Affordable UX Learning Resources from Top Universities
Some of the world’s leading universities have created innovative, in-depth, high-impact learning resources for those wanting to learn about user experience but may not have the time or financial flexibility to attend a traditional in-person program. I’ve scoured the web to find some of the most reputable, highly ranked, and affordable UX learning courses available. I’ve also followed up with folks who have taken some of these courses in order to get some candid, unfiltered insights on their thoughts. A few of these courses I’ve discussed in previous articles (Inclusive UX Education and UX Research Career Starter Guide) but in this article, the majority of programs discussed are new and should be on your radar if you’re looking into learning about user experience online and affordably.
In this article (in which some of these links may contain affiliates), we’ll be looking at the best affordable courses on the web and the learning curriculums so you can compare offerings and make informed decisions regarding which one would best meet your needs. The goal of this article is to take away the guesswork and showcase the top online programs from prestigious universities so you can make the best decision for yourself. These programs blend a solid foundation of academic theory with real-world practical application, so you’ll be coming away from your selected course with a solid knowledge base and a recognized credential from a highly respected institution.
This article looks at affordable (and in some cases, free) user experience learning programs from:
- Cornell University
- University of Minnesota
- University of Michigan
- University of California San Diego
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- California Institute of the Arts
- Glasgow Caledonian University
User Experience Design Certificate from Cornell School of Computing and Information Sciences
eCornell has recently created a certificate in User Experience Design that is offered 100% online.
This certificate program approaches UX and other forms of product design through human-centered design, the practice of placing users and their needs as the focus of the work. This includes everything from creating effective and enjoyable user experiences to ethical and safe interactions between the user research team and the product. The courses begin with the foundational concepts of good design: human-computer interaction, usability, user experience, and user research.
This certificate course consists of six 3-week courses:
- Human-Centered Design Essentials (CIS301)
- Effective User Research (CIS302)
- Creating User Personas (CIS303)
- Developing a UX Design Concept (CIS304)
- Prototyping and UX Feedback (CIS305)
- Evaluating Usability (CIS306)
Although the price of this course is significantly higher than many other offerings on this list (at the time of this writing the sticker price is $3,600USD) the rigor this course offers is impressive. The program duration is 5 months with a small class size capped at 35 students and taught by Senior Lecturer Gilly Leshed. If you’re looking for an educational offering from an Ivy League institution with instructor moderated discussions, and a final project to practice what you’ve learned in a real-world context, you might want to consider this course.
UX Design MasterTrack™ Certificate from the University of Minnesota
Starting in January 2021, in this new UX Design Mastertrack Certificate from the University of Minnesota, learners will complete a real module from the University of Minnesota’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Graduate program. Through these courses, you’ll gain both artful and scientific skills of conducting, implementing and evaluating user experience design and research.
By the time you complete this program, you will apply your new career skills by designing a proposal and developing a user experience product for your organization or interests. You can use your UX Design MasterTrack Certificate as a pathway to the associated Human Factors or the Ergonomics Graduate Program at the University of Minnesota.
The certificate welcomes working professionals who seek to broaden their marketability and organizational value by applying user experience design to their chosen field as well as students who seek educational opportunities to explore learning user experience design on a post-bachelor level. As a MasterTrack Certificate student, you will master new skills through four graduate-level courses that will require 6–8 hours of study per week. You will join a collaborative and engaging online learning community, complete hands-on projects, and collaborate with peers, researchers, and practitioners from the vibrant Twin Cities design community. You will also benefit from timely feedback, live sessions, and lectures provided by guest speakers like design leaders from Target, Medtronic, and more.
This program consists of 4 core courses:
- User Research for User Experience Design
This course emphasizes the understanding of designing for the user to foster improved product and delivery through heuristics evaluations, experience mapping through observation, surveys, analysis, and cognitive processes. Topics addressed include an overview of design thinking, UX, philosophy of qualitative research, methods, and principles behind qualitative data, effective interviews, validation, and ethics. You will master these concepts through course readings, hands-on exercises, and the development of a final project proposal that will be built and tested in course two.
