When it comes to UX research, there are two major categories: evaluating what’s already been done, or exploring and defining unknown spaces. Evaluative work is great, but if you’re starting from scratch or trying to figure out who your users are, you’re going to need to turn to foundational research, which involves the exploration of users, contexts, or possibilities. This approach can help you understand what you should be building and for whom.

In this course, Amanda Stockwell guides you through the ways foundational research can help uncover new opportunities and areas for improvement, regardless of your current state. Amanda starts by describing what foundational research is and how it differs from evaluative research in UX. She then covers different forms of foundational research like ethnography, data mining, and market research. Much as you wouldn’t start building a house from the third floor, building a strong foundation to your UX research will bolster every step going forward.

When your job as a UX researcher is entirely based on learning about people and their behaviors, how do you adjust when you can’t conduct research in person? In this course, research expert Amanda Stockwell details the keys to conducting remote UX research, from recruiting participants—and making sure they show up—to planning, preparing, running and remote sessions. Amanda covers the benefits of conducting your UX research in a virtual environment, as well as situations where a more traditional research approach would be beneficial. Having a command of remote methods in addition to in-person research practices will help you conduct your work effectively, regardless of the situation.

Learn the basics of UX DesignOps: integrating a design team into an agile, business-driven development process. DesignOps is a human-centered approach to better planning and collaborating using an iterative agile approach that helps a design or product team scale become more successful. This course provides an overview of the practice, from designing better workflows to scaling your UX team, Plus, learn how to work effectively with developers and stakeholders and measure your success. Instructor and UX expert Dee Sadler follows a successful UX department through the DesignOps process and explains all the interdependencies and communication channels needed to make it work efficiently—every step of the way.

While UX teams typically work well with product teams, it’s a little less intuitive when UX teams must work closely with developers. A lot of the troubles that arise when UX and developer teams work together are the result of the teams not knowing enough about what each team does. That’s where DesignOps comes in. DesignOps can take the unknowns out of the equation by creating a UX process and making sure there is consistency in the handoff of deliverables. In this course, Dee Sadler teaches you the basics of UX DesignOps, covering the process of interfacing with business and strategy departments alongside developers in an agile process. Dee outlines the steps a successful UX department follows and the interdependencies and communication channels needed to make it work efficiently. After this course, you’ll have a better idea of the benefits UX teams and developer teams can both reap by working closer together, and how DesignOps helps facilitate better interaction.

One way to enhance customer experience and build better products is to plot your ideal customer’s journey chronologically. That way you can identify weak moments in the buying experience—and make those moments stronger. First, gather data about the pain points your customers face. Note how they find out about your business, compare competitors, and become a customer. When you document how this progression happens, you create a map you can use to make informed business decisions—a journey map. In this course, learn how to research and capture your customer's end-to-end journey through UX journey mapping. Market researcher and bestselling author Sarah Weise explains the elements of a journey map, how to gather data by conducting research with customers, and how to synthesize results. She covers how to identify opportunities to create products, experiences, and marketing that align your customer’s needs with your business goals.

Studying your customers’ experience—especially as they interact with your product or brand in the context of their lives—leads to discoveries that help you make strong business, product, and UX decisions. In this course, learn how to capture snapshots of the moments that matter by conducting mobile diary studies through text, screen recording, or selfie videos. Sarah Weise explains this qualitative research technique to gather real-life data from customers in a way that will meet your UX or market research goals. Using data gathered in mobile diary studies, you can make value-based decisions by mapping a customer’s journey, identifying buyer touch points, understanding how to segment your audience, conducting exploratory research, and more. By the end of this course, you’ll be ready to perform mobile diary studies that result in actionable and meaningful insights.

At the heart of every web application and framework (such as Angular or React) lies the DOM, the Document Object Model. In this course, instructor W. Scott Means explores the DOM from the bottom up. After a fast-paced introduction to the Node interface and DOM trees, Scott takes things to the next level by constructing a functioning HTML parser. He shows you how HTML source code is translated into a complete DOM tree, including comments, text nodes, and elements with attribute nodes. Then, Scott demonstrates how the resulting DOM tree can be traversed and transformed using DOM-specific maps and lists, tree references, and document fragments to produce pretty-printed HTML output. He concludes the course with advice on how you can practice what you’ve learned and get one step closer to mastering the DOM.

