Learn the skills to become a UX/UI Designer. This course covers design concepts, industry tools like Figma, and research methodologies. Get career-focused training, build a portfolio, and receive one-on-one mentoring and prepare for a career in UX/UI design.
Start learning Figma for UI/UX design. Gain a solid understanding of its capabilities, from creating files, to designing on a grid, working with text/photos/colors, creating components, building prototypes, exporting assets, sharing files, creating animations, and more.
Discover the essence of UX Design. From UX vs. UI to usability testing and prototyping, delve into the intricacies of user experience design. Gain practical skills in research, wireframing, and more. Elevate your design game with this comprehensive course.
UX stands for User Experience: the overall quality of a user’s interactions with a product. The term ‘user experience’ was coined in the 1990s, but the principles of UX design have existed for as long as people have created objects to be used by others. Rather than making a product safer or more comfortable, a UX Designer makes it more usable. UX design particularly considers users’ needs, perceptions, thoughts, and abilities in relation to a product design. It explores how specific features and their arrangements improve users’ experience and avoid confusion and dissatisfaction. An expert in UX design can guide a team toward better product design by suggesting improvements, warning against missteps, and contributing directly to a design in progress. UX Designers may also test features and designs to collect data on user preferences and performance.
This term is most frequently used for software products. A program’s UX design includes its visual appeal, clarity of interface elements and guidance, ease of use, and effectiveness at meeting users’ needs and expectations. UX design often overlaps with User Interface (UI) design; both shape the control features and output displays that create a user’s interactions. UX designers may also influence the functions included within a program and the organization of those functions, making its operations faster, more complete, and easier to understand. Similar considerations apply to UX design in website development, with UX designers concerned with a website’s appeal, ease of use, and ability to meet user needs.
Training in UX design teaches you to create better products. Anything you create that requires user interactions—an application, a website, an electronic device, a kitchen appliance, a vehicle, a tool, or even a guidebook—can benefit from better design. Programmers designing new applications, including games, benefit from better UX design, which makes their programs easier and more pleasing to use. If you are building a website, UX design particularly addresses how to make that site welcoming and easily usable for visitors.
Whatever the product, there are always considerations about how to arrange its controls, functional parts, and informational outputs. You will consider how a user interacts with a product and what design choices will make that interaction more intuitive, efficient, effective, and satisfying. Studying UX design helps not only when revising a full prototype but also during initial planning, to decide what a product should do and how it should interact with its users. This training is especially helpful for inventors and entrepreneurs, as they may lack access to designers or market research and need to know what features will appeal to customers.
Introductory UX design classes begin with a discussion of the field, explaining how design affects a product’s performance, usability, customer impressions, and sales, especially as applied to technological products like software. Instructors will explain the principles of good product design, including general guidelines called ‘heuristics’. Some UX design classes also include lessons on graphic design and UI design, addressing how visual and interactive elements contribute to user experience. UX design courses also address how to anticipate your product’s users, learning their needs, thoughts, and preferences through research methods like market analysis, surveys, and interviews. Next, UX design courses address how to create product prototypes based on design principles and user requirements plus input from collaborators like engineers and managers. Courses usually discuss the role and activities of UX designers in a design and production team, so that graduates are prepared to collaborate in professional environments. Many courses focus on one or more prototyping tools, software packages like Figma or Adobe XD which allow collaborative creation of interactive prototypes. Finally, courses discuss how to refine prototypes through user testing, where users of differing skill levels explore or use the product to provide verbal feedback and/or performance metrics.
New students can learn the principles of UX design quickly, especially when explained with practical examples. Learning to apply these principles to specific products and product features is more challenging, requiring study of related fields like visual design, UI design, and web design and development. This exploration often involves case studies that show how problems were resolved through applied UX design. Students then practice generating their own design prototypes and research programs. For students without prior experience in data collection and analysis, these concepts can be difficult at first. Prototyping can also be a new process, as students must learn to use prototyping tools to create and collaborate across disciplines. Throughout this work, students must learn to think like product users, anticipating their needs, preferences, and limitations, translating these directives into specific features, and advocating for users during the design process. This understanding is not always intuitive, and emerging UX designers may need more practical experience, case studies, and data to correct their initial misconceptions.
UX design challenges many students because it combines several creative and technical skills. The breadth of options, considerations, and potential pitfalls when brainstorming a design can intimidate even imaginative students. Gathering and balancing ideas across diverse disciplines like marketing, visual design, UI design, and software engineering requires that UX designers understand each field and keep their technical knowledge up-to-date. A UX Designer then must learn how to guide the prototyping process, balancing options and resolving conflicting demands. A UX Designer must also act as a psychologist and human factors expert, thinking like potential users and collecting behavioral data. The research aspects of UX design demand an organized, analytic approach and the information management skills of a Data Scientist. A UX Designer must learn how to assess each option under consideration in a project, gather valid data from users, and then report this information clearly and accurately to their colleagues.
