A Google UX Design Course Review — The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
In a nutshell : Dive in with a goal in mind and you will not be disappointed.
🏃♂️ Summary (TL:DR)
If you are…
- New to UX Design — Dive deep into the course and take in as much as you can. The course gives a basic but sturdy foundation in UX design, both in design thinking and in practical skills.
- Mid-Level — If you are looking to refresh your fundamentals, take the first few courses or take the courses selectively. Unless you are a certificate hunter, don’t mind spending ~SGD$50 a month or are the type of person that can’t leave things unfinished. However, be prepared to be spending a good amount of time working on this if the projects are ending up in your portfolio.
- Senior Designer — I wouldn’t recommend the full 7 courses for the Specialisation but similar to the above, take selective courses only if you want to refresh the basics.
💁♂️ Course Information
General Course Structure
The Google UX Design Professional Certificate is split into 7 courses, namely:
- Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design
- Start the UX Design Process: Empathise, Define and Ideate
- Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes
- Conduct UX Research and Test Early Concepts
- Create High-Fidelity Designs and Prototypes in Figma
- Responsive Web Design in Adobe XD
- Design a User Experience for Social Good & Prepare for Jobs
Each course has around 4-6 “weeks” worth of lessons, with “weeks” being the term Google uses to split their course into smaller parts. However, the actual time needed to complete each “week” varies.
What is worth noting is that these courses can be completed individually, with each course issuing their own course certificate.
However, if all 7 courses are completed, there are some extras such as:
- A separate Specialisation certificate from Coursera that can be shared on LinkedIn for virtual claps and applause. (picture above)
- A digital badge from Credly and Google that can be shared on LinkedIn for virtual claps and applause.
Grading and Assignments
Each course will have a minimum of one practice quiz or a peer-reviewed assignment.
For the practice quiz, there is a minimum passing grade and a maximum of 3 tries before there is a timed lockout of 24 hours before trying again.
For the peer-reviewed assignments, the grading criteria is shown before submission. After submission, the student is required to review a minimum of 2 other submissions from other students based on the criteria given.
Takeaways
The selling point on this course was that students will be able to present a portfolio that will allow them to get their first job in UX. True to their word, by the end of the course you will have high fidelity prototypes and mockups of at least 2 mobile applications and 2 responsive web applications ( of which you will have mobile, tablet and desktop screens )
As this is Google’s UX Design course, the takeaways both in terms of learning materials and design principles are from Google.
Though admittedly, this is Google’s UX design process and teachings, I believe that it is sufficient to give students a decent understanding in UX and serve as a starting point into this complex field. More often than not, the design practices in your company might differ but then it is up to the designer to adapt to the company’s values while being the evangelist for UX in the team.
👦 Personal Context
The main reason I started this course was to solidify my knowledge in UX and its fundamentals, especially in terms of user research. The second reason was to probably feel a sense of validation (am I good enough???) that I have completed a certified course by Google but lets not dive too deep into that.
Coming from an Engineering background, most of what I learnt was through online videos and articles before stumbling onto my first job and learning most of it there. I did some personal projects before and was almost a year into my full-time job as a product designer before I decided to embark on this course.
In terms of commitment level, I was able to spend about..
- 2 evenings (~5 hours each) from Monday to Friday after work
- ~7 hours during the weekends
with a total length of time of about a year before completing all 7 courses. I would admit I took longer than most to complete the course. However, I did strive to complete every assignment and activity that was prescribed and took slightly longer to complete my designs as I felt that I had the time to really think about how I wanted the final product to be like. This included spending more time on illustrations, prototyping and coming up with style guides.
With that said, it brings us to…
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
👍 The Good
- Required assignments forces you to actually utilise what you just learnt, with many opportunities for practice
As described in the course information above, each course has either a quiz or an assignment or both. During the first half of the course, most or all of these are compulsory and students cannot proceed without either passing the quizzes or the assignment.
In the later half of the course, some assignments are deemed optional. However, the final assignment of the course will require you to have done the assignments in the previous weeks. For example, there will be some optional assignments mid week that will require you to do up a competitor audit. The final week will then have a compulsory peer-reviewed assignment of the mobile application. As competitive audits are part of good design research, this will have to be done before completing and submitting the final app design.
2. The delivery of the course and course instructors are engaging
It is crucial that the lessons are delivered in engaging and interesting ways that keeps the students attention. I have encountered several other courses that are 10–15 minute long videos that gave a whole chunk of information given in a Powerpoint format and that was definitely not ideal for learning. Overall, I felt that Google ticked the boxes in terms of how lessons were formatted.
Some examples of these are…
a. Having a mix of short form videos (<10 mins) and readings that reiterates what was taught in the video along with extra information and helpful links to design articles elsewhere.
b. Having ungraded practice activities to encourage hands on learning. A “model answer” is also shown for students to review their own work.
The course instructors all felt genuine and spoke directly to the students. The videos were cuts between the instructors teaching directly to the camera and slides that were short but succinct. These slides are then available for download.
There were also interesting videos where guests are invited to give a short talk about their experience in UX and these were nice breaks in between the learning videos and gave us a certain amount of insight to certain topics a UX designer might encounter.
3. Learning materials given are useful for future reference and serve as a good starting point
Along with videos, the assignments come with a template that students will download and edit with their own content.
Even though these templates may not be the most comprehensive, accurate or even visually appealing, I felt that it serves as a good starting point for future reference.