As more people in the world of post-production continue to wear many hats and perform multiple roles, it’s more important than ever to have a solid foundation of the tools, techniques, and terminology that’s required knowledge in the field. In this weekly course, Nick Harauz and Eran Stern guide you through key concepts and timely topics. Each week, they present two episodes, the first breaking down an important post-production concept, and the second providing a quick tip that gives you a shot of knowledge that you can immediately apply to your work. If you’re looking to keep your post-production skills sharp, check in every week with Nick and Eran as they offer up their lessons on industry standard tools like Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, Cinema 4D and more.

As a manager, your most important job is helping your direct reports create great results within their roles and thrive under your leadership. A key part of your role, therefore, is to be able to use the performance appraisal process to create a space for meaningful conversations about performance and clear guidelines on how your employees can succeed. In this course, join Alisa Cohn—executive coach and leadership development expert—as she walks you through the performance review process when you have to deliver it virtually. Alisa helps you prepare for the conversation, think through how to deliver tough messages, and give a “grade” if you need to. She also covers how to set up your virtual environment, guide your employees as they complete their self-assessments, and deal with difficult reactions like crying or defensiveness. Most importantly, Alisa clarifies how to get into the right mindset to help your employees understand where they stand and how they can grow.

Research shows 90% of sales have moved to video conferencing, and 50% of sales leaders believe this model will continue. Instructor Shari Levitin walks you through how this transformation to virtual selling works and how to make it work for you. First, Shari covers why virtual selling is vital, how to find your focus, and how to keep the technology that you use from becoming a distraction. The course goes into how to set up a productive home environment. Shari discusses how to research your clients online and on LinkedIn to build trust and credibility with your prospects. Next, Shari explains why it is harder to build trust online and how to do it anyway. The course takes you through how to incorporate all five senses and the right communication skills in order to create engaging virtual meetings. Shari emphasizes the importance of planning the next steps and putting your knowledge of virtual selling into action.

Microsoft Visio is a popular diagramming app that's used in a variety of industries. In this course, David Rivers will help you master the intricacies of this powerful tool, whether you're using Visio to create a flowchart, map out a network, or draw a floor plan. David shows you how to open files and adjust the UI, then steps you through creating, adding, removing, and changing connected diagrams, including SmartShapes. He shows you how to add a variety of additional objects to diagrams, including graphics, ScreenTips, and more. David covers themes, shape fills and effects, shape lines, and creating an Azure diagram. He goes over using AWS shapes in a diagram, as well as using Visio to update workplace floorplans, create a wireframe for a mobile app, and create a crime scene diagram. It’s important to be able to share your work, so David concludes with various ways you can publish and share your diagrams.

If you are a responsible programmer, you regularly test your code to make sure it behaves the way you expect it to behave. Unit tests are the most common type of developer test, and most programmers rely on a unit test framework to create and run those tests. In this course, Walt Ritscher takes a deep dive into the unit test tools available in Visual Studio. Walt gives an overview of unit tests and how they integrate with Visual Studio, then takes a deeper look into unit tests with MSTest and xUnit framework and how each is fully integrated into the Visual Studio Test Explorer, He also reviews additional Visual Studio test features like CodeLens, Live Unit Testing, and code coverage.

In this course, instructor Jon Galloway offers up an introduction to Visual Studio for Mac, the integrated development environment for .NET applications from Microsoft. With Visual Studio, you can build all the different programs, apps, websites, and services that you can build with .NET, but with a user interface and tools to help you get started and be more productive as you’re developing. Jon guides you through the basics of installing Visual Studio, and gives a tour of the most important features it has to offer, like code navigation, debugging, testing, and collaboration. After installing the free software, he shows you how to create a C# app, compile it, and debug it. Jon also shows how to get more involved with the large .NET and Visual Studio communities, ranging from livestreams to in-person meetups.

