Jordan Hudgens: Standing right next to me is Jesse Cook. Jesse is the CEO and the Creative Director for the Slate dev shop in Lehi, Utah. I've had the privilege of working with Jesse for over a year now and I've absolutely loved the experience. He has been able to completely upgrade the way that devCamp looks, so if you've noticed a difference, then you have Jesse to thank for that. He is very good at what he does.

For this course, I wanted to bring someone in who is truly a specialist. I decide not to teach the user experience course on my own because it's not my specialty. I've only received very light and informal training in UX and UI, which I think is the case for many developers.

That's the purpose behind this course. We want to teach you what happens and what's needed in order to properly design an application.

Now, I think one of the biggest problems with the perception of design in the development world is that people may think designers are just the people who pick out what colors and fonts go on the screen, but there is so much more to it than that. There is an entire science behind how user experience is built.

I want to introduce Jesse for that side of the process, and in this guide, we're going to take a high-level look at what "creative direction" is. Jesse, talk a little bit about some of the things, from a creative direction perspective, that you do when you're working with clients or when you're working on an application.

Jesse Cook: We specifically work a lot with clients, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're always going to be in that position. You might be working for some tech company that has one app and you have a manager that you're reporting to, but they are very similar scenarios.

The idea is that the creative director is approached because something needs to be built or changed. What they do is take the vision of whoever's approached them, and get that vision on paper. It seems a lot more straightforward than it usually ends up being.

The analogy that I always give my clients is to draw a bicycle. The idea is that everyone knows what a bicycle looks like; they know what an app looks like in their mind. But when you actually sit people down, statistically, 75 percent of people will draw a bicycle incorrectly, even though we all know what it looks like.

That's what I tell my clients. They know what it looks like but they don't necessarily know how the data is going around. They might not even know all the users that need to exist to create that data. They think, "Oh! Then this needs to be approved!" Well, who's approving that procedure? Who is interacting with this data? They need to be able to see the multi-dimensional structure that these apps create. And that's what the creative director does. They help bring this idea to a point where you can really follow the entire objective all the way through to all the different users.

JH: That's awesome, and it's something that I've found so critical through the years because the user experience is not my specialty. When I'm on a project by myself, or I'm the person in charge of the UX, it doesn't look as good as when I'm able to go and implement your designs. It slows down my progress because I'm spending so much time simply figuring out where all the components on the page need to be, and who's allowed to interact with them, and what happens if they click on this button versus this other one. Whereas, my development time speeds up astronomically when Jesse sends me a set of screens and a full set of wireframes on what I need to go build.

That is a huge part of why we wanted to build this course, because if you can learn how to develop your own UI and UX -- have you heard of the "Unicorn" term?

JC: Yeah, yeah.

JH: If you've never heard of it, there is a term for if you are very good at design and also very good at development. The reason is that such a person is about as rare as a unicorn. We want to turn everyone who goes through this course into a unicorn.

We have a number of great modules throughout this system and we also took a little bit of a different approach, here. I have seen a number of other courses that combined both UI and UX into the same course. I purposefully wanted to create one UX course and one UI course because they're completely different disciplines. It's usually the same person who's asked you to do them, just like you, Jesse.

JC: Haha!

JH: But if you start to think, "Oh, if I'm doing UI/UX, that means that I'm just working a lot in Photoshop and making things look pretty," I think that completely devalues the entire UX portion.

JC: Right.

JH: While we were going through the outline for this course, we started to realize how much time was spent in building out the right user experience, as opposed to just making things look pretty. I wanted to make sure that we really focused on that so that you would value it as much as it really deserves. I can promise that when you actually get out and start building real-world applications, having this skill set can set you apart from all the other developers that are out there.

JC: Oh, absolutely! My developers are incredibly valuable because, occasionally, I get some things wrong, and sometimes it will get to the point where I'm explaining something to either the CTO, or the CTO is explaining it to the developers, and, if they've really developed that critical thinking, they might say "Where is this coming from? Where am I supposed to pull this data from?" And maybe the application needs a higher level admin or a different user, or maybe it needs to happen on a different page. It's so helpful for those things to be found sooner, and not after two weeks of development. At that point, they may realize they have to go back and refactor a bunch of stuff.

I love it when my developers can, right off the bat, identify something that I've missed. It's definitely a unicorn moment. A lot of times, something just falls through the cracks. And then eventually it's like - oh my gosh - how did I miss that? It's definitely something where, if you can really hone those skills to be able to see the multi-dimensional aspect of these applications really quickly and bounce back and forth between the granular and the big picture--You want to be able to zoom in and see that, but you don't want to be so close to it that you can't see and understand the bigger picture.

JH: Absolutely. That's a great introduction to everything that we're going to be going through in this course. We're going to be talking about the different concepts you'll need to learn in order to build a solid user experience, and we're going to be using a number of case studies that we have worked on so that we can tell you some of the things we did that were good and also a few the things we might have done differently.