What the price buys, and what you can read free

00Identify high-value AI opportunities

3 points

• Distinguish between hype-driven and value-driven AI features
• Use a Jobs-to-be-Done framework to pinpoint where AI uniquely delivers value
• Identify friction points that AI can meaningfully reduce or resolve

01Facilitate evidence-based AI strategy conversations

5 points

• Facilitate cross-functional discussions that align teams on AI priorities
• Guide stakeholders toward balanced, evidence-driven thinking, whether they’re risk-averse or overly optimistic
• Lead productive conversations when teams disagree on AI direction, value, or risk tolerance
• Shift teams from AI-first or AI-avoidant reactions to a value-first, problem-first approach
• Use workshop formats and facilitation tools to build alignment and shared ownership

02Evaluate and prioritize AI features

4 points

• Apply a prioritization framework to score and rank AI ideas
• Define evaluation criteria to ensure AI features align with organizational goals
• Use hands-on diagnostic scorecards with real-world case studies
• Prioritize a roadmap of AI features based on potential user and business impact

03Plan for adoption, trust and long-term value

4 points

• Establish design criteria that set accurate expectations and communicate system confidence
• Analyze trust loops and behavioral adoption dynamics
• Connect UX metrics to growth and business metrics to demonstrate AI feature ROI
• Explore how real companies scale AI capabilities over time

00Develop a strategic foundation for leveraging AI in your everyday work

4 points

• Explore current AI capabilities and limitations relevant to design tasks
• Learn from real-world case studies of how teams are integrating AI into design workflows
• Develop effective prompt engineering skills for design-specific applications
• Implement ethical guidelines for responsible AI use in design

01Apply practical AI use cases across the design workflow

4 points

• Establish a decision framework for when and how to integrate AI in design practice
• Leverage AI as a creative partner for desk research, ideation, and concept development
• Use AI to pressure-test design ideas and uncover blind spots
• Conduct design critiques, heuristic evaluations, and QA reviews with AI-assisted analysis

02Create high-quality design assets and deliverables using AI tools

4 points

• Streamline microcopy generation, UX writing, and content localization
• Generate brand imagery, moodboards, and design variations with image generation
• Produce wireframes, design mockups, and interactive prototypes using AI prototyping tools
• Evaluate, edit, and refine AI-generated outputs to meet professional design standards

03Future-proof your design workflow and team practices

4 points

• Understand how AI is reshaping design roles, workflows, and team structures
• Navigate organizational and ethical challenges of AI adoption in design teams
• Design scalable systems and workflows that balance automation with human judgment
• Develop adaptive strategies to stay relevant and lead through technological change

00Evaluate when and how to implement AI throughout the research process

5 points

• The benefits and limitations of AI in UX research
• Strategic opportunities for AI integration throughout the research process
• Maintain methodological rigor while leveraging AI capabilities
• Evaluate the tradeoff of quality vs. speed when using AI
• Avoid AI products that overpromise and underdeliver for researchers

01Design more effective research studies with AI assistance

3 points

• Plan studies and create research plans more quickly with AI
• Optimize screeners, discussion guides, and survey instruments
• Improve participant recruitment and communication workflows

02Analyze qualitative and quantitative data more efficiently

4 points

• Use AI as a thought partner in your analysis and synthesis practice
• Scale your ability to process large volumes of research data
• Evaluate AI-generated research insights for accuracy, bias, and relevance
• Follow data privacy best practices when using AI tools

03Communicate research findings with greater impact

3 points

• Articulate research findings in clear, actionable ways
• Transform data into compelling visualizations and reports
• Tailor research deliverables for different stakeholders

00Understand the strengths and limitations of analytics data for UX

2 points

• Common analytics metrics and how UX teams should interpret them
• What analytics can and cannot tell us

01Incorporate analytics data into design and research

4 points

• Use analytics data to supplement your user research toolkit
• Triangulation: Using multiple research methods to study the same problem or behavior
• Case studies from a variety of fields (finance, insurance, government, ecommerce, intranet, and more)
• Common recipes for combining analytics with other forms of user research

02Make analytics data more meaningful and useful for your organization

3 points

• Define and track goals, events, and conversions
• Interpret funnels and paths
• Design custom segments to slice up your data and make comparisons

03Benchmark your project or product’s success over time

2 points

• Frameworks for choosing UX and business success metrics
• Common pitfalls and mistakes

04Optimize your designs through experimentation

3 points

• Running and evaluating A/B tests to compare different design and content variations
• Planning an experimentation roadmap
• Less common forms of split testing, like multivariate testing

00Understand the landscape of qualitative data analysis

3 points

• Overview of qualitative analysis methodologies
• The core skills of the qualitative researcher
• How analysis differs for exploratory and evaluative research data