A single short class is usually sufficient to grasp the principles and challenges of UX design and the duties of a UX Designer. Learning to apply these principles to specific product designs takes considerably longer. Students need time to explore how UX design is used within industries like web development or software engineering. UX design students also need to practice with collaborative design tools and techniques so that they can interact with other disciplines and contribute to a design team. Gaining this grounded understanding of UX design, sufficient for use in a professional environment, can take between three and four months of focused study. Mastering the tools of UX research can take even longer since UX design courses address product research but do not always detail the analysis techniques that clarify and visualize user data. Sufficient expertise to operate independently as a UX Designer could take a year or more of study and practice.
For students who need to meet instructors at a shared classroom location, in-person learning may be the best option. For UX Design, it can be helpful to get immediate feedback on questions and design prototypes. In-person study also helps with computer and internet access problems, offering direct access to hardware, software, and class materials. However, travel distance will limit the classes you can reach, especially if further limited by transportation costs or available time.
If you have regular internet access, live online classes can offer much of the same interaction as in-person learning, using streaming video sessions. However, you still need to be available at scheduled class times. Self-paced online study removes even this limitation, allowing study at any time using written and pre-recorded video lessons. Both types of online learning provide a much wider range of class options than in-person study. Unfortunately, most online courses do not provide computer hardware or software, some do offer discounted or free software downloads. Most courses also supplement video lessons with a combination of downloadable texts and exercises, message boards, chat rooms, and in some cases, live chat or calls with instructors. Of the two, live online courses are usually the most current, since self-paced courses rely on pre-written materials.
You can find many free introductory tutorials online for UX design, as well as articles and video lessons about topics in this field or software used by UX Designers. Some free lessons on UX Design can be found on Noble Desktop’s website and YouTube channel. However, most of these lessons are limited, either surveying their subject briefly or focusing on a particular sub-topic. Even if you read and watched every available free lesson, they would not cover each subject in sufficient depth to understand UX design at a professional level. And even if they did, free lessons are not organized into a logical structure, nor do they usually provide practice exercises to improve your skills. They also cannot address questions or critique your designs like a course instructor. Without the guidance of an instructor, your study will take longer, require more trial and error, and still contain mistakes and gaps.
UX Designers are rarely pure advisors and usually work within other fields. They must combine UX design knowledge with other skills to produce results. Graphic design, web design, and UI design will give you tools to create visual appeal, informative resources, and logical, intuitive interfaces. Studying other forms of design also improves your creative process and can suggest a wider variety of options to consider. On the back-end, subjects like software development, web development, and programming will improve your understanding of technical challenges and limitations when implementing designs. To better structure and communicate your design ideas, it helps to become proficient in design software (such as the Adobe Creative Cloud) and prototyping software like Figma or Adobe XD. Additional study in communications and team management can also help when explaining ideas and eliciting feedback across disciplines. Finally, studying subjects like marketing, research design, UX research, data science, and human factors engineering will improve your ability to work with product users and create informative, reliable UX studies to evaluate features and prototypes.
UX design is most often applied to technical products like software applications and websites. Software developers, web developers, media creators, and social media providers hire UX design experts to shape products that not only attract customers but keep them satisfied and engaged. In particular, media sites and video games require frequent user interaction and positive user experiences. Businesses developing or improving their web presence and resources, especially ecommerce sellers and service providers like healthcare agencies, ensurers, and financial advisors, may seek UX designers to ensure that their online resources are welcoming and easy to use. As more government services move online, UX designers play a part in ensuring that citizens can access these resources without barriers. The effectiveness of teaching and learning is critical to the user experience for educational products, including school websites, teaching apps, and multimedia courses. Physical manufacturers, too, employ UX Designers, especially for electronic devices, appliances, vehicles, and other products that involve regular user interactions. UX Designers can also work in marketing departments or with marketing agencies, determining what product types and features best appeal to customers and bring repeat business.
UX Designers may be hired directly under this title in many industries, though it is most common in software and web development. UX Designers are usually members of larger design teams working on major projects or a line of varied products. Such delegation allows them to focus on user experience in the product development process, collecting data from focus groups to aid the initial design, advising other designers and developers to constrain projects, and then testing prototypes to choose options or identify problems. UX Designers earn an average of $126,000 per year in the United States.
UX Researchers focus on the research aspects of this field, providing the data and analyses that guide better UX design. UX Researchers conduct surveys and focus groups of potential users, examine feedback from a product’s current users, and test designs and prototypes to learn what features improve usability and user satisfaction. UX Researchers then analyze and report their findings to guide UX Designers and product developers. Some UX Researchers act as scholars and consultants, others contract with clients to conduct varied product research, some work directly for employers to study and improve their products, and some work alongside Marketing Researchers and Analysts in marketing firms. A UX Researcher in Boston can earn an average of $115,000 per year.
