I don't care what you tell me it doesn't matter if you're a junior designer an experienc designer there will come a day when you might have to create your own case study from scratch and this video is going to show you how to do it in one week using my Google design exercise as an example hey y' welcome back to my studio my name is Ricardo and I'm a ux designer at Google so like I mentioned in the intro there might be a time when you have to create your own case study regardless of where you are in your career it doesn't matter if you're an intern or like a person that's transitioning into ux from a different career that needs to create their own case study because they don't have experience in ux or you might be an experienced designer that is actually trying to get a job in a field within ux if they don't have a lot of experience in like maybe AR so you might have to create your own case study to show that you have the skills to get into that position that maybe your job experience and your resume doesn't reflect regardless of the Reon reason sometimes we might need to create our own case that is from scratch to build our portfolio so what we're going to do is that we're going to look at a framework that you can use to create a ux case study within a week and we're going to use the design exercise that I created for Google when I was applying for an internship as an example because I created that case study in one week we were actually required to have it within one week so a couple of assumptions that I'm making here I'm not counting for time to teach yourself figma like I'm assuming that you know how to use figma you know enough about the design process to get this done in a week so this is this does not account for any learning time okay this framework will be all about crafting designing and formatting your case study so that you can have it all done within that week okay so the first phase I'm calling the discovery and research phase there are a couple of things that you want to tackle in this phas the first thing is the why so so understand your goal when you're choosing the topic for your case study you want to Define your audience and The Who Who Are You designing this for who is the audience for this product who are who are the customers who are the users the third thing that you want to Define is the context where are the users at what's the company what use cases are they trying to sve for and what's the customer's context the other thing you want to think about is what are the constraints what is the MVP for this product you only have 7 days so what can you realistically achieve in those S days something else that I want you to think about is try to find a case study that ties into your interest as a person and as a designer so this is a good opportunity for you to let the hiring manager and the recruiter know a little bit more about you so find an industry or a domain that you are passionate about you don't want to create something generic like a dog walking app or a food delivery app so make it unique make it your own while at the same time making it a real world problem that can show off your skills so if we look at the the case study from the Google exercise when Google gave us this exercise they gave us an idea of what they wanted us to design so for this project they wanted us to design an experience for new students to browse search and propose new student organizations so you want to essentially create something like this for you so in this description you know who your audience is it's students and you know why you're trying to solve for you want to solve for creating some sort of product that allows students to find and propose new student organizations so something simple like that is what you want so that the case study doesn't become too complicated and then what I did is that I expanded on the context by using the university as the client for this particular product so now by doing that I don't have to worry about what is the identity what are the style guys what is the brand ideally you should look for a company that already exists so that you can reuse a lot of those brand business needs business goals Vision in your case study and that can inform your your design okay so now that you know or have a better idea of what product and Industry you want to design for you can start to do the research to pinpoint what problem you want to solve within your product and your case study so what I would do in this next phas is find some users to interview that could fall into potential customers for that company or client that you're designing for ideally what you want is you want to understand from those interviews their needs pain points that then you can use to inform what you designed for in your case study and it doesn't have to be a lot of people just do two or three enough to show in your case study that you talk to real people and you Leverage The qualitative data from those interviews to inform the direction of your design another thing that I would do in this section is make a list of assumptions what are the assumptions that you're making while putting together this case study and then later in the case study you can use those assumptions to test them against the findings and the designs that you're making so at a design exercise for Google I did some secondary research and looked at the psychological Behavior behind what brings people together since we were basically designing an app for students to propose or join student organization so I was really interested in knowing what brought people together and then also looked at what where some of the business meet from the University what were they trying to achieve so using all that information I made slide with the business goals of CCA and then some of the needs that they may have that this potential new app could address and then I had a slide with user interviews like I said you don't have to have many I just pulled three potential candidates and some of the quotes that struck me from the interviews that I performed and also recognized that as a CCA student myself I had some biases so I wanted to make sure that my assumptions were validated through the user interviews then the following slide in this section I talked about some of the patterns that I was seeing emerging from the interview some of the pain points that students were pointing out and then highlighted those under the emergent needs sections basically the emergent needs are those themes that I was seeing coming from the research so I would honestly say that this section should not take more than one to two days right and I say two days just so that you have time to figure out who you're going to interview and how to recruit the two to three people for your user research okay so for the next phase I would focus on on problem and strategy definition so now that you have all of that research you can take a look at how the company can tackle the problems and the pain points that you found in the user research so what features can you