02Code data appropriately

6 points

• Choosing a coding approach to fit the data and your goals
• Inductive vs. deductive coding
• Apply different code types throughout the coding process
• Iterate through your codes
• Moving from codes to categories
• Different software tools and approaches for coding

03Extract and report insights

6 points

• Write memos to explore your data
• Question frames to help you move beyond the literal
• Visualization techniques to identify and explore important connections
• Techniques to test your interpretations
• Analyzing effectively with others and reducing bias
• How to effectively communicate insights to your team and stakeholders

04Analyze usability test data appropriately

3 points

• Analyze behavior in addition to transcripts
• How to catalog issues and determine their severity
• Tools and methods for analysis of usability test sessions

00Manage visual complexity in applications with many functionalities

3 points

• Minimizing visual search
• Progressive disclosure and visual hierarchy
• Menus, accordions, tabs, and direct manipulation

01Guide users through complex workflows

4 points

• Understanding users’ conceptual models and expectations for a workflow
• Data input, entry, and selection
• Forms vs. wizards
• Dealing with long processes

02Present complex data

4 points

• Patterns for displaying big tables
• Filtering data and accessing data subsets
• Principles for making visualizations easy to understand
• Designing useful dashboards

03Help users learn a new interface

4 points

• Learnability and learning curves
• Inline and contextual help and tips
• Tutorials
• Catering to both novice and expert users

00Align design systems with business and product strategy

4 points

• Define the scope, team structure, and cross-functional partnerships needed to operate a design system
• Build business cases that communicate scope, process, and benefits to secure sustained investment
• Audit existing design assets to surface consolidation opportunities, gaps, and strategic priorities
• Strategically select and scope pilot projects for design systems to build credibility and momentum

01Establish sustainable governance and contribution models

4 points

• Design governance structures that enable adoption without rigid policing
• Create contribution workflows that prevent bottlenecks while maintaining quality control
• Apply decision frameworks for handling edge cases and competing needs
• Build feedback loops that capture practitioner needs and drive system evolution

02Lead design systems work in complex contexts

4 points

• Make strategic tradeoffs when underfunded, understaffed, or operating as a team of one
• Navigate competing priorities, conflicting stakeholder needs, and resource constraints
• Architect multi-brand or multi-product systems through layered library architectures
• Adapt design systems to organizational change, mergers, rebrands, and platform shifts

03Evolve, scale, and future-proof your system practice

4 points

• Track system health through both qualitative and quantitative measures that demonstrate product impact
• Manage versioning, deprecation, and technical debt as systems age
• Identify practical applications of AI in design system work
• Develop political acumen and organizational influence skills essential for design systems leadership

00Understand UX assessments

3 points

• How they fit alongside user research
• UX teardowns, design reviews, and competitive analyses
• Heuristics, best practices, and design principles

01Learn the benefits of UX assessments

4 points

• Identifying potential usability issues and areas for improvement
• Determining whether user interface principles and best practices are in place
• Conducting a comparable UX assessment of competing product experiences
• Prioritizing product roadmaps when there is no time for research or data collection, or when another perspective is needed

02How to select a usability inspection method

4 points

• Heuristic analysis
• Pluralistic and cognitive walkthroughs
• Consistency and standards reviews
• The PURE method for quantifying ease of use

00Develop the UX coaching mindset

4 points

• Understand the role of a UX coach within their product team
• Empowerment vs. management
• Grow in self-awareness, empathy, and positivity
• Fixed vs. growth mindsets

01Gain the communication skills for building a cohesive UX team

4 points

• The importance of active listening
• Practice inquiry-based leadership with effective question-asking and feedback models
• Empathetic leadership and recognizing bias
• Differentiate between strategic and tactical outcomes

02Master conflict resolution techniques

5 points

• Identify and address conflicts
• Collaborative problem-solving
• Individual team-member communication preferences
• Identify and resolve common team toxins
• Create a healthy work environment where everyone can thrive

03Craft language to impress stakeholders

3 points

• Convey UX concepts to diverse stakeholders
• Inclusive communication
• Framing and adaptive communication

00Build your UX strategy

5 points

• Define UX vision and mission by aligning user insights and business objectives
• Deliver a UX roadmap that drives organizational results, along with cultural change
• Put your UX strategy ideas into action
• Synthesize customer data from many sources to identify strategic opportunities
• Recommend innovative products or services

01Communicate your UX strategy

5 points

• Target who to involve in creation and execution
• Build buy-in across Agile development teams
• Break down silos by orienting your organization around your customers
• Influence to remove roadblocks and improve the effectiveness of UX teams
• Mentor, coach, and train all UX team members on UX strategy