- User Testing for User Experience Design
Creating a great user experience involves a holistic approach and is rarely a linear process. This project-based course builds on a proposal that you will develop in User Research for User Experience Design. Through this hands-on project, you will gain an overview of qualitative research to progress product development and develop your design thinking skills. Topics addressed include design thinking methods, UX/UI design methods, and principles (interactive prototyping, testing, analysis, etc.). You will learn key skills and principles to guide your project through class readings, interactive exercises, and facilitated discussions.
- Visual Literacy
Literacy itself implies an ordered set of information; verbal literacy is linear, generally one-dimensional, reading a sequence of symbolic information, and is like spoken speech. Visual literacy recognizes two or more dimensions and utilizes a more complex range of symbols and semiotic meanings.
This course includes critical viewing, interpretation, and hands-on design activities as methods for learning. You will examine elements of communication theory, psychology theory in perception, design theory, use of new technologies, interface design, and the social and cultural implications in media use, creation, and distribution.
By applying the components of visual literacy you will be able to develop and recognize the meaning of images, empowering you to critically view, use, and produce effective visual content in your own field of interest.
- Ethics and Research
In this course, you will explore the breadth of ethical concerns and questions that you will encounter in the process of conducting and disseminating research. Topics addressed include ethics in research settings, use of human subjects, data handling, plagiarism, authorship, publishing, research funding, social responsibility of researchers, collaboration, and professional codes of conduct.
If you’re interested in this program from the University of Minnesota, you can find out more here:
Introduction to User Experience Design from Georgia Tech
In this program offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology, students will learn the fundamentals of user experience design. This course is most appropriate for absolute beginners starting from scratch and looking to build a solid foundation.
Taught by Dr. Rosa Arriaga, Senior Research Scientist at Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, this course is geared towards the novice. It is for learners that have heard about “user experience” or “user interface” design but don’t really know much about these disciplines.
The course mantra is that “Design is a systematic and data-driven process.” In this course, the learners are introduced to the user interface design cycle. Along the way, learners are exposed to a set of techniques to gather information about what the user needs are and how to design and model interfaces based on these needs, and then how to evaluate the design to ascertain that the user’s goals are met.
If you’re looking for a course with a gentle learning curve to help you understand the field of user experience research and design, this course might be for you.
This specialization from the University of Michigan is currently one of the most popular and high profile affordable options for learning user experience research and design. This course offers lectures that are polished and entertaining, not to mention taught by world-class educators at one of the most respected universities in the world.
In this User Experience Research and Design Specialization on Cousera students will be taught how to integrate UX Research and UX Design to create great products through understanding user needs, rapidly generating prototypes, and evaluating design concepts. Learners will gain hands-on experience with taking a product from initial concept, through user research, ideation and refinement, formal analysis, prototyping, and user testing, applying perspectives and methods to ensure a great user experience at every step.
This program consists of several courses (which can be taken individually or part of the entire specialization):
· Introduction to User Experience
· Understanding User Needs
· Evaluating Designs for Humans
· UX Design: From Concept to Prototype
· UX Research at Scale: Surveys, Analytics and Online experiments
· UX (user experience) Capstone project
This course includes a legitimate credential from one of the most respected higher education institutions in America (Go Blue!) and finishes with a capstone project which you’ll be able to use as a legitimate portfolio piece.
The production quality and depth of the material offered in this program is very impressive, to say the least. The frequent quizzes and assignments go a long way in helping learners reinforce the material discussed. I have no doubt this program will continue to gain popularity thanks to its incredibly polished content and brand name institution credibility.
UX/UI Design Specialization From CalArts
This UX/UI Design Specialization from California Institute of the Arts will give learners the foundation they need if they are looking to launch a more visual design-focused career within the field of user experience.
Although I am firmly against using UX and UI interchangeably, this program offers a design-centric approach to user interface and experience design and offers practical, skill-based instruction centred around a visual communications perspective, rather than on one focused on marketing or programming alone. In this sequence of four courses, you will summarise and demonstrate all stages of the UI & UX development process, from user research to defining a project’s strategy, scope, and information architecture, to developing sitemaps and wireframes. Students will learn current best practices and conventions in UX design and apply them to create effective and compelling screen-based experiences for websites or apps. The skills and knowledge you will learn in this specialization are applicable to a wide variety of careers, from marketing to web design to human-computer interaction.
