Skip to main content

Analytics for Design

Analytics for Design

COID 332 | Online, In-Person | 2nd 7 Weeks | 3 credits

Welcome to Analytics for Design taught by Jennie Myers. Develop an understanding of how to gather user needs, create journey maps, conduct user testing, turn data into insights, and produce user experiences that deliver results. By using industry-standard enterprise research and analytics tools, students will begin to understand how to collect data, visualize it, and most importantly, how to understand and apply it. Students will complete the course with 6 projects and 1 professional portfolio to showcase their hard work.

Course Calendar

WeekLessonsProjects
1Lesson 1: Introduction
Learn how we can use data to inform human-centered design solutions, how data tells a story that moves, how you can make an impact toward some of the world’s most important causes, and more!		Project 1: Secondary Research
Pick a worthy cause to focus on for the duration of the course, learn how to identify the stakeholders, conduct secondary research, and develop a research hypothesis.
2Lesson 2: Understanding Audiences
Learn how to conduct primary research in the form of ethnographic interviews. Interview real humans with first-hand experience with your chosen cause. 		Project 2: Interviews
Learn proven interview tactics, interview individual(s) with first-hand experience with your worthy cause, and use their insights to inform your survey design.
3.1Lesson 3.1: Probing Problems
Learn to think about your audience’s problems with nuance by categorizing, mapping, comparing, and prioritizing problems to determine which justifies the time and investment of our analysis.		Project 3.1: Primary Research -> Survey Design
Create a research plan, design a survey, gather feedback on your design, and formulate a survey distribution plan.
3.2Lesson 3.2: Testing Problems
Learn quantitative data collection methods by launching a survey, promoting survey participation, and collecting results.		Project 3.2: Secondary Research -> Survey Distribution
Distribute your survey, gather responses, and reflect on the effectiveness of your methods.
4Lesson 4: Story in the Numbers
Learn how to analyze your results using analytical software, how to identify the stories that lie within our data, how to create data visualizations, and how to package those stories into messages that will resonate with our desired audience.		Project 4: Data Analysis + Data Visualizations
Analyze the data gathered from your survey responses using pivot tables and learn how to turn that refined data into easy-to-understand data visualizations.
5Lesson 5: Insight + Ideate
Learn how to pull your collective research together, brainstorm solutions to your worthy cause, and gather effective feedback on your ideas.		Project 5: Insight + Ideate
Using your research, use your learnings to develop a unique POV, map and test your insights, and use them to strengthen your final solution design.
6Lesson 6: Telling the Story
Learn how to condense, organize, and effectively communicate your methods, findings, and recommendations into a final blog post.		Project 6: Telling the Story Blog
Now that you’ve completed your research and used data to help inform an awesome solution to a worthy cause, pull everything together and share what you’ve discovered through a comprehensive blog post.