Learn UX design review

This is an honest review of the Learn UX course learnui.design (by Erik Kennedy).

How I learnt to make simple, usable apps

Here’s a before and after example of my UX skills. I know the ‘before’ is just a wireframe – but in the ‘before’ example, I wasn’t confident enough in my UX skills to even think about making something look pretty. Now, I have much more confidence in the UX side!

TLDR review:

• I recommend the course for beginners who want to go into UX/UI design (not UX research). I learned foundational basics that are 100% necessary for every UX designer to know. If you’re looking for a research deepdive (e.g. to prepare to go into UX research or strategy), this is probably not the course for you. But if you want to be a UX/UI designer, this will give you right foundational skills.
• The course focusses heavily on interaction design (how to make usable buttons, forms, dropdowns, navigations etc.)
• The course does not focus on UX research/ideation (defining the problem and product requirements, etc.). There’s an amazing couple of videos on user interviews, but other than that, there’s not much on this side
• Last, the course is extremely manageable time and effort wise – it’s not a ‘commit 8 months of your life’ type of thing. You do it at your own pace, and I probably got through the whole thing (as a single, working full time person) in five weeks.
• If you’re torn equally between the Learn UI and Learn UX course, assuming you are equally interested in UI and UX, I think the Learn UI course offers more value currently. I think this is mostly because UI is much more concrete/defined (“always make your lines consistent”) but UX is much broader/ambiguous (“there are many ways to solve this user’s problem) so I didn’t feel as satisfied walking away from the UX course, but it’s probably more a symptom of the field itself.

My design background going into the course:

• I already took the learn UI design by Erik Kennedy (honest review here), which was hands-down the best UI education resource I could find.
• My design background going into this course was very small, but I had done my due-dilligence in looking for design resources (I took UCSD’s online class on Coursera, finished half a bootcamp (from the General Assembly, Careeer Foundry etc. assortment), and amassed a google doc full of online articles, haha)

Read below for the comprehensive review. Below is a breakdown of the different parts of the course, and my honest thoughts:

Fundamentals of UX design

• This section goes over how to think like a UX designer. What are the main things you should be considering when creating a usable interface? For example — a UI designer may be thinking of things like consistency and the ‘feeling’ a UI gives. But a UX designer would be thinking of things like: “how can I make sure a user does what we want them to do?” “how do I make sure they can find what they are looking for?”
• The course will give you specific best practices and techniques to ensure you can answer those questions. It really helped me have the mindset for how to design something usable. While that seems mushy/abstract, it actually helps a LOT to have a set of guiding principles when you design something.
• For example, one of the videos is called “Think like a user, not a database”. I found that I always made my designs like a database (e.g. basically displaying all the information to the user and making them do the hard work of finding what they need). Instead, Erik teaches you how to empathize with the user and show them what they need, when they need it.
• Overall, you’ll learn a set of guiding principles that will positively shape the way you design. This comprises about 20% of the course.

Here’s an example of thinking like a database (on the left) and thinking like a user (on the right). The left example just lays out all the website’s contents for the user, and the user has to do the hard work of finding what they actually want. The right example only shows the content in the sequence and amount that the user would actually want to see.

There are two main sections of the course, explained below:

Design patterns & best practices

• Here, you’ll learn how to kick butt at interaction design. If you think about an app you heavily interact with (e.g. a calculator, google calendar, a checklist etc. – not something like a medium blog where you’re just reading it), you’ll learn how to choose the right types of elements to make these interactions simple, intuitive, and consistent with the industry.
• You’ll walk away with basically a set of mental (and physical) UX checklists to know: when should I use a dropdown? when should I use a segmented button? how do I design a table? how do I design a filter? – covering basically 95% of all the UX elements (nav, forms, search, lists, etc.) that you see on the web
• Overall, this part was EXTREMELY useful. You absolutely need to know these things in order to create apps that people are used to seeing, will know how to use, and to show other designers/interviewers that you know what you’re doing.

Research & testing

• The last major section of the course is about user interviewing & usability testing. There’s only about 3 hours of content here currently — so it’s not a deepdive on user research or usability testing by any means, but by using the tips on this section, I found I could more confidently conduct user interviews and usability testing, compared to other resources on the internet.
• Basically: it’s probably enough for a UI/UX designer to know, but not enough if you want to go into just UX research/strategy. Because I don’t have much background here, I found that I did want more information in this section, which was kind of a bummer.
• However, the content here was a significant improvement above the resources I could find on the internet, blog posts, bootcamps etc. which were too theoretical. Erik literally walks you through an interview he does with someone and breaks down the whole thing and gives you a template script to follow. I conducted user interviews & usability research afterwards and found that the insights I got were MUCH better than before.
• The course doesn’t go into to research & testing outside of these two realms (e.g. outside of user interviews or usability testing) – fairly, because these are probably the most often used tools especially for a UI/UX designer. But again – if you want a deepdive on other topics, this course probably isn’t for you. I think the course is really geared towards people who want to be more on the side of making apps and interfaces, not the research part.

What I wish the course had more on:

• UX Research methods outside of user interviewing and usability testing (e.g. card sorting, surveying)
• UX Research deliverables (empathy maps, user journeys etc.)
• User flows and tasks flows (designing more than one static screen at a time). This was actually really lacking in the course (there’s some general stuff about it, but nothing in detail at all, and I think it’s probably important to know). We focus a lot in this course on just designing for one screen, but it’d be really helpful to know how to design entire flows.
• Information architecture (generally on how to structure information — again, there’s some general information on it, but not specific details)

Overall, I found that the course was high value for someone who wants to learn about creating a usable interface — and would recommend it to anyone who wants to do that. Again, if you want a deepdive in research or strategy, this course is NOT for you.

Last, I would say that: becoming a good designer comes through practice and getting feedback on your designs, not through just watching videos. One person could go through this course and get very little out of it because they don’t practice, while another person could go through it and become a significantly better designer because they practice their skills (this is a lesson I learned the hard way, haha).

That is to say, just by purchasing the course you won’t become a better designer. I really recommend (1) doing all the practices and also extra practice on your own (e.g. the daily UI challenge) and (2) getting feedback on your designs from a designer (a friend, coworker, on the internet, etc.)

If you’re interested, I think the course only opens at certain times, so you need to sign up for notifications to know when the course opens – https://learnui.design/courses/learn-ux-design.html

Last, I am a beginner designer who wants to help other people getting started, and haven’t figured out it all either, by any means at all! But we’re in this together haha. Please feel free to comment or reach out to me lily.meg.design@gmail.com if you have any questions!

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Interested in the Learn UI design course? You can read my honest review here.