Want to work smarter with Visual Studio? This series of tips and tricks are each less than a minute long, so you can transform your Visual Studio workflow in your spare moments. Learn how to use Tabify and Untabify to fix inconsistent spacing, use multiple carets to select and edit text, and rename classes and namespaces to match file and folder names. Discover how to refactor If statements and get a file path from the editor tab. Plus, see how to clone the Solution Explorer window to quickly do a side-by-side comparison of project structures across projects.

Discover tips and techniques that can make working in Microsoft Visual Studio simpler, faster, and more interesting. In this course designed for .NET developers, Walt Ritscher shines a spotlight on helpful shortcuts and productivity boosters for Visual Studio. He dives into a variety of topics, including filtering views, using custom keyboard commands, grouping files with tabs, duplicating code, and previewing files. Plus, learn about helpful extensions that augment the power of Visual Studio.

Prefer working with an IDE instead of the command line? Discover how to use Git, the defacto distributed source control tool, effectively within Visual Studio. Throughout this course, instructor Walt Ritscher delves into the mapping between Git and GitHub commands and the tools in Visual Studio. After going over key Git concepts, commands, and GUI tools, Walt shows how to initialize a new repository with PowerShell, Visual Studio, and GitHub. He then shows how to add, rename, move and delete files; add a remote repository; clone and fork a repository; and view and handle merge conflicts. Plus, see how to work with branches, create, review and compare pull requests, and more.

The first step to leadership is self-awareness. In this hands-on leadership course, instructor Nevada Lane provides an effective and fun way to build self-awareness through visualization. First, Nevada helps you to identify life events that influenced your development and growth as a leader. She asks you to identify people who have inspired you and to articulate the core principles that drive your own leadership approach. Next, Nevada walks you through identifying your leadership strengths and values. She shows you how to state a vision for what you want to create or how you want to be. Then Nevada encourages you to identify a quote that summarizes an aspect of your values, principles, or vision. She has you pull all these pieces together and build a leadership story graphic. In conclusion, she helps you to identify ways to use your leadership journey graphic, including sharing it with others.

VMware NSX is the most disruptive network technology in recent memory. Demand for employees who understand NSX will continue to grow as the product reaches maturity. In this series of courses, VMware Certified Instructor Rick Crisci helps you understand all the concepts behind NSX-T 3.0. Rick begins with basic networking. He covers networking fundamentals like the OSI model, Layer 2 switching, and maximum transmission units (MTU). Rick goes into ethernet broadcasts, the spanning tree protocol (STP), and base IP standards. He also discusses virtual networking basics like the vSphere standard switches and distributed switches. This course helps you prepare for the VMware VCP-NV exam. To take the VCP-NV exam, you will need to complete some course requirements from VMware. Be sure to check those requirements, as well, as you prepare to get certified.

Note: This course was created by Rick Crisci. We are pleased to host this training in our library.

VMware NSX is the most disruptive network technology in recent memory. Demand for employees who understand NSX will continue to grow as the product reaches maturity. In this series of courses, VMware Certified Instructor Rick Crisci helps you understand all the concepts behind NSX-T 3.0. This course highlights management and transport nodes in a vSphere environment. Rick walks you through managing NSX-T with the management plane, the control plane, and the data plane. He explains the architecture and Controller concepts for NSX, then goes over Controller plane sharding. Rick shows you each step in preparing transport nodes for NSX-T, including a useful demo of configuring hosts and VMkernel ports for NSX-T. He concludes with a discussion of uplinks and teaming. This course helps you prepare for the VMware VCP-NV exam.

Note: This course was created by Rick Crisci. We are pleased to host this training in our library.

Demand for employees who understand VMware NSX will continue to grow as the product reaches maturity. In this series of courses, Rick Crisci steps through each of the key concepts behind NSX-T 3.0. In this installment, Rick shines a spotlight on logical switching. Learn how logical switching is done within NSX-T, explore the integration between vSphere 7 and NSX-T, review the tables that make up the control plane of the N-VDS Layer 2 segments, and more. Along the way, Rick provides demos that showcase how these concepts function in the real world.

Note: This course was created by Rick Crisci. We are pleased to host this training in our library.