For example, the competitor audit template that was given to us was very comprehensive but I felt that some of the columns were not necessary during the research phase of one of my projects. Similarly, I wanted to do a comparison of individual sub-pages on the competitor websites which was not in the template. By taking it as a starting point, I proceeded to make a simpler version using Notion that compares screen by screen between multiple websites while keeping in mind the aim the competitor audit.
👎 The Bad
On to the juicy part…
For clarification, I will try to focus on the actual course structure and content and not comment too much on the actual UI of Coursera as a whole.
- Content structure in the later parts of the course can be improved, with multiple repetitions and optional lessons
I spoke briefly about the optional lessons in the course above and I felt that it is a point that deviates from the purpose of the course. In the later parts of the course, there are some parts that are labelled “optional” and the actual lesson content is a summarised version of a lesson in a previous course.
For example, in the 7th course, Design a User Experience for Social Good, there is an entire optional lesson on testing and conducting a usability study for your low fidelity prototype for a responsive website.
Understandably, the UX process might follow the same general process from start to finish. From initial user research to wire framing to testing and iteration to prototyping, these are the basic steps to follow and Google has stuck to it through course. Though these serves as good practice (and practice makes perfect?), I felt that as a paying user to the course, I am entitled to more than just that. If I needed more practice, it should be something that I am able to perform on my own time.
With that said, a possible improvement might be to introduce other ways of achieving the same outcome. There are many tried and tested methods in the realm of UX, such as in user research and brainstorming. Maybe the lessons can be structured in a more guided way in that one lesson in a previous course can be done with one method while another lesson in the later course can utilise another method.
2. Pacing of the course was not consistent and felt like a rush at the end
To emphasise this point further, the first 5 courses culminated in one complete portfolio project of a mobile app while the 6th course required students to go through the process learnt in course 1 to 5 to come up with a responsive website. The 7th course then required students to go through the process of course 1 to 6 which then produced a complete project of 1 dedicated mobile app and a mobile responsive website.
This coupled with the previous point on repetition made completing some lessons in the later courses feel slightly tiresome as I was just repeating myself without actually practicing anything new (as mentioned in the previous point).
I understand that the last 2 courses serves as a “summary exercise” for the student. However, by squeezing the duration of time needed (length of time for 5 courses to just 1), it does introduce an element of fatigue.
Furthermore, the last course, Design a User Experience for Social Good & Prepare for Jobs, felt like it could definitely be split into 2 courses. It was quite intensive to finish as it requires the student to complete the portfolio project, do up an entire portfolio, and learn all about applying and interviewing for UX jobs.
🧟♂️ The Ugly
For a good laugh
- Peer-reviewed assignments
Ah. Peer reviews. The test of integrity and discipline.
Need I say more?
Interestingly enough, I noticed that these “cheaters” tend to appear more often in the later half of the courses.
Admittedly, there are times where completing the assignments felt like a chore and there were some parts where I was submitting assignments solely based on the criteria and not putting my 100%. Again, I noticed this only during the later half of the course.
Though there definitely are bad apples amongst the students, I felt that this can be mitigated by solving the negative points which I listed above. By improving on the pacing and structure of the courses, it will allow students to be more engaged in learning and in doing the assignments rather than finding the “easy way out”.
Conclusion & some tips to aspiring students
- 💸 Start with a specific goal in mind
This is a case where time is literally money. As a subscription-based course, the total amount paid equates to the length of time it takes to complete the course. It is thus in your best interest to balance between effort and speed.
UX is a field with many complex areas to dive into. Having a specific goal in mind when starting on the course allows you to be focused in what you are taking the course for. That does not mean skimping on other areas but rather taking it in, having a solid grasp of its concepts through basic practice and then moving on.
Personally, I felt that I needed to work on 2 areas in UX : User Research and Visual Aesthetics.
Thus, whenever I encountered lessons or assignments in either, I would take the time to learn the source material given, practice the assignments in its entirety and look for resources elsewhere to bolster my knowledge.
For User Research, I found an app called Otter.ai that helped me to record and transcribe my interviews to ease my research process. I’ve also utilised Useberry as a tool to help me in my unmoderated usability testing. Finding and using these tools definitely took an additional amount of time but I felt it helped me in my learning process.
For visuals, I took some extra time to brainstorm more layouts, try out different styles and adding my own illustrations.
Conversely, as I was already working in the UX field, I finished the videos and readings on job interviews and applications but spent a relatively shorter time on them. As I could always review the learning materials on a later (and more relevant time), this was a conscious decision made to shorten my total course time.
2. 📝 Save all learning materials for future use and document your work
This might seem like a no-brainer but having an easily accessible folder that stores all the learning materials for future reference is essential and ties in with the point above as well. As the course is laden with information, I found it hard to digest everything in one sitting. Similarly, as the months rolled by, I had to constantly refer to past materials to jog my memory on previous lessons.
“Isn’t everything stored on the Coursera portal?”
Yes they are but the way Google structures the courses (by labelling them as “weeks”) makes it harder to find specific information and there were times where I was clicking through the different weeks to find the relevant course materials.
Similarly, as part of the portfolio project, there will be lots of documents generated. From presentation decks, Google Sheets, Word documents and images, it is always a good habit to do some housekeeping and folder management. These materials will all be used in the creation of your portfolio and having them easily accessible makes the process less of a headache.
🎬 In Conclusion
With that all said, I had a wonderful time with the course. As someone that enjoys coming up with personal projects, working on the courses gave me a strong backbone in my design process and kept me focused on coming up with solutions that caters to the users. The materials given are also something I will constantly refer to in the future.
