How I published my first Skillshare class as a UX/UI designer within a week
Creating my first video class about UX/UI design has been on my bucket list for ages now. I’ve always been passionate about teaching and sharing my experiences, but my list of excuses why I can’t create an online course was endless.
In October 2017, when the Skillshare team reached out to me to create my first class about UX/UI design, I knew this is the best opportunity to start. Since at the time I was super busy with client work, my excuses won again and I had to delay my first design course.
In March 2018, thanks to the persistent support from the Skillshare team, I decided to publish my first design class in this month no matter what.
My class is now selected for a featured slot on the Graphic Design browse page (less than one percent of classes are chosen for these features), which is mind-blowing for me and I’m incredibly grateful for it! :)
Overcoming mental barriers
In my head creating an online video course was this big, complicated process I know nothing about. I always estimated around a month or two to complete such a project.
After checking out the Skillshare teacher guidelines, something clicked and I asked myself: What if I could create the complete class from start to finish within a week?
This question gave me a huge push in motivation, since creating a course was no longer an endless and complicated task, but something I could create from Monday to Sunday!
(Side note: I did create my class within 7 days, although I still had a couple of client projects at the same time, so I had to spread the 7 days over a 2-week period.)
Day 1 — Creating class structure
The most difficult part of creating my first course was finding a topic, which is interesting and useful for a lot of students.
I was hesitating between sharing my design process for an iOS app or sharing my design process for web.
After doing some research I decided to go with the web project, since when most people are thinking about creating an iOS or Android app, they also consider hiring a developer and designer. However, when they’re thinking about creating a simple website, like a landing page, they’re much likely to want to design it for themselves, because it’s less complicated.
This is how I got the title of my course, which is “How to Design High Converting Landing Pages in Sketch for Beginners”.
About the structure of the class, my goal was to share my complete process for designing a landing page from the initial idea all the way to the execution without any shortcuts or hidden secrets. I wanted to create a class, where students feel like they sit next to me during the complete project and we design together.
On top of it, I also wanted to show how I combine business goals with design to increase the effectiveness of a landing page.
Here is the final class structure I went with:
01. Intro
02. Elements of a successful landing page
03. Finding inspirations
04. Basics of using Sketch
05. Installing plugins
06. Creating color palette
07. Choosing fonts
08. Designing the landing page
09. Designing for mobile
10. Class project
11. Finishing
12. Bonus: Dribbble workflow
I decided to go with this structure because this way each of these lessons are between 2-6 minutes. This ensures it’s easy to follow and watch even if the student only has around 10-15 minutes during the day.
Only exceptions are the “Designing the landing page” and “Designing for mobile”, which are relatively long since these are the lessons where I show the whole process of creating a landing page design in Sketch step-by-step.
Day 2–4 — Designing & preparing the class case study
After I had a solid foundation for the class structure, I started designing the example landing page, which I use as a case study during the class.
I wanted to create a modern landing page with the most common elements such as the 3-feature-section or testimonials, so these sections are transferable between different projects and the students can apply this knowledge in their own projects as well.
In terms of look & feel, I wanted the design to be as up-to-date as possible and in line with the latest design trends on Dribbble.
I created the landing page design for both web and mobile devices and also prepared it for developer handoff, so the students can see what to forward to the developers and have a clear idea how everything will work on the site.
Day 5-6 — Recording the class
Before recording the intro and finishing videos, I started with the screencasting videos.
For recording my screen, I used the ScreenFlow app, which is one of the best screen recording tools I’ve tried. ScreenFlow is powerful enough that I could record, edit and export my entire class within this one application.
I made sure to include my keystrokes in the videos as well, so the students can see not only my cursor but also all the different keyboard shortcuts that I use on a daily basis to speed up my workflows within Sketch.
Day 7 — Publishing
Publishing was the easiest part of the whole process. I exported all the different lessons and uploaded them one by one.
At this point the only thing left to do was to write the descriptions for the class summary as well as for the class project and prepare all the necessary files for the students, so they can follow the class easily.
Besides the class materials, I also included the original Sketch source file containing both the desktop and mobile designs as well as my Dribbble post template.
Takeaways
For me the biggest takeaway from this process was to discover how some limiting thoughts like “creating a video course should take at least 1 months of full-time work” can affect our productivity and in the future I’m sure I’ll ask a lot more “what if I only have a week to create this class, project, website, app?”.
I hope you found this article useful and I’m looking forward seeing you in my class, so we can start designing together.
I try to be super responsive in the community chat and in case you have any questions feel free to ask, I’ll make sure to reply every one of them.
You can check out my first Skillshare class here:
Special link giving you 2 free months: https://skl.sh/2I6RCcx
Thank you for reading! If you found this article useful let me know and I’ll write more in the future. :)
Follow me on Dribbble and Twitter to get notified when I publish something new. 🎉
