Learning UX Design with the Interaction Design Foundation
— A review
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” — Lao Tzu
Short brief about me:
I started my journey as a Quality Engineer and now I am working as a Lead Quality Assurance Engineer with having 8+ years of experience, in short you can say I am not a designer. But let me tell you one thing i.e. design thinking and evolving user experience in the software industry always fascinated me as I wanted to utilize my creative skills but I don’t know where to start from.
For example: I used to search the design logic behind the various popular companies’ logos and also see design-centric apps and websites. All these designs include interesting facts about the companies.
When I learned about IxDF online:
In recent past, I got the opportunity in my current organization to become a part of design team, so when I got selected and my training started then I came to know about IxDF platform then I enrolled myself in IxDF courses, which provides various level courses like Beginner, Intermediate, and Advance level course. The day I started this course, I was enthusiastic but never thought that it’s going to be that enlightening experience.
Now I would love to share my experiences and learnings from IxDF courses, also how these courses actually helped me to transform my overall personality (as they included many psychology related courses too).
Let me show you some interesting structure details about these courses:
1. It shows you where you stand in your country, Asia and Worldwide.
2. On the left hand side there is a Lesson Navigation section which will help you to track your lessons status and green tick represents that you had completed the lesson successfully.
3. Once you complete all the lessons then the last lesson in all the courses includes the course certificate which you can generate by clicking on the “Generate Course Certificate now” button or if there are still any answers left for evaluation then this button will be in disabled state.
4. And after all the evaluation results, you can generate your course certificate.
So now you can see how these courses are structured in a well-mannered way which will help you to track your daily progress.
Now coming to the most important part of this IxDF Design Journey i.e.
What I have learned from these various interesting courses?
● Carry out a design process that focuses on people’s needs to ensure that designs are easy and pleasurable to use.
● Create and enhance user interface design based on principles of human cognition.
● Design engaging user experiences for desktop, mobile and physical devices.
● Design user interfaces that are easy to understand by applying knowledge of how human vision and attention works.
● Analyze how easy it is to use a design through usability evaluations and cognitive walk-throughs.
● Plan and conduct user testing to gather feedback from real users and improve designs.
● Apply the principles of user centered design to improve the usability of web designs.
● Apply basic accessibility guidelines to web designs to ensure a high level of accessibility.
● Evaluate the effectiveness and usability of alternative design options.
● Build a user test plan using industry best practices.
● Provide actionable insights to stakeholders through reports on the results of usability test observations.
● Apply knowledge of emotions within design work to enhance the user experience (UX) of the product.
● Increase a product’s adoption and sales by designing for positive emotional experiences.
● Manager the emotional user experience throughout a product’s lifecycle to provide a positive experience on all the user touchpoints.
● Evaluate and improve how existing user interfaces and products will affects user emotions.
● Reduce time and cost of product design and development through fitting user research into design processes in the most optimal way.
● Designs and optimize products so that people with visual, auditory, cognitive and mobility disabilities are able to use assistive technologies to navigate and operate them.
● Usability is the outcome of a user-centered design process. That is a process which examines how and why a user will adopt a product and seeks to evaluate that use. That process is an iterative one and seeks to continuously improve following each evaluation cycle.
● I had also learned about various design theories, principles and laws (which is a very vast topic but very beautifully explained with images and examples).
Courses Name: Human-Computer Interaction — HCI, Gestalt psychology and Web Design: The Ultimate Guide, The Practical Guide to Usability, User Research — Methods and Best Practices, Accessibility: How to Design for All, Emotional Design — How to Make Products People Will Love, Psychology of Interaction Design, The Brain and Technology: Brain Science in Interface Design, Get Your Product Used: Adoption and Appropriation and many more.
Learnings as a Designer:
● Patience is the key to success. We all are aware of the value of patience and it is equally applicable in designing as this works as the secret ingredient which helps you to achieve WOW! Feeling from the user.
● Keep focus on empathizing with users rather than just fulfilling objectives with the design. Feel users’ pain, share it and then, design it.
● Design Emotionally: How to make products that people will love i.e. Secret of making a lovable product is providing “JOY of USE”.
● Today everything is present in our handheld devices i.e. MOBILE, so we must do designing for mobile first as a principle, lets focus on the power of the mobile computing platform rather than desktop or other devices.
● As a designer, one must RESIST the temptation to jump immediately to a solution to the stated problem. Instead, we first spend time to find the root cause of the issue that needs to be addressed first.
● Innovative problem solving approach is known as “THINKING OUT OF THE BOX”.
So, these learnings will definitely help me to become a better designer and choose a career in design that I always wanted to pursue. And I will surely encourage other friends/ colleagues of mine to pursue IxDF if they are inclined to learn designing.
About IxDF Courses:
● As these are online courses, you are free to take the courses as per your availability.
● Courses are well structured and designed in such a way that you will never get bored i.e. it includes both text, images and videos.
● Each chapter contains important information, so please don’t miss any.
● There are many meet-ups available, which will help you meet other designers in your area and exchange your learning and designs, as this makes it more interactive.
● Once you complete the course with minimum 70% then a course certificate is awarded which will help you to grow more professionally by attaching the same in your LinkedIn profile, or any other platform and if you achieve more than 90% then you will get the certificate with distinction.
● Sometimes there are subjective questions which will help you to think differently and you never know at times you will be impressed by your own answer ☺
● Within the course they provide ready-to-use templates for creating personas, research plan checklists and many more which is really helpful.
● And finally, you can implement your new skills in your existing job or to get a new job in UX design.
Now I would like to thank my mentor — “Salil Rawal” (who is from the design field and having years of experience in design) as he was always there for me whenever I got stuck or confused. Also he has guided me by providing timely feedback and discussions. I really appreciate his valuable advice which became rock bottom for robust growth in this new venture. He equally shares this feat. Thanks for being so awesome.
Special Thanks to IxDF platform for designing these wonderful courses which is a mixture of video-based and text-based content that allows your brain to learn in different ways without getting bored.
And also if you are too busy to start/complete your course then IxDF also sends you an email for motivating you to complete your Course timely for example:
Disclaimer: Don’t think that I am getting paid for this article, because I am just a passionate student who loves to read and learn more, but I highly recommend IxDF courses to whoever wants a career as a UX/UI designer.
All the Best!
Happy Reading ☺