02Measure and promote the success of your UX Strategy

0 points

00Develop an effective content strategy

4 points

• Essential components of content strategy
• Setting content goals and metrics
• Measuring and optimizing your strategy
• Inventories and audits to evaluate and maintain content

01Design research to inform content design

3 points

• Content-focused usability testing
• Structured content for consistency and scalability
• Content and design collaboration

02Establish workflows that work and flow

4 points

• Define and choose a content management model
• Content operations and AI tools for process efficiency
• Planning with editorial calendars
• Training content managers and publishers

03Build editorial standards, design systems, and style guides

2 points

• Establish and enforce content standards
• Ongoing content governance and maintenance

00Establish your crossfunctional journey-management plan

7 points

• Essentials to journey design
• Learn what data and insights to collect for identifying and prioritizing opportunities for improvement
• Define team structures, team roles, where they report, and how to work across silos to establish healthy crossfunctional networks
• Establish your team’s journey design operations and processes
• Tools and technology to support your plan, like customer data structures, journey analytics, and customer data management tools
• Choose strategic signals to create a customer journey health score
• Identify ways to personalize the journey experience

01Discover how to build stakeholder buy-in

4 points

• Communicate success metrics with a journey insights program
• Quantify and convey the impact of pain points
• Make a business case and forecast business impact with behavioral metrics
• Emphasize efficiency with defined operations and a repeatable process

00Understand the design thinking philosophy

2 points

• What is design thinking?
• Design thinking history and theory

01Build empathy

3 points

• Make sense of scattered research and insights
• Understand users through empathy maps
• As-is scenario (journey) mapping

02Define the real problem

5 points

• Understand the user’s pain points
• Pinpoint areas of opportunity
• Craft meaningful need statements
• Anatomy of an effective need statement: Who, what, so that
• How need statements relate to product management and development

03Explore and ideate

5 points

• Use needs statements to generate big ideas
• Feature vs. Idea
• Quick sketching tactics
• Discuss complex experiences in a distilled manner
• How to converge and remix

04Prioritize and evaluate

3 points

• Prioritization grids and affinity maps
• Evaluate ideas based on importance and feasibility
• Identify no-brainers vs. big bets

05Maintain momentum

5 points

• Roadmapping
• Plan activities
• Action Items
• Design thinking and agile
• Practicing design thinking by yourself

00Establish consistency across design decisions

2 points

• Define design principles
• Build buy-in and adoption of principles

01Assess and improve your decision-making and your team’s

5 points

• Determine your decision-making style
• Diagnose decision problems
• Know when to deviate from best practices
• Decide when more research is needed
• Improve group decision-making and avoid common pitfalls

02Balance between conflicting priorities

5 points

• Perform a tradeoff analysis
• Consider costs and opportunity costs
• Short-term conversions vs. long-term relationships
• Technical feasibility vs. user experience
• End inefficient debates

03Overcome natural biases and bad habits

3 points

• Systematically integrate rational, structured analysis
• Identify common cognitive biases that influence decisions
• Journaling and pre-mortems

00Understand DesignOps and its responsibilities

4 points

• Introduction to DesignOps
• DesignOps Thinking vs. DesignOps the Role
• Responsibilities of DesignOps roles
• Aligning DesignOps priorities to current challenges

01Scale design teams

4 points

• Common team models and roles
• Evolving team structure over time
• Finding and building the right skills
• Implementing PeopleOps

02Scale UX work

3 points

• Design systems and research repositories
• The evolving role of ResearchOps
• Shared tools and platforms for scaling workflows

03Scale UX impact

3 points

• Defining design quality
• Measuring UX design impact
• Educating and enabling design team partners

00Design AI interactions that solve real user problems

4 points

• Identify the user needs and pain points that AI features should address
• Translate stakeholder and user expectations into interface requirements
• Understand the current capabilities of AI that impact what you can design and how users will interact with it
• Learn from examples of good and bad AI interface design

01Implement user interfaces for your AI products and features

5 points

• Incorporate user data to inform design decisions
• Decide on UI frameworks for AI features
• Establish user trust in your AI products
• Define the amount of transparency needed for your AI product
• Learn from examples of good and bad AI user interfaces

02Help stakeholders choose the right technology for your users’ needs

3 points

• Synthesize up-to-date information about AI model capabilities with product needs
• Conduct meaningful conversations with developers around AI technology tradeoffs
• Learn how current limitations of AI technology informs crucial design decisions

00Deeply understand complex applications

4 points

• How complex tasks differ from simple ones
• Complex app user types and what they need
• Support highly-trained users with specialized knowledge
• Designing with limited domain knowledge