build what new experiences can you create to help solve some of the pain points that we saw in the previous phas and then you can move on to specify what are the goals of this case study what are you trying to achieve with this new experience and tie them back to the paino points that you saw in your research so you'll see that in my case study exercise I did not spend a lot of time on this section I basically had a slide talking about what I did in the previous section and then I created a mission statement or a vision statement for the strategy of this app and then I moved on to talking about how I was going to solve the problem and just like I told you I basically outlined three different goals for how we were going to solve the pain points that we uncovered in the research section BAS basically these are the use cases that we're going to design for in the case study you want to think about all of these things while you're in the problem definition phase and start to build your goal statements around those things so that you are starting to put together a cohesive story with your case study now you shouldn't spend too much time in this space I would say maximum one day okay so this is y'all's favorite part or maybe not because this is probably the most work the first thing that I you need to do in the design phase is hit the like button and subscribe to this channel if you're finding this content useful I'm going to get better at including these call to actions in my videos You'll see so in the design section you want to spend time just sketching I would start just sketching and wireframing and just thinking about all of the different ways that you can solve the the problems that you have outlined and then also you could do a mini brainstorm with yourself and just basically mimic what you would do in a team environment and show that process in your case study so once you have your idea you can start to think about the user Journeys that you want to focus on or the customer Journeys what are the edge cases that you need to consider and depending on the feature or the product that you're designing you can choose a primary customer user journey and create your case study based on that primary cuj also depending on how complex your case study is you can start to create a task model to help you think through all the steps that the user needs to complete to use the feature or complete the task that they're trying to achieve with your product so then once you have all of that I would start thinking about the flows what are the flows that you want to create and start wi wireframing those in mid Fidelity and then at this point you have to think about which are the parts of the of the feature and the app that you want to highlight in your case study right because really it's not realistic to create High Fidelity user flows and mocks for every single part of the app and then along those lines based on how much time you have left in the week decide if you want to make a prototype if you want to make animated mocks to show up some of the behaviors and interactions that part is up to you and it's going to be determined by what it is that you want to showcase with this case study like I said this section is a little flexible because it will depend on your skills and on how long it takes you to design something High Fidelity but I budgeted two to 3 days for the design and ideation phase so in my design exercise I talked a little bit about the sketches and the wireframes I talked about some of the key Journeys that I wanted to highlight but you'll notice that as I go through the slides I left some of these Journeys in mid Fidelity I did not make High Fidelity designs for all of them I was very strategic about which parts of the journey I wanted to create High Fidelity mocks because I was doing this in a onewe constraint so I talked a little bit about the information architecture of the app I talk about the primary Journeys to complete some of the tasks that we outlined for example I called out how the user would discover tribes I called out how they would discover campaigns and I basically went through all of the different features the landing pages in the different parts of the app that I wanted to highlight and dedicated a slide to them and also for some of them if they required a flow I would show that and I would also annotate the different parts of the app but you'll see that in my high fidelity mock because I was constrained for time I use the school colors for CCA and then I use material design as the base line for the UI of this app to just make my life faster and then I finished the the slide Deck with an overview of the different parts of the app and showed them in a mock template so that I can show how they look within the context of a mobile device and that was it for the design section so you see this is the section where you're probably going to spend the most time and where you want to show off your skills you want to show that you can take something from problem definition all the way to high Fidel and design marks that means that we have one day left to finish our case study and what I would do in this last day is essentially spend some time crafting the story of the you of your case study how are you going to describe the process what are you going to use to uh share your case study are you going to use a website are you going to use a slide deck like I did in my design exercise and honestly when it comes down to formatting your case study you can spend as much time as you want on it until you feel happy with the way turned out because the way you tell the story of your case studies is going to be crucial to ensuring that the hiring manager and the recruiter understand your project and what you were trying to achieve I would also add a section with learnings and takeaways to close out your case study so that you can communicate what you learned and potential next steps to neatly package your case study at the very end and there you have it that's the entire guide for you to create a case study in one week use this opportunity to showcas who you are be selective and be intentional about the case studies that you choose to create and let the case study be a reflection of who you are as a person and your values as a designer and along those lines don't feel like you need to follow the same process that you see all other Junior designers follow make the process a representation of how you went about doing the case study make sure that your case study is following the product development process and the key parts of the design thinking model that most people are familiar with but aside from that make everything your own make the process your own and can change it wherever you think it makes sense to adapt it to what you're doing and what you're trying to achieve with your case study but don't stop there check out my video on the Adobe case study that I used to get hired at Google so that you can take your case studies to the next level so I will see you all in that video bye