User interfaces (UIs) are a significant part of the user experience for many products, especially for electronic tools and devices, software products, and websites. The majority of users’ experience depends on the ‘feel’ and look of the product and the clarity and functionality of its controls and outputs. UI Designers shape these external parts of a product, choosing features by their appearance and ease of navigation and use. UX design informs many of these decisions. UI Designers often work with UX Designers, other designers, and technical developers as part of a multi-disciplinary design team, creating interface layouts and product prototypes. In Boston, a UI Designer earns an average of $73,000 per year.
Some smaller businesses combine all aspects of product design, hiring Product Designers who can handle their graphic design, UI/UX design, and sometimes even technical development. These multi-talented creators especially benefit from UX design to unify their processes and balance various options and demands. The research aspects of UX design also help to narrow potential designs and test prototypes. Product Designers earn an average of $112,000 annually across the United States.
While Software Engineers are more focused on the technical aspects of building programs, they may require knowledge of UX design to work more effectively. A Software Engineer who is conversant in UX design will more easily understand the requests of UX Designers and can anticipate some user needs. When Software Engineers are independent creators or part of a smaller company, they may overlap many duties of UX design, choosing program features based on their best understanding of user behavior. Some Software Engineers create design and prototyping software and need to understand the work of UX Designers to build the features they require. Across the United States, Software Engineers earn an average of $105,000 per year.
Web Designers create the outward aspects of webpages and websites, a job similar to graphic design and UI design but specifically applying to websites. Training in UX design helps a Web Designer create clearer, more useful webpages and websites that are easier to navigate. Web Designers also benefit from the research aspects of UX design to support their design decisions with data like user feedback and site activity records. A Web Designer in Boston earns an average of $99,000 annually.
Web Developers create the technical elements and structures that underlie a website’s functions such as data storage, executed programs, and custom webpage generation. Web Developers may work closely with Web Designers to build complete, usable websites, and can benefit similarly from studying UX design. This is especially true for Front-End Developers, who focus on the interactive user elements of a website, or Full Stack Developers, who handle all parts of a web development project. A Web Developer or Front-end Developer in Boston earns an average of $87,000 annually. A Full Stack Developer in the United States earns an average of $124,000 per year.
General Assembly presents technical courses both in-person at its Boston campus and live online. For beginners seeking a comprehensive introduction, their UX Design Short Course covers this topic over several weeks. Instructors begin with the fundamental concepts and processes of UX design and then demonstrate each topic. The course also addresses user research, communicating content strategy to a design team, prototyping (including software tools like Figma and Sketch), usability testing, and the use of AI in UX design.
Alternately, General Assembly’s UX Design Bootcamp is a longer course that covers the same topics as their UX Design Short Course, but in greater depth. The bootcamp also adds further lessons on visual design and UI design and might appeal more to students interested in general product design or combined UX/UI design.
Noble Desktop hosts live online courses for many professional and technical skills. Their UX Design Foundations course is a short introduction to the field, suitable for students with no prior design background. This class explains key concepts that define UX design, the UX design process, UX research methods, and terminology and documentation that help to communicate design ideas. The course includes supplemental learning materials, and participants receive a certificate of completion and the option to retake the class once for free for up to one year.
Noble Desktop’s UX & UI Design Certificate course is a more comprehensive program for students seeking employment as a UX/UI Designer. It begins with the same introduction as the UX Design Foundations course, then expands upon each concept as it applies to different product types. Instructors show students how UX Design guides the creation of webpages, websites, apps, and other products. These examples then illustrate user research, product testing, and data analysis. The course demonstrates the creation of interactive prototypes using Figma, a popular design and prototyping program. Finally, students practice writing case studies and demonstrating sample designs while building a design portfolio. In addition to supplemental course materials, students can schedule a private, 1-on-1 session with a mentor to address any difficulties and discuss career plans. This course awards a UX/UI Design certificate upon completion, and participants can retake the class once for free for up to one year.
If you have employees who need to learn UX design, either as a new subject or as an update to their current skills, Noble Desktop can offer professional training live online or at your business location. You can choose from Noble Desktop’s existing course catalog or design a custom course to meet your needs, and class schedules can be adjusted as necessary. If you prefer, you can purchase course vouchers for regularly scheduled live online courses (including a discount for bulk purchases) and distribute these to employees to schedule as available.
Email corporate@nobledesktop.com to ask for more information, to purchase course vouchers, or to schedule a free consultation to discuss custom course design and scheduling.