows in the Figma file are the previous iterations.

For anyone considering taking the course, I say: do it! My advice would be:

• Take it and pace your time. Schedule in your calendar at least 1 hour a day dedicated to the course. Unfornutelty I did that too late into the course because of other work but often happened that I spend more than one hour just because I enjoy working on the project so much. Dot repeat my mistake, plan ahead and think about what you will do during the time when you need to scout for your participants that will help you with your usability study.
• Search for your participant in advance to get a headstart.
• Do your research.
• Read the instructions well and add each file separately when it comes to the peer assignments. It's just easier and better to review and grade them this way.
• Be proactive.
• Record your process, make time-lapses, take photos of your sketches, and use all that experience for content creation.
• And yes, don’t forget to enjoy the process!

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P.S. If you want to be part of my curious journey, you can find me on also on Instagram @angelova.nikoleta.design and LinkedIn (Nikoleta Angelova).

I am also reading out loud my articles and publishing them on Subsctack! Medium has the listen feature, but my voice can put you to sleep 😅 Try it out.

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