Learners enrolled in this UI/UX Design Specialization are also eligible for an extended free trial (1 month) of a full product suite of UX tools from Optimal Workshop.
This offering consists of 4 courses:
- Visual Elements of User Interface Design
- UX Design Fundamentals
- Web Design: Strategy and Information Architecture
- Web Design: Wireframes to Prototypes
Although this specialization is fairly new, it seems like a great starting point for anyone looking to become a more visual-based UX professional.
Interaction Design Specialization from the University of California San Diego
This program currently has a 4.3/5 rating on Class Central and is heavily cited on various UX community spaces such as UX Mastery Forum and the user experience sub-Reddit as one of the best introductory courses to user research and UX in general on the web. Having had the pleasure of taking this program when I was finishing my undergraduate HCI studies, I can’t recommend it enough. Professor Scott Klemmer eloquently and passionately weaves the theory and application of interaction design, cognitive psychology, user interface design, and human-computer interaction seamlessly throughout all 8 courses, setting a foundation of knowledge for any aspiring UX Research professional.
Participants will learn about need-finding and observation techniques, how to carry out rapid prototyping, principles for effective interface design, and strategies for evaluating interfaces. A mixture of quizzes and peer-reviewed assignments helps reinforce learning as well as introduces learners to hands-on practice.
This specialization consists of 8-courses which can also be taken individually:
· An introduction to Human-Centred Design
· Introduction to design principles
· Social computing
· Input and interaction
· User experience: research & prototyping
· Information design
· Designing, running and analyzing experiments
· Design capstone project in collaboration with Instagram
Although the approximated time to complete is cited at 10 months, the course is self-paced, so there is no reason a motivated person wouldn’t be able to finish it in 3–5 months
This specialization also offers office hours and a Slack group for support and discussion.
If you’re just getting started and looking for a résumé boost in the form of a legitimate UX credential as well as a capstone project you can showcase to potential employers via a portfolio case study, I highly recommend this specialization.
Professional Certificate in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech
Another offering from Georgia Tech on this list is a certificate course focusing on Human-Computer Interaction. This course is more appropriate for learners looking to broaden their knowledge within the fundamentals of all things HCI and research, rather than a more interface design based course.
Learners will come away with a solid foundation of the fundamentals of Human-Computer Interaction in this four-course certificate.
This course begins with an introduction to the field of Human-Computer Interaction as a whole and where it sits in the context of related and similar fields like Human Factors Engineering and User Experience Design. Here, you’ll learn just enough of the history of HCI to get started having real conversations about the field.
Then, you’ll learn the fundamental design principles of human-computer interaction. You’ll start with the fundamental feedback cycle that underlies all interactions between users and interfaces. With that in mind, you’ll then learn the design principles developed by visionaries in the field like Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Larry Constantine, and Lucy Lockwood. From there, you’ll move into more advanced theories of HCI, including situated action and distributed cognition, then conclude by looking at how interface design can impact social change.
After you’ve learned the fundamental principles and theories of HCI, you’ll move onto the design life cycle. The design life cycle covers how you iteratively gather requirements, brainstorm alternatives, prototype interfaces, and gather user feedback quickly to make fast progress in designing and improving user interfaces. You’ll cover the basics of how to develop a good survey, conduct an informative interview, and control for bias throughout your needfinding processes. You’ll then learn about running effective brainstorming sessions, and then prototyping at the just-right level of fidelity for your current confidence in your designs. Finally, you’ll learn how to evaluate those prototypes with real users, gathering their feedback for a new run through the design life cycle.
After that, you’ll briefly look at the current state of human-computer interaction, focusing on three areas: technologies like virtual and augmented reality, ideas like gesture- or touch-based interaction, and application areas like healthcare and security. In this exploration, this course relies heavily on cutting-edge papers and publications from the ever-changing field of HCI.
Then finally, this course wraps with a recap the entire program contents and tells you what to do next to further your HCI education: whether it’s pursuing a Master’s or PhD in the field, taking follow-up MOOCs, or beginning your own HCI research career.
