Online Platforms to Learn UI/UX Design

Learn UIUX in this platform

Companies around the world have a hard time finding qualified UI and UX designers. To make matters worse, demand for UX professionals grows each and every year. In the US, novice UI and UX designers have an average yearly salary of $74,953, and experienced UI and UX designers can earn up to $107,086 (2018 Glassdoor Salaries Report). It’s no wonder people want to pursue a career in UX, especially if money is a key motivator behind job choice!

If you are one of these people who wants to kick-start a career in UX, the reviews in this article will help you choose between the various online course platforms around to teach you in-demand UX skills. The comparisons made will even help if you are currently considering how to make a career change into the world of design, or just simply wish to upgrade your existing skills. Prices for courses vary from free to a whopping $6,649, but then again, that high price tag comes with a job guarantee.

CareerFoundry is one of the few non-US learning platforms for UI and UX. Founded in 2013 and based in Berlin, they provide online tech education through self-paced, mentored programs in web development, UX design and UI design. As a student, you can take their courses with the help of expert mentors and tutors, and use a personalized and project-based curriculum relevant to the requirements in the industry.

It will take you anywhere between 4 and 12 months to finish a course, depending on the topic. The 3 courses that will probably make the biggest impact on your career are the most comprehensive and therefore expensive, while the remaining 4 are cheaper and mostly used to broaden your skill set.

Upon completion of a course, you will be issued with a certificate you can use on your resume, LinkedIn profile and within job interviews. Besides the certificate, a tech career specialist will help you with your resume, give you placement guidance and help you prepare for interviews. In fact, CareerFoundry goes as far as to provide students with a job guarantee, meaning you get a full refund if you are not employed within six months of earning your certificate. Alumni of their UX Designer course have landed jobs at tech companies such as Google, PayPal, Netflix, BBC and Amazon.
With regard to the job guarantee, it’s important to note there are many conditions you have to meet before you become eligible. These stipulate you:

• Live in a metropolitan area in a set of particular countries
• Apply to a minimum of 5 jobs per week
• Can accept both remote and non-remote positions
• Check in every other week with a career specialist
• Respond to messages from the career specialist within 72 hours
• Follow advice given by the career specialist
• Opt in to CareerFoundry emails
• Showcase your portfolio projects on Github, Behance and Dribble

Unfortunately, CareerFoundry does not inform potential students of these requirements when they mention the job guarantee on their website. They are only stated in the terms and conditions, which most people don’t read — so make sure to read the small print if you decide this is your course platform of choice!

We at The Interaction Design Foundation are an independent nonprofit initiative with an objective that sounds like a paradox: To raise the level of global design education, while at the same time reduce costs to as low as possible.

As a member, you can learn from 29 beginner to advanced courses that cover the entire spectrum of UX design — from mobile UX design and usability, to UX management and accessibility. We even have a course on how to become a UX designer from scratch! All courses feature in-depth, high-quality content taught by leading industry experts and top academics, and the courses are graded by real-life humans too. We deliver this content through both text- and video-based material and our courses also include “Build Your Portfolio” exercises which take you through a practical project so you can use what you’ve learned to create case studies for your portfolio. This will come in super handy when you try to get your next job in the field!

Since the Interaction Design Foundation is the oldest (we were founded in 2002) and most specialized learning platform in the business, our course certificates are authoritative, recognized and trusted within the UX industry. We also promote learning paths to help you earn the certificates most relevant to your career goals — for example, you can follow the User Researcher, Usability Expert or Product Manager path, just to name a few.

What’s more, global companies take our courses — the likes of IBM, Adobe, Philips, SAP, Accenture and McAfee, for example. Likewise, universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London use our educational material to help them teach UX design.

You can get access to the full range of courses at the Interaction Design Foundation for somewhere between $96-$156. There is no option to pay for single courses, but this is a pretty modest fee considering what you get access to, and there is a 30-day money back guarantee!

Coursera gives you access to more than 3,500 online courses across multiple fields. They have partnered with top universities and organizations all over the world, including US universities such as Stanford, Princeton and Yale, as well as international institutions such as the University of London and University of Zurich.

The main thing to note is Coursera is not specialized in UX. Their course certificates are therefore not recognized within the UX industry, however they do offer three types of educational products:

Courses
Their courses are devised and taught by instructors from some of the world’s best universities and schools. Courses contain videos of lectures, text, quizzes, projects, peer-reviewed assignments and discussion forums. When you finish each one, you’ll earn official recognition for your work in the form of a sharable electronic course certificate. Prices range from $29 to $99 per course.

Specializations
Specializations are made up of multiple courses within the same subject. If you need to master a specific skill, you can join a specialization and give yourself the chance to earn a specialization certificate to share on social media and present to potential employers. Prices range from $39 to $79 per month per specialization.

Online Degrees

If you want to wholly commit to a new career or shake up your existing one, Coursera gives you the opportunity to earn an online degree. For example, you can earn an accredited master’s degree over a time span of 1 to 3 years from the comfort of your own home. Prices range from $15,000 to $25,000 per degree. 

Udemy boasts of a humongous 100,000-course library, which leaves other online course platforms behind in a cloud of dust when it comes to sheer choice. This number is made possible because Udemy allows instructors to create courses based on the fields they claim to be experts in. Once courses are created, instructors can launch them and charge a fee from students. As opposed to many other course platforms, Udemy doesn’t list courses created by universities and educational institutions.

Since almost anyone can create and publish courses through the Udemy platform, the quality of the courses ranges from poor to world-class. Make sure you read the course reviews before you enlist and be sure to watch the course preview video so you know what to expect.

As opposed to the UX-specific learning platforms covered in this article, Udemy covers a wide range of fields. This has repercussions for the course certificates earned through the completion of their UX courses. A Udemy course certificate on your resume or LinkedIn profile will unfortunately not carry much weight within the UX industry.

With more than 27,000 online classes, Skillshare is one of the largest educational platforms in the world.

Each of their courses is made up of an instructional video which typically ranges from 45 minutes to an hour, plus assignments, a class community and class projects to provide a rich learning experience. In contrast to many of the other learning platforms reviewed in this article, Skillshare does not provide any certificates or proof of completion, which makes it difficult to highlight your newly acquired skills on your resume or at a job interview.

Another drawback worth mentioning is there is no instructor-led training, which means students and instructors do not communicate directly through the platform. So, don’t expect to get direct feedback from instructors if you want questions answered or projects graded!

Almost anyone can create a class and publish it on the platform. This means you can expect to find a broad range of classes with varying qualities ranging from world-class to amateur level. Be sure to read reviews of the classes you intend to take before you pay to use the platform.

The comparison table at the bottom gives you a quick overview of the learning platforms being examined, and lets you see how Skillshare in particular holds up compared to the alternatives.