01Explore case studies from a variety of domains

4 points

• Government and public safety
• Finance and healthcare
• Enterprise and supply chain
• Engineering and data science

02Adapt the design process for complex applications

4 points

• Understand and model the work domain
• Research methods for studying complex workflows
• Recruit and test with expert users
• Quantitatively measuring complex work

03Use patterns and strategies for complex application design

6 points

• Support advanced decision making
• Mitigate risks of executing high-impact or high-value tasks
• Accommodate multiple levels of expertise and experience
• Navigate massive datasets
• Design for multi-step and long-duration processes
• Provide guidance and just-in-time learning

00Understand the discovery phase

4 points

• The value of discovery
• Risks of skipping discovery
• What discovery involves
• When discovery is needed

01Define and frame the problem

3 points

• Reframe solution requests
• Get to the real problem using the 5 Whys
• Frame the problem through a problem statement

02Plan a discovery

3 points

• Who needs to be involved: roles and responsibilities
• Set a goal for discovery
• Plan a realistic schedule and timebox activities

03Conduct a discovery

4 points

• Align your team around a common goal
• Identify unknowns to explore
• Understand research activities commonly used in discovery
• Analyze and synthesize

04Share and use discovery findings

4 points

• Use mapping techniques to facilitate learning and problem-solving
• Presenting discovery findings
• Creating effective How-Might-We questions for ideation
• Wrapping up discovery effectively before moving to design

00Overcome common obstacles to effective ideation

4 points

• Building comfort in ideation sessions
• Avoid the desire to shut down ideas prematurely
• Create space for ideation within the organization
• Invite buy-in and preliminary participation from stakeholders

01Increase the quality and quantity of ideas you generate

5 points

• Generate many ideas in response to any problem
• Move on from initial ideas to explore deeper insights
• Accept and build on ideas contributed by others
• Documenting ideas
• Using research artifacts in ideation

02Select appropriate ideation techniques for your needs

3 points

• Judge the amount of time required for different ideation activities
• Order activities logically and adapt them to current needs
• Leverage research findings and artifacts (such as personas)

03Keep team members and stakeholders engaged during ideation

5 points

• Invite the right people to join ideation sessions
• Prepare the necessary materials for in-person and remote workshops
• Prepare shared digital spaces and gather physical materials for ideation
• Demonstrate the necessity of ideation for productivity and business value
• Manage challenging participants

04Prioritize the ideas that come out of ideation sessions

2 points

• Combine similar ideas and prioritize them for implementation
• Identify the most valuable ideas from ideation sessions that deserve future action

00Understand the need for efficiency, adaptability, and resilience

3 points

• Explore industry frameworks that support efficiency and adaptability
• Learn techniques to respond to evolving requirements while maintaining user-centric design principles
• Develop a structured mindset to incorporate adaptability into day-to-day UX processes

01Identify opportunities to streamline UX workflows

4 points

• Leverage artificial intelligence
• Understand the importance of staying updated with emerging UX trends and technologies
• Learn strategies for researching and evaluating trends to integrate into ongoing projects
• Understand the role of experimentation in driving UX innovation and problem-solving

02Maintain alignment and morale during change

4 points

• Understand the differences between fixed and growth mindsets and their implications in UX practice
• Apply reflective practices (e.g., post-project retrospectives) to create reusable frameworks
• Learn strategies for managing change, uncertainty, and shifting priorities in UX workflows
• Foster an adaptive team culture that embraces flexibility and continuous improvement

00Learn about current emerging patterns

4 points

• Novel technologies like artificial intelligence (AI)
• Popular visual design styles like neumorphism, glassmorphism, and brutalism
• Changes in content strategy, content structure, and information architecture
• Cultural shifts like the increasing importance of inclusive and responsible design

01Distinguish fads and trends from emerging patterns

3 points

• Understand the innovation-hype cycle
• Differentiate between novelty and lasting innovation
• Future-proof design decisions by anticipating future changes

02Evaluate an emerging pattern to see if it is worth following or adopting

3 points

• Utilize inspection methods to evaluate emerging patterns
• Choose the appropriate research and inspection methods for discovery, prototyping, and validation
• Articulate design justifications for emerging but unproven design patterns

00Use UX workshops to achieve key goals

3 points

• Gather insight across multiple disciplines and roles
• Build a shared vision
• Overcome a design challenge

01Plan and run efficient, engaging workshops

6 points

• Define goals and agendas
• Establish a clear structure
• Determine attendees and assign roles
• Prepare your participants
• Concluding UX workshops
• Running workshops remotely

02Build a toolkit of workshop structures and techniques

5 points

• Key facilitation skills and strategies
• Brainstorming, discovery, and visioning workshops
• Planning and evaluation workshops
• Mapping and sorting
• Prioritization and voting