The material in this course is borrowed from Georgia Tech’s CS6750: Human-Computer Interaction, part of its online Master of Science in Computer Science program. You’ll watch the exact same lectures as students in the for-credit program.
This professional certificate consists of 4 core courses:
- Human-Computer Interaction I: Fundamentals & Design Principles
Learn the principles of Human-Computer Interaction to create intuitive, usable interfaces, with established design principles like feedback cycles, direct manipulation, affordances, signifiers, and more.
2. Human-Computer interaction II: Cognition, Context & Culture
Get into the user’s mind and understand the role of mental models and representations, then investigate how to design interfaces that integrate with and influence the world around us.
3. Human-Computer Interaction III: Ethics, Needfindings & Prototyping
Build on your knowledge of HCI’s core principles by learning to design interfaces in the real world. Begin with the ethics of human subjects research, then learn critical methods for requirements gathering and brainstorming design alternatives.
4. Human-Computer Interaction IV: Evaluation, Agile Methods, & Beyond
Complete your understanding of the design life cycle by learning to take interface ideas, prototype them quickly, and evaluate them with real users. Finally, tie principles and methods together and learn the next steps you could take in HCI.
UX Design Institute credit-rated by Glasgow Caledonian University
The UX Design Institute has teamed up with Glasgow Caledonian University to create a unique diploma program for aspiring UX professionals. The course goes deep into the UX process. It combines academic rigor, individual career mentorship, project reviews, collaborative project work, portfolio construction, and high-quality video to deliver a well-rounded learning experience.
All courses are credit-rated by Glasgow Caledonian University, a highly-ranked UK university. The Professional Diploma in UX Design is allocated 20 credits at Level 8 on the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework. You can view this table to see with this certificate would be the equivalent of in your country (for those based in Canada and the United States, this certificate is the equivalent of an Associates Degree).
This unique program differs from many other online UX educational offerings in that it is an accredited program, at an associate’s degree level, from a world-recognized university and taught by instructors with a verified background in the subject matter they are teaching.
To ensure the course stays current and job-focused, it’s validated by an industry advisory council that includes members from some of the biggest and most influential tech brands in the world such as Intercom, Hubspot, and Dell.
With a rating of 4.83/5 on SwitchUp.org and alumni working well-paying jobs at great firms such as MasterCard, UserVision, IBM, and Udemy, this program is well worth looking into for folks looking to make a direct transition from learning theory to gaining an industry role.
I had a chance to talk to former student Stephanie Bell about her time at UX Design Institute and here is what she had to say about her experience with the program:
“The verified credential from Glasgow Caledonian University played a big part in my decision to enrol. Having a high-level of accreditation legitimized it compared to a lot of other courses and bootcamps you see out there.
I was also recommended this program from a friend who was already doing the course, as well as a few other professionals in the industry. I really liked the idea that you could continue working while taking the course. You have to really be able to manage your time effectively, I managed to complete this course over 6 months while working full time as well. Looking back on it, I’m very happy I chose this program. It really helped me make the transition into a UX design role”
Google Career Certificate in UX Design
“College degrees are out of reach for many Americans, and you shouldn’t need a college diploma to have economic security,” wrote Kent Walker, senior vice president of global affairs at Google
Google has partnered with Coursera to launch a first of its kind Career Certificate course in UX Design. The certificates are created and taught by Google employees, do not require learners to have a college degree, and can be completed in three to six months, and 100% online via Coursera. Google says it will consider all of its certificates as the equivalent of a four-year college degree for related roles at the company. (source)
Google’s Google vice president, Lisa Gevelber has stated that:
“This is not revenue-generating for Google, there’s a small cost from the Coursera platform itself — the current pricing is $49 a month — but we want to ensure that anyone who wants to have this opportunity, can have it.”
If you’re interested in this Google Career Certificate in UX Design when it becomes available, signup for CourseraPlus. This subscription also gives you unlimited access to ALL courses offered on Coursera. I’ll be sure to refresh this article with more info on this offering as more updates become available.
Coming away from this article I hope you get a feel for some of the affordable, high-quality learning content that is available to you. All you need is an internet connection, computer, and willingness to stay dedicated and work through the material. I wish you the best of luck in whichever educational decision you decide to take.
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