Week 1: Empathizing with users and defining pain points. Begin the design process for a mobile app! This part of the course will focus on understanding users, which is the first phase of the design process. You’ll empathize with fictional users to build empathy maps and create personas. These hands-on activities will help you understand user perspectives and pain points.

Week 2: Creating user stories and user journey maps. You'll continue to empathize with users of the mobile app you'll later design. You'll craft user stories and develop user journey maps. You’ll also learn about the importance of considering accessibility when empathizing with users.

Week 3: Defining user problems. All of your work to empathize with users will help you define the problem that users are facing. In this part of the course, you'll move from the empathize phase into the define phase of the design process. To define the problem your designs will solve, you’ll build a problem statement, a hypothesis statement, and a value proposition. In addition, you’ll explore how psychology and human factors influence design.

Week 4: Ideating design solutions. Move into the third phase of the design process: ideate. You'll consider everything you've learned about the users you're designing for and the problems they're facing in order to brainstorm ideas for design solutions. To help you come up with lots of ideas for design solutions, you’ll conduct a competitive audit and complete design activities, like How Might We and Crazy Eights.