00Develop a global UX strategy

2 points

• Understand cultural dimensions and their impact on design and team dynamics
• Balance global consistency with local relevance in products and processes

01Create culturally adaptive designs

2 points

• Adapt UI patterns and content for different cultural contexts
• Design flexible systems that accommodate diverse user needs and preferences

02Conduct international user research

2 points

• Plan and execute remote global user testing
• Analyze and interpret data across cultural boundaries

03Lead diverse, distributed UX teams

2 points

• Foster inclusive communication in multicultural environments
• Implement effective workflows for global collaboration

04Navigate global UX challenges

2 points

• Address ethical considerations in cross-cultural UX work
• Manage stakeholder expectations across different cultural contexts

00Interpret heatmaps to identify behaviors and pain points

4 points

• Spot patterns using click, scroll, move, and revenue heatmaps
• Learn what different click behaviors reveal about intent and friction
• Understand the strengths and limitations of AI-generated heatmaps
• Combine pages into templates and account for sample size

01Combine methods to validate and strengthen findings

2 points

• Triangulate heatmaps with session replays, funnels, and form analytics to build confidence in your findings
• Understand the strengths and limitations of visual analytics, and when to use other methods

02Build an investigatory mindset to uncover deeper insight

2 points

• Ask deeper questions of your data to guide exploration and next steps
• Select the right methods for the question you’re trying to answer

03Inform content and design decisions

4 points

• Optimize content hierarchy based on engagement signals
• Maximize campaign impact by understanding content reach
• Uncover content gaps where users expect to interact
• Identify friction in funnels and forms to improve conversion rates

04Prioritize findings to maximize impact

2 points

• Use atomic research principles to turn observations into insight
• Apply objective prioritization frameworks to decide what to fix first

00Articulate the importance of information architecture (IA)

2 points

• Why a strong IA can save your company time and money
• Essential logic and concepts you need to build a useful, usable, and extensible information architecture

01Understand key information architecture concepts

3 points

• User information-seeking models
• The pillars of information architecture: structure types, organization schemes, label names, and metadata
• Mental models and cognitive models of categorization

02Design and evaluate information architecture

5 points

• Creating user-centered categories
• Identifying issues and potential solutions
• Measuring baseline performance
• Testing structure, schemes, and labels
• Card sorting and tree testing research methods

00Apply proven interaction design principles, patterns, and strategies

5 points

• Design effective inputs, forms, processes, and paths
• Prevent errors and build trust
• Provide useful feedback
• Design for various devices and assistive technologies
• Craft clear and actionable language

01Evaluate usability and effectiveness with interactive prototypes

3 points

• Build realistic interactive prototypes to simulate user interactions
• Adapt prototypes to test and iterate on design ideas effectively
• Understand and address challenges with interactive prototypes

02Learn about the impact interactions have on digital products

5 points

• Guide users toward actions that meet their needs and support business goals
• Minimize interaction cost
• Minimize cognitive load
• Leverage micro-interactions
• Provide clarity and guidance

03Understand how people approach and process interactions

2 points

• Align interactions with user expectations and behaviors
• Ensure consistency and predictability

00Articulate the goals and benefits of journey mapping

3 points

• Creating empathy, alignment, and buy-in
• Storytelling through a visual artifact
• Determining when journey mapping is useful

01Deeply understand the elements of a customer journey map

3 points

• Actors and scenarios
• Actions, mindsets, and emotions
• Touchpoints, channels, and findings

02Follow the 5 steps of creating a journey map

5 points

• Determine critical up-front constraints
• Gather research findings: Contextual inquiry, task analysis, diary studies, and quantitative data
• Synthesize your findings
• Evaluate the experience: Identify transitional volatility, gaps, opportunities, and values
• Craft the visual narrative and key takeaways

03Communicate and act on your findings

4 points

• Prioritizing findings
• Communicating opportunities
• Turning your insights into action
• Envisioning optimized experiences

00Fit UX in your organization’s culture

4 points

• Assess business goals and how UX can help meet them
• Justify UX budget to best meet goals
• Nurture goodwill and expectations about UX
• Make UX an expected and lasting part of the development process

01Hire exceptional UX talent

2 points

• Create job levels, descriptions, and pay scales to structure job expectations and growth
• Hire a top team, including full-time staff, contractors, and consultants

02Build your team’s skills

2 points

• Perform a skills gap analysis to determine how to bolster UX
• Mentor, develop, and review the team to ensure positive communication, met expectations, high performance, job satisfaction, and high retention

03Optimize your team’s effort

2 points

• Develop processes that ensure a solid and viable infrastructure for UX
• Incorporate UX within different development approaches, including Agile

