For anyone considering a career in UX design, our UX Design Foundations course is the perfect introduction to the field, covering all the fundamentals. And key to the course’s success is our team of contributors from the industry; seasoned experts who share their knowledge and insights throughout the online UX design course.
Together with Parsons School of Design, Creative Bloq has gathered a carefully curated team of UX designers, product designers and branding experts to deliver the course. Over five modules, they provide insight into topics such as the concepts behind a human approach to UX design, user research and usability testing methods, design concepting, wireframing and the new technologies shaping user interface design.
Our contributors come from different backgrounds and have taken different routes into the field of UX design, from graphic design and branding to product design. This gives them unique perspectives on an industry that continues to evolve and develop at a rapid pace. Meet our contributors below, and sign up for our fully remote UX Design Foundations course (opens in new tab) today to begin your own journey in UX design.
UX Design Foundations: meet the course contributors
Abigail Posner works at Google but has a varied background that incorporates anthropology and advertising. In her current role, Posner aims to help advertisers and marketers make sense of users’ emotional relationship to the digital space and to take a more strategic and creative approach. By shining a humanistic lens on culture, business, and technology, she brings a fresh perspective to product development, branding and marketing. While at Google, she has also launched an industry-first thought leadership series: Humanising Digital.
For our UX Design Foundations course, Posner helps us frame how UX in all its forms should benefit the individual. She combines her personal and professional experiences to help students open their minds to different types of UX design.
“When I consider technology, when I consider actually the making of anything, whether it’s a piece of technology, a piece of furniture, I always ask what is the role it’s going to play in culture and what is it that human beings really need from it,” Posner says.
Trine Falbe has worked in user experience design for 20 years and is currently an independent ethical design advisor, consultant and trainer, while also building digital products as an entrepreneur. She has worked in digital customer and user experience in news, for kids, and in various e-commerce businesses. Falbe has been a UX educator for a decade, has written two books on the subject and is often called upon to speak at international conferences.
In our UX Design Foundations course, Trine brings this wealth of experience to the fore to help students understand the broad field of user experience and how it’s evolving.
A pivotal moment in Prakarn Nisarat’s career was when he moved to Seattle and worked at the Office of Head Starts designing tools to help millions of families, especially children with autism and Down syndrome. There, he realised the power of design and began exploring ways technologies and design can improve people’s lives. Since then, he’s been incorporating design visions with new technologies such as augmented reality, smart devices, and voice interfaces.
In recent years, he’s helped fortune 100 companies and universities such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, Lululemon, Novo Nordisk, University of Washington, and Stanford launch multiple cutting-edge products. Now senior interaction designer at Google, he’s been working on the Google Assistant experience. He contributes his knowledge and experience to our UX Design Foundations course, and also advises us what common UX mistakes to avoid.
Daphne Lin’s background is in engineering and front-end development but she has moved into research, interaction design and leadership. Now at Spotify, she has worked as a design consultant for a wide range of clients, from small startups to Fortune 500 enterprise companies. With a passion for human-centred design and putting users at the centre of every big decision, Daphne’s aim is to find design solutions to problems using lean UX.
Contributing to our UX Design Foundations Course, Daphne brings her insights and expertise to several modules, teaching us how we can humanise user experience design by keeping real people in mind.
“Interaction in design is the design of what information to reveal and what actions to reveal on a page one at a time, such that a user can easily understandably accomplish a specific task,” she says. “You should make it easy for a user to understand what their primary task should be at any given point in time on a page.”
Nena Salobir is an award-winning graphic designer and art director who has specialised in branding for startups for over a decade. As a creative experienced in front end web design, illustration, and strategic marketing consulting, she offers a uniquely holistic creative view.
Now the creative director and co-founder of Orbits, a unique virtual event platform, she helped develop the platform successfully during the pandemic to host events for Microsoft, Google, ASUS and UN Women in its first year of inception. See Salobir’s six essential tips for UX design.
Agnes Pyrchla’s work is rooted in creating a thoughtful experience. Currently a product manager at Planet Labs, she manages a team that’s making satellite imagery accessible and understandable for all types of audiences by distilling the complexity of the geospatial field to create simple, elegant web tools.
Pyrchla has worked for both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies and has had her work featured in MIT Tech Review, Business Insider, UX Collective and Parsons Design School. In our UX Design Foundations course, she sheds light on how designers should think beyond the immediate experience and how user experience will evolve with time, affecting individuals differently. She defines user behaviours and how we can interpret them and preempt them successfully.
“The goal of UX is for you to be able to think like a person in that position and really embody who they are, almost as if you were them,” she says. “It’s a shortcut for trying to walk a mile in someone’s shoes.”
Jacquelyn Iyamah is the founder of Black UX Collective, a platform that highlights the importance of Black designers in tech, and Making the Body a Home, which helps people unpack racial conditioning. With an MS in Interaction Design from the University of Baltimore and a BA in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley, she currently works for Uber as an inclusive content designer, combing her different passions and experiences.
Throughout our UX Design Foundations course, Iyamah teaches us about the importance of fair representation and creating products and experiences that benefit everyone.
“Within the design thinking process, the need to continuously question ourselves and our biases is critical to ensure we’re not designing products that continuously harm,” she says.
Amir Baradaran is the founder and CEO of ABXR Studio, a leading-edge platform democratising XR creation for Web 3.0. He is also an artist, technologist, entrepreneur and a scholar who specialises in artificial intelligence and augmented reality. He was a researcher and leading lecturer in spatial computing at Columbia University, where ABXR was born.
Baradaran brings invaluable experience to our UX Design Foundations course, making sure students ask difficult questions and broaden their vision in order to design for the many and not the few. Inclusivity and fair representation are vital factors designers need to be aware of today and Baradaran aims to help students get them right.
John Bricker is the founder Gensler’s Retail and Branding studios. His thought leadership and focus on the design experience have been instrumental in developing the Gensler brand into one of the most recognisable names in the design industry.
In our UX Design Foundations course, Bricker offers unique, practical insights, having worked with many clients. He highlights the importance of working to a brief, from factoring in costs to understanding different physical and digital spaces, while managing expectations and aligning the different moving needed to create a successful user experience.
Daniel Holtzman is an interactive creative director. He’s worked across multiple industries and applications for more than 10 years, always with a focus on user-centred design. He is currently at Frog Design, a leading global creative consultancy which challenges the status quo to craft and build transformative human experiences.
Holtzman contributes to a number of modules in our UX Design Foundations course to help students understand the core basics of user experience, how it’s evolving and how we can leverage new movements in UX design.
He says: “UX is about understanding how a product or experience is going to affect a user’s life and how you can create that product or experience in a way that they will be able to use it better, get more out of it, find more delight in it, and ultimately engage with the product in a more successful way.”
Other contributors to the UX Design Foundations course include Pilar Serna, senior design manager at Spotify, and Luke Cooley, a UX researcher on Google’s Cloud AI team, who brings insights on project planning and how to best leverage both qualitative and quantitative data sets to create a successful user experience from the get-go.
All our experts are highly revered in the industry, and their unique experiences provide behind-the-scenes knowledge and insights on the course. See the UX Design Foundations course brochure to learn more or sign up for the course below.
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