One of the most important ways to impress potential employers is to show strong examples of your user experience projects. This final project course in the certificate program gives you the opportunity to bring all your skills together and create a site or project that demonstrates your abilities. You will seek out your own real-world client and work independently to complete your design project. Your instructors will be available to offer guidance as you carry it out.

During this course, you will complete the entire process of analysis, design, development and deployment of a website. Before the first class, you’ll prepare a requirements document that defines the client, the site objectives, the users, and the target technology platform. You will receive feedback on your project proposal on the first night of class. Then you will begin to design the information architecture, interface and visual design before implementing the site using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript as needed. The course addresses cross-browser compatibility and briefly reviews jQuery and other JavaScript libraries. Because the use of a CMS tool requires advanced skills, you must provide a well-defined need for it in your proposal, and obtain instructor approval before proceeding.

By the conclusion of the course, you will have presented your design and implementation process, and will have produced a fully functional website or a front-end interface for a Web page to add to your portfolio. You can choose from development frameworks such as Bootstrap, Materialize, Foundation or SemanticUI, with guidance from your instructors. Current trends in website design patterns and frameworks will be discussed.

This project course does not repeat instructions of prerequisite courses. You should already have the skills needed to implement your design project.

Within the first two sessions of the class you will submit your project proposal and give a short presentation about your project scope, highlighting the key objectives, the platform, expectations etc. Once you receive your approval on your project you may proceed to the next step. There are many phases of a design project as you learned during your certificate program, including user research, understanding the specific domain, potential technical challenges, the actual design work, user testing, implementation, and deployment. During all these phases you are also expected to work with your client on a regular basis, and engage in a collaborative dialog.

Your implementation phase may include HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript as needed, as well as other development languages such as Swift for iOS, Java for Android. You may also use content management system tools such as WordPress or Drupal, if required. Some of these tools require advanced skills and you must provide a well-defined need for it in your proposal, and obtain instructor approval before proceeding.

Learning Outcomes

At the conclusion of the course, you should be able to

• Demonstrate independent work, responsibility and UX project management skills
• Complete a design project from a concept to production.
• Understand how to work with clients
• Creating a website or an application that solves a real-world problem
• Utilizing design methods and strategies in a real-world problem
• Include a significant design project in their portfolio

Topics Include

• How to produce a requirements document
• How to produce design deliverables
• How to produce a website
• How to validate a website

Working knowledge of:

• Designing Web pages or executing user experience design processes. Visual design and design implementation courses are strongly recommended. Also required is a code editing tool suitable for Web development, such as TextWrangler, BBEdit, Notepad++, Sublime, Dreamweaver, etc. in order to implement the design and complete the project.

Additional Information

All prerequisite courses listed must be completed before students can enroll in the course. Students should have server space available for posting their projects.