04Maximize your team’s impact

2 points

• Prioritize the work to best meet goals given the available resources
• Measure the impact of UX work

00Use Lean UX to fit within Agile environments

7 points

• The tenets of Lean UX
• Applying Lean UX techniques to keep teams focused on the right opportunities
• Collaborative cross-functional involvement
• Activities to perform before development starts
• How to be effective during scrum meetings
• Getting to "done" every sprint
• When a spike is best used (and should not be used) for UX work

01Understand and implement the Agile development process

7 points

• Benefits of Agile
• Agile development fundamentals
• Delivering quality products quickly
• Creating flexibility to change course as needed
• The "pure" process, hybrid process, and Waterfall
• Creating user stories
• Designing lean visuals in Agile

02Overcome the challenges of Agile

7 points

• Communication and working with multiple scrum teams
• Getting UX in the team priorities and schedule
• Design and research activities that work well in Agile
• Working ahead vs. in parallel with developers
• Balancing UX work before, during, and after a sprint
• Estimating UX work in the backlog
• Finding time to fix design issues retroactively

03Improve the product iteratively

5 points

• Choosing an iterative delivery process
• Learning from user feedback
• Having a voice in the backlog
• Sharing beyond the scrum team
• Tracking UX findings and ideas between releases

00Understand the art and the science of influencing

4 points

• Theories of persuasion and communication
• Build influence across all levels of your organization
• Select the best method for the context you're in
• Determine your “default” communication style and make it even better

01Develop influencing strategies and communication skills

3 points

• How to influence even when you don't have authority
• Presentation and public speaking tips
• Communicating with clarity and inspiration

02Build your reputation

3 points

• Techniques involving and motivating teams and stakeholders
• Traits of effective UX leaders
• Effectively respond to difficult situations and resistance

00Establish or reinforce a benchmarking practice

3 points

• When, why, and how to collect UX benchmarks
• Choose and define meaningful UX metrics
• Decide which benchmarking methodologies you’ll use (surveys, analytics, or quantitative usability testing)

01Track UX improvements over time

2 points

• Determine whether or not design changes are having a positive impact on the experience
• Compare your experience against your competitors

02Determine and prove the value of UX

4 points

• Calculate the return on investment (ROI) of UX projects
• Connect UX metrics to business goals (KPIs)
• Put a monetary value on improved experiences
• Use ROI to decide whether or not to fund a project

00Build a foundation of mobile-design essentials

4 points

• Mobile limitations and strengths
• Principles and design patterns for mobile
• Why users choose to use a mobile site vs. a mobile app
• Mobile behaviors and activities

01Learn best practices for critical components and organization strategies

5 points

• Navigation and search: Hamburger menus, tab bars, navigation bars, search design, secondary navigation, and more
• Listing items: Hub-and-spoke, deck-of-cards, horizontal swiping, carousels, cards, and grids
• Form design: Input-field guidelines and errors
• Mobile content: Scannability, images, videos, tables
• Logging in and onboarding

00Build and organize your team

6 points

• Assess and prioritize work
• Optimize time management
• Determine roles and responsibilities
• Establish best-practice processes
• Create and track a budget
• Interview and hire UX talent

01Communicate and promote your team’s success

3 points

• Reporting to leadership
• Working with other teams
• Justifying costs

02Effectively manage individuals on the team

4 points

• Support a range of experience levels, from new UXers to leads
• How to mentor and encourage
• Dealing with performance issues
• How to complete an annual review

00Define and build your omnichannel user experience

6 points

• Visualize how users engage with organizations through digital and physical touchpoints
• Understand how users choose which devices and channels to use and how they transition between them
• Understand the customer journey through their interactions over time
• Diagnose pain points in customer journeys
• Communicate the ROI of journey-level improvements
• Apply guidelines for the 5 components that create excellent omnichannel experiences

01Gain stakeholder support for improving your omnichannel experience

4 points

• Articulate why companies should focus on exceptional omnichannel experiences
• Determine your organization’s omnichannel maturity and prepare to discuss the results with your team
• Identify places to start driving organizational change to adopt omnichannel strategies (even if others aren’t bought in yet)
• Explore technical capabilities that support cohesive experiences

02Discover how research can help you improve

3 points

• Run your own omnichannel research to discover pain points
• Measure changes and improvements in the customer experience
• Use customer journey maps as a diagnostic tool

00Understand the definition of personas

7 points

• What personas are and why they work
• How user profiles, demographics, and customer segmentation differ
• See how personas create a common language about user needs and shift away from making assumptions about users
• How many personas are needed
• Understand the benefits of having personas and how they help your team
• Explore common challenges teams encounter creating personas
• Where personas fit into the product development process

