Turn your focus to visual design, which is how a product or technology appears to users. In this part of the course, you'll start to create mockups, which are high-fidelity designs that represent a final product. To create mockups, you'll use visual design elements, like typography, color, and iconography. Elements are often arranged into layouts using methods like grids, containment, and negative space. You'll apply all of these visual design learnings to build on the mobile app designs you've been working on throughout the certificate program.

In this part of the course, you’ll use visual design principles to refine mockups. First, you'll use emphasis to guide users to the most important parts of a page. Next, you'll apply hierarchy, scale, and proportion to organize the elements on each page of your app. Then, you'll consider unity and variety to help elements of your app function together or stand out. Finally, you'll revisit Gestalt Principles, like similarity, proximity, and common region, to help users interpret your designs easily.

Come explore the world of design systems! In this part of the course, you'll be introduced to the parts of a design system, as well as the benefits of using a design system. You'll examine various companies' design systems, and you’ll have an opportunity to use them in your own mockups. You'll also learn how to use and create sticker sheets in Figma.

You’re ready to build high-fidelity prototypes in Figma! Following six steps, you'll turn your mockups into a prototype that's ready for testing. In addition, you'll explore two new concepts, gestures and motion, which can help enrich the user experience and increase the usability of prototypes.

Now that you have a high-fidelity prototype, it’s time to test your designs. To get started, you’ll conduct a usability study to test your high-fidelity prototype of a mobile app. You'll analyze the feedback you receive to come up with actionable insights and iterate on your designs. Then, you’ll learn how to hand off designs to engineers for production. Finally, you’ll turn everything you’ve learned about user research, ideation, wireframes, designs, and prototypes into a case study for your professional UX portfolio.