UX Designer Roadmap Curated by the Programming Community

What you'll learn

Design thinking
User Research
Information Architecture
Wireframing (including some design tools)
Prototyping
Testing

overview

A UX designer is responsible with taking care of the end to end experience of the product. From the loading screen to the final task completion, every step of the product usage is monitored by the ux designer. In this roadmap, you will learn to figure out how your users think and behave so that you can design well tailored experience of your product.

Design thinking

The designers who use Hackr.io use several guiding principles to launch their careers. To get started, most people choose a generalized course on digital design. These courses tend to cover user empathy, and the process where you define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement. Here are a few of our community's favorite resources on the subject.

A virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking (dschool.stanford.edu)

Become a UX Designer (udacity.com)

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Resource

Design Thinking Resources

User Research

We design for people of many different backgrounds, histories and cultures. Hence, User research is crucial before moving forward with any design project. There are many ways to do this, so you need to pick what method suits the situation you are designing for. The community of designers at Hackr recommended the following resources.

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User Research Basics (usability.gov)

User Research: What It Is And Why You Should Do It (interaction-design.org)

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User Experience Research and Design Specialization (coursera.pxf.io)

Resource

UX Research Cheat Sheet

Information Architecture (IA)

Your team developed the information, and you want to share it with your users. But how do you do it? Professional UX designers consider Information Architecture when designing the solution. With AI, you structure your data in a way that makes sense for the people who visit your app or site. Here are a few of our designer's favorite resources on the subject.

Complete Beginners Guide to Information Architecture (uxbooth.com)

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Information Architecture (IA) Fundamentals (click.linksynergy.com)

Project

A New Design Challenge Each Week

Resource

Difference Between IA and Navigation

Wireframing

Both UI and UX professionals rely on wireframing as a foundation for their projects. To learn about wireframing, our designers recommend the following resources. Topic-specific tutorials exist, but you'll often find some of the most reliable information in larger UX courses. Check out resources on Figma, for example, which cover wireframing as part of the larger topic.

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Wireframing For UI / UX Designers (grinfer.com)

Figma UI UX Design Essentials (click.linksynergy.com)

Project

Design Challenges

Prototyping

Our designers use prototypes to create simple versions of more complex projects before assigning additional resources. That saves us from doing extra development work when we just need to collect data. You can learn bout prototyping from just about any working designer. Here are a few of our communty's favorite resources on the subject.

Note that many tools now have built-in prototyping support, too!

Fast Prototyping with Sketch, Invision and Craft (youtube.com)

Design Sprint Foundations (udacity.com)

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Testing

The center of UX design is right there in the first letter. Users. Our designers understand that you need to get feedback on your design if you want to please your audience. That's why you ask for their thoughts. Here's a primer on user testing. Get comfortable taking this feedback. It's one of the most valuable parts of the job!

UX Fundamentals: User Testing (click.linksynergy.com)

How to follow this roadmap?

Before jumping on to this roadmap make sure you have some experience designing interfaces of the web and/or mobile apps.
Make sure to move slowly through every step of the process. Remember the subtle art of designing experience requires patience. Only then you can really figure out user behaviour and identify real user needs.
Make sure to practice with as many real examples as you can. Take feedback as much as possible and decide how you are going to incorporate that back into your design.
Always remember that understanding User Experience takes time.
Have fun learning and Happy Designing!