01Discover how to make personas work for you

6 points

• How to utilize personas throughout the design process
• Use personas to drive feature generation and definition
• Identify user needs, motivations, and attitudes important to your project
• Personas to plan and scope your product
• Ideate design ideas with user scenarios
• Evaluate your own products and compare to competitors using personas

02Create well-researched personas

4 points

• Learn a systematic approach to persona creation
• Methods for user research and data collection
• How to turn research data into useful personas
• Creating lightweight personas when faced with limited time and resources

03Establish support for your personas long into the future

4 points

• A communication strategy that encourages your team to use personas and builds acceptance
• Create supporting artifacts to promote personas
• Persona maintenance to keep your personas relevant
• When to reuse or retire personas

00Recognize and respond to users’ emotional reactions

4 points

• Understand the main types of emotional reactions to designs
• Create a positive first impression
• Put users in a state of cognitive ease
• Build trust with users to improve credibility

01Reduce decision-making difficulty for users

3 points

• Understand the factors that make it difficult to make choices
• Help users differentiate between alternatives
• Improve satisfaction and reduce regret

02Increase user motivation and satisfaction

2 points

• Accommodate the fundamental human motivations
• Create designs to facilitate autonomy

03Leverage cognitive biases to assist and protect users

2 points

• Protect users from potential confusion or dissatisfaction
• Help users recognize what they are looking for

04Ethically persuade users to your way of thinking

4 points

• Encourage future behavior based on past behavior
• Motivate users to give something back by giving them something first
• Leverage the voice of others to bring credibility
• Proactively avoid tricking users with deceptive (dark) design patterns

00Clarify roles and responsibilities on product teams

3 points

• Explore the distinct responsibilities of UX and product management roles
• Understand key distinctions and healthy overlaps between UX and PM work
• Help teams build shared clarity around who does what, and when

01Create empowered teams and individuals

3 points

• Build strategic, autonomous teams that own their outcomes
• Shift from project-focused thinking to product-focused mindsets
• Prioritize meaningful outcomes over shipped outputs

02Build strong partnerships across the team

3 points

• Establish the communication foundations that healthy partnerships require
• Define shared goals that align UX and product priorities
• Diagnose and solve common collaboration blockers before they escalate

03Navigate conflict and influence outcomes

4 points

• Apply the core pillars of influence to make your voice heard in cross-functional settings
• Work effectively within team politics and negotiate with confidence
• Set priorities and get critical UX work onto the product roadmap
• Resolve conflict with strategies that preserve relationships and momentum

00Advocate for ResearchOps

3 points

• Understand what ResearchOps is
• Be prepared to argue why it’s needed
• Prove the return on investment

01Identify process improvements to boost efficiency

4 points

• Streamline and expand recruitment
• Create an internal research panel
• Track and manage research requests
• Foster a strategic research culture

02Build research capacity

3 points

• Create a User Research Playbook
• Plan research skill development
• Democratize research effectively and responsibility

03Socialize user research insights

2 points

• Build a research repository
• Highlight insights through atomic research

04Grow a formal ResearchOps function

4 points

• ResearchOps roles and responsibilities
• Hiring for ResearchOps
• Tracking the effectiveness of ResearchOps initiatives
• Hire for ResearchOps

00Use service blueprinting

5 points

• Broaden your understanding of your product or service
• Align “frontstage” user needs with “backstage” employee experiences and/or processes
• Create value for the customer that extends beyond the traditional touchpoints
• Link customer pain points to organizational shortcomings or redundancies
• Identify opportunities for improvement

01Understand service design and service blueprints

3 points

• Service design compared to user and experience design
• Front-stage needs and back-stage processes
• The 5 principles of service design

02Develop and deliver service blueprints

5 points

• Service blueprints vs. experience mapping vs. journey mapping
• The 6 phases of service blueprinting
• Aligning business models to service design
• The service lifecycle
• Facilitating blueprinting workshops

00Understand essential statistics concepts in a UX context

6 points

• Center and variability of a data distribution
• Continuous, discrete, and binary metrics
• True-score theory
• Measurement error
• Confidence intervals
• Statistical significance

01Determine how much you can trust your data

4 points

• Why a design with better metrics might not actually be better
• How to verify whether the numbers from a study are trustworthy
• How to protect your quantitative study from measurement errors
• Which questions to ask when presented with numbers

02Learn statistics methods and how to apply them to UX data from a variety of sources

5 points

• Master statistical tools for analyzing UX performance metrics (success rates, task-completion times) and self-reported metrics (single-ease questions, SUS, NPS)
• Compare differences between designs
• Understand if your design matches a desired benchmark
• Decide how many participants to recruit for your study to get reliable results
• Structure research studies to maximize statistical power and relevance

