(Online Course Review) User Experience Design Fundamentals, Version 4

Overview

Review Published: July, 2015.

Hosted on the Udemy online learning platform, this course is a broad examination of UX design and the theory behind it.

From initial strategy & scope all the way through visual design, this 10-hour course provides a detailed look at the principles that make great digital products.

Rating:

3.5 / 5

(Promising Content, Presentation is Clear)

What does this score mean?

Difficulty:

Beginner (Broad approach to design strategy & implementation).

Length:

10 hours.

Where to Buy It:

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Check your Local Library:

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What's Good

Great structure & organization; the course is broken up into bit-sized chunks that lay out each stage of UX design projects.
Experienced instructor; with nearly 3 decades of experience, Joe's comfort and skill with the subject matter clearly shows.
Additional resources; with more courses available on his own website and a healthy Facebook community, you can always find the next step to improving your UX design skills.

What Can Be Improved

Lack of practical application; while each stage and aspect of a successful UX design is touched upon, you're not explicitly shown the technqiues to accomplish it.
Subject matter can sometimes be vague; considering how much is covered in just 10 hours, this is to be expected, but can still intimidate newcomers at times.

The Bottom Line

Great for theory, not much application; while this course is very thorough giving you a ground in UX design theory, there is not much attention paid to the actual tasks needed to accomplish each stage of a project (check out my review of the "Springboard UX Design Course" for a great option).
Good value; for less than $100 (much less if you wait for a sale), this course will give you a valuable framework for understanding what goes into designing digital products (and why it matters).
For beginners to get a great foundation of detailed UX theory; while I found that additional application-based resources were necessary afterward, this course helped me to contextualize and understand the overall UX design process very well (i.e. understanding what makes up a UX process, and how they fit together).