How I Am Becoming a UX Designer Thanks to the Interaction Design Foundation — a Review
I am 28, I live in Rome, and I’m a registered psychologist who has now almost completed his transition into UX design. For this career change I have to thank the Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF), but first I’ll tell you about my background and what led me to take this choice.
When I was attending university, 99% of my classmates wanted to become psychotherapists or land a job in HR; those were things that I certainly took into consideration too, but at the same time they did not ignite the spark in me, and I’ve always felt like taking a common path would have been a bad choice for me, and a waste of my personal skills.
I’ve always been a creative person and an art lover, so when I took the optional course “Psychology and Art” at the university I finally felt passionate about something I was studying, but I still had no idea about how to translate that knowledge into a job.
After becoming a full-fledged psychologist, I first decided to drastically change my career; so I founded my one-man-company with the intent of developing a brand of home and pets products to sell online, while I was writing articles as a freelance journalist. I was finalizing the details of my first contract with a Chinese factory when I realized that business was too risky and expensive. I wanted to find an innovative and uncommon job, where I could express my creativity in a practical way and where my psychology background would have been useful in some way. So I discovered user experience design and soon I realized that it was the perfect solution for me. Since I had already wasted enough time with my entrepreneurial attempt (which at least left me with a good knowledge of the e-commerce world), I decided to totally devote myself to the acquisition of the skills that would allow me to work as a UX designer. So I started my membership with the IxDF, as it clearly seemed to be the best online school to learn UX design. Fortunately it then proved to be really the best; I tried other courses too, but honestly the courses offered by the IxDF are pure gold.
First of all, the Interaction Design Foundation is incredibly cheap and affordable, not because its quality is low, but because they believe in education accessible to all. You pay a very small annual fee and you have access to a great variety of courses, divided into 3 main categories: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. These courses are perfectly structured, and cover everything you need to learn about UX design, they are based on a human-centered approach to design and are taught by top level teachers, really inspiring professionals like Frank Spillers, William Hudson, Brian Withworth, Alan Dix, and the great Don Norman, the father of UX design, among the others. The high level of quality content, the open-ended questions graded by humans, not machines, and the prestige of the teachers, make the certificates obtained by completing these courses recognized and trusted by industry leaders. You can choose what courses you want to take and you can go at your own pace, you can connect with other IxDF students around the world and in your hometown thanks to the IxDF local groups, it also offers bootcamps, master classes, webinars, and a vast open-source, open-access literature.
Personally, as I started as a beginner, I decided to take as much courses as I could; so far the ones I found most interesting are ‘Design Thinking’, ‘Human-Computer Interaction’, ‘The Brain and Technology: Brain Science in Interface Design’, ‘How to Design for Augmented and Virtual Reality’, ‘Psychology of Interaction Design’, ‘Mobile User Experience Design’, and ‘Affordances: Designing Intuitive User Interfaces’. As you can notice, there is much more psychology in UX design than you can imagine, “I finally see Gestalt psychology finding its practical application” I thought when I started studying these disciplines, and I also thought about how I finally have found something I really like to learn and that is going to lead me to a job where my psychological studies meet my creativity and my passion for design, technology, and innovation.
At the moment