03Report quantitative findings clearly

3 points

• How to share your results with stakeholders
• How to avoid statistics-heavy language
• Preventing misuse of numerical findings by using the right language

00Craft a compelling story

2 points

• Components and construction
• Building a narrative

01Present ideas and concepts at all stages of the design process

2 points

• Turn research findings and design concepts into illuminating stories
• Integrate storytelling in ideation work

02Customize your presentation for your audience

3 points

• Sell ideas to stakeholders and clients
• Unify development teams around users
• Selecting a medium for your presentation

03Enhance your story with imagery and visuals

3 points

• Create a storyboard to communicate ideas
• Craft more compelling reports
• Explore creative mediums for storytelling

04Refine your presentation skills

2 points

• Craft your language, presence, and timing
• Minimize audience distractions

00Overcome common stakeholder obstacles

4 points

• Common stakeholder characteristics and obstacles
• Having crucial conversations
• Managing stakeholder opinions and feedback
• Strategic compromise for mutual benefit

01Conduct stakeholder research

4 points

• Understand stakeholders and their needs
• Determining stakeholder needs and expectations
• Identifying and prioritizing stakeholders with stakeholder mapping
• Efficiently balancing stakeholder time and their involvement

02Negotiate and compromise for mutual benefit

5 points

• Getting buy-in, commitment, and sign-off
• Developing a tangible stakeholder communication strategy
• Building business cases for your UX work
• Ideating with stakeholders
• Leading workshops with stakeholders

03Build political currency

2 points

• Developing a reputation as a leader in research, design, and content
• Building a network of advocates

00Discover when to use surveys and what they are

3 points

• When should/shouldn’t you use a survey?
• Myths about surveys
• Good (and bad) reasons to use surveys in the UX process

01Understand the tenets of good survey design

5 points

• Establish goals and create questionnaires that support them
• What are good questions and how do you fix bad ones
• Open-ended vs. close-ended questions
• Avoiding common survey biases
• Build your questionnaire considering question order and audience

02Develop impactful results with your analysis

2 points

• Qualitative analysis methods
• Reporting and tracking results

00Anticipate and explain user behavior

5 points

• Important principles from cognitive psychology and human-computer interaction
• Go beyond guidelines and best practices to understand the underlying reasoning
• How users consciously and unconsciously decide what to interact with (links, text, and features)
• Strategies for information-seeking, processing, and retrieval
• Mental models for predicting interactions and outcomes

01Understand human abilities and limitations

8 points

• How people process visual stimuli
• Using principles of perception to direct attention
• Memory and retention capacity
• Long-term, short-term, and working memory
• Cognitive load and information overload
• How people perceive the world around them
• Factors that influence reading and comprehension
• Problem solving, decision making, and interaction cost

02Apply psychology to digital design

5 points

• Design better products by knowing how humans think
• Directing users’ attention
• Influencing how people perceive your designs
• Create a positive first impression
• Appealing to peoples’ emotional processing

00Understand the UX philosophy and mindset

3 points

• Why UX is a valuable business investment
• The differences between key related concepts (for example, UX, UI, usability, user-centered design)
• The importance of studying your users and what they need

01Influence your organization’s approach to UX

3 points

• Estimation of your organization’s UX maturity
• Promotion and education about UX
• Advocacy for cost-effective and iterative design

02Understand the UX design cycle when to use each UX activity

6 points

• UX research methods (interviews, usability testing, analytics, and more)
• Attitudinal vs. behavioral methods
• When to use different types of research throughout the project lifecycle
• How to conduct heuristic evaluations to quickly assess usability
• The UX work involved in each layer of an interface
• UX deliverables (like personas and journey maps)

00Understand the most common and useful UX deliverables

5 points

• Research reports as documents, videos, and presentations
• Personas and user journey maps
• Flowcharts and wireflows
• Sketches, wireframes, and prototypes
• Design specifications and documentation for handoff

01Use deliverables to manage UX

4 points

• Storytelling and communicating UX value
• Documenting progress
• Focusing the decision-making process
• Specifying requirements for implementation

02Choose the right type of deliverable for the purpose

7 points

• Determining the audience and their goals, expectations, and needs
• Recognizing and accommodating the development and project phase
• Considering UX maturity and how it should affect deliverables
• Ideating and collaborating with a multi-disciplinary team
• Getting buy-in from stakeholders
• Communicating UX with developers
• Working with external clients and internal team members

03Anatomy of an effective deliverable

6 points

• Identifying the context
• Defining a purpose
• Presenting findings and evidence
• Communicating actionable solutions
• Gauging and measuring deliverables’ success
• Using appropriate levels of detail and fidelity