Why Learn UX Design?

User experience design is the science of building digital interfaces that are user-friendly and accessible. User experience design relies heavily on research and user behavior testing, and the career fields associated with UX design are in high demand. Have you ever explored all of the things UX design can do? [User experience design skills can open the door for many career paths, lay the groundwork for more intensive research and data science training, or help creatives design better, more responsive digital applications. Here, you’ll learn more about the careers that benefit from UX design and how it can enhance your professional life. Regardless of your goals, learning UX design is a valuable and impressive skill to add to your resume.

What is UX Design?

User experience design (UX design) is a field of web design dealing with how a website, application, or other digital product feels to its users. User experience design ensures that an application feels easy and accessible to operate. It is a heavily invested field in user behavior research, prototype testing, and data analysis. It is useful to think of it as the more hands-on counterpart to its visually-oriented sister skill, user interface design. Often, user experience design isn’t isolated to work on a single webpage or digital application and instead refers to a subset of data science that strictly examines user preference and behavior regarding web applications.

Rather than simply gauging how a digital application looks, user experience design aims to rigorously test that application to understand how it feels once it is in the hands of real-life users. Learning user experience design will involve learning how to conduct research, analyze data, and use that data to make informed decisions about the interface design process. User experience design also coincides with market research, as User Experience Designers will gauge how users perceive a web application’s desirability or how they perceive that application communicating brand awareness. UX design also covers attempts to make web applications easier to use and more accessible for users with disabilities or who have other challenges accessing and navigating digital applications.

Read more about what UX design is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with UX Design?

UX design skills will allow you to build better digital applications and contribute to a larger pool of knowledge that helps other designers build better web applications. Whether one is working on individual projects or attempting to improve digital design as a whole, user experience training will help professionals build digital applications that are more user-friendly, accessible, and memorable than ever before.

Within the field of UX design, trained professionals will be able to fine-tune and iterate upon designs for digital applications to produce interfaces that respond to user behavior and feedback. This means they can apply their knowledge and expertise to a wide variety of projects to ensure that the finished product is functional, responsive, and accessible. UX design is a particularly enticing field for anyone who feels that digital applications need to be doing more to respond to the needs of their users, as this is the field that gathers the data that demonstrates these needs.

UX design is also the field that affords Digital Designers the most opportunity to engage directly with their users and customers. Between focus groups, user surveys, and interviews, many UX designers will spend more time interacting with the public than they will with their team of designers and developers. This makes the field particularly appealing to students interested in learning the difference between how we think users interact with technology and how they interact with it. For the empirically minded designer, UX design will open many doors for producing compelling research about user habits and behaviors.

Common Professional Uses for UX Design

The skills one learns when training in UX design is used across various industries. Given the premium importance that companies and organizations place on developing a strong digital presence, almost every company will, at some point, invest in ensuring that their webpages and digital applications are responsive and user-friendly. In addition, many User Experience Designers are employed in a strict research capacity. Here are a few career opportunities for users with UX design training:

• User Experience Designer: User Experience Designers are responsible for designing and testing how users interact with specific web projects and applications. Through prototyping, user feedback, and behavioral testing, they will test the navigation and accessibility of web applications to assure that the projects are functional and user-friendly. In addition, they will work closely with other Web Designers to move a project forward and Web Developers and Market Researchers to continue testing a project as it leaves the design phase. User Experience Designers are in especially high demand, as the field of data science is becoming increasingly integral to the operations of even small businesses and organizations.

• User Experience Researcher: User Experience Researchers are less invested in individual projects and more directly involved with higher-level research projects. They analyze customer and consumer data, lead focus groups, conduct surveys and interviews, and examine long-term, data-driven trends to understand user behaviors better. Individual firms may employ them to help track long-term data surrounding brand identity and user satisfaction, or they may be employed as part of a data science team to gather larger amounts of user data for other companies to utilize.

• User Interface Designer: Many User Interface Designers also have training in user experience design, particularly at smaller firms and organizations. UI Designers manage a website's visual look, using graphic design tools to ensure that the digital application looks inviting. Using tools such as Illustrator, Adobe XD, and Figma to build visual layouts for web pages, UI Designers may also be tasked with designing the functionality of an application, requiring them to have some measure of user experience training. While not all UI Designers overlap with the tasks of UX designers, the two work closely enough with one another that learning one skill will greatly enhance your job prospects in careers related to the other.

Learn Research Skills

One of the most important skill sets students will learn while studying UX design is how to perform useful and effective research. This can mean conducting user surveys, designing and leading focus groups, holding interviews, or simply collecting data through programs like Google Analytics. This will help designers make more informed decisions about how they build their digital applications and will help them better understand user behaviors.

Learning user experience design skills can also teach students how to work with large datasets, giving them the skills they need to begin working in data science. Companies and organizations, even smaller ones, are increasingly investing time and money into collecting and analyzing huge amounts of data. Learning the skills associated with user experience design can give students hands-on experience working with data, giving them a leg-up if they choose to take more focused data science courses, such as Noble’s Data Science Certificate program.

Build Better User Interfaces

Not everyone who studies UX design does so to enter a new career path. Some professionals, such as UI Designers and Web Designers, can benefit from learning UX design because it will help them make more informed decisions as they draft their web layouts. Some of the principles of UX design can be applied to any digital application, meaning that a basic level of training can help creatives avoid common pitfalls when designing their interfaces.

Learning these skills will help users optimize their workflow and demonstrate to employers that a designer is making thoughtful decisions that extend beyond the visual appearance of a design. This can set designers apart from the rest of the field when looking for jobs, particularly at companies and organizations that place a premium on hiring thoughtful designers who know how users will interact with the digital applications they are building.

How to Start Learning UX Design

There are many training formats for students seeking to learn UX design. These courses vary in cost, time commitment, and delivery systems, but all of them can help students better understand the philosophy behind UX design. Regardless of how a student opts to learn UX design, Noble can help them find and compare UX design classes using their Classes Near Me tool.

The most structured and immersive learning option is to learn through live instruction, either in-person or online. These courses allow students to interface directly with expert instructors who can answer their questions, provide them with feedback on their work, and go over material that is giving them difficulty. Live classes have the added benefit of providing students with valuable networking opportunities and technology support to assist their learning. Online courses come with the benefit of not being restricted geographically, giving students greater control over the kinds of programs they can access.

Some students may find that they cannot commit to a live instruction course because they cannot get their schedule to align with a live course. For these students, they may wish to consider on-demand UX training. These courses let students dictate their learning pace, and they are ideal for students with familial or work commitments that prevent them from regularly attending a live class. They also let students move ahead in a lesson or return to previous lessons as they see fit. These courses require students to be slightly more self-motivated to learn UX design, but the challenges can be well worth it.

Finally, many free resources and tutorials are available for students wanting to learn UX design. Noble’s official YouTube Channel provides users with several free video seminars in its Web Design and Development playlist. Here students will learn both the basics of UX design and the basic functionalities of several popular UX design tools. Students can also visit the UX design page on Noble’s Learn Hub to find free tutorials, seminars, interviews, and other materials to help them master UX design principles before they enroll in more advanced training courses.

Read the full guide on how to learn UX design.

Learn UX Design with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop offers students many user experience design courses and bootcamps. These courses, available both in-person and online, offer in-depth, career-focused UX design training and are all taught by expert instructors in real-time. Even taken online, these courses will allow students to interact directly with their instructor in the classroom and during one-on-one mentoring sessions. The small class sizes ensure students won’t get lost in crowded lecture halls. In addition, students can retake any course they enroll in for free within one year. This means students can take their courses a second time to review lessons, cover material they found difficult, or get more hands-on user experience design practice.

For students looking to learn the basics of UX Design, Noble offers a UX Design in a Day, in which students will learn the basic elements of the UX design process. They will learn key terms and ideas, like personas and scenarios, and how to conduct basic user research and interview participants to receive feedback. They will also learn the basic process of sketching and building prototype applications for testing. This is an introductory course, so it will only scratch the surface of the tests and research work involved in UX design, but it is an important course for laying the foundation for more immersive training.

Students looking for a more detailed, career-focused training course can enroll in Noble’s UX & UI Design Certificate. This course prepares students for employment in the UX/UI design field and will provide students with hands-on experience building and testing user interfaces. Users will receive training in advanced research techniques, including conducting interviews, producing written user reports, and running surveys. Then, students will be taught how to interrupt this data so that they may return to their designs and iterate on them in light of the feedback. Students will also be given hands-on training in prototyping and design software, such as Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. At the end of the course, students will have the opportunity to build a portfolio of sample interface designs and user experience case studies. In addition to this portfolio, students will receive one-on-one career mentorship, and by the end of the course, they will be ready to enter the workforce in the field of user experience design.

Key Insights

• User experience design is the field of digital design concerned with building digital applications responsive to how users interact with those interfaces. It is concerned with how consumers behave and is a research-heavy field.
• Professionals specializing in user experience design, such as User Experience Designers, are in high demand as companies are increasingly invested in building responsive user experiences that provide users with a positive experience.
• Learning UX design principles will also help students better understand how to conduct consumer research and deal with large amounts of data. This can prepare students for further training in fields such as market research or data science.
• Learning UX design is also useful for Web Designers and UI Designers. It will help them build better prototype designs, test their layouts, and avoid common pitfalls associated with user behaviors.
• Regardless of why you want to learn UX design, Noble Desktop offers comprehensive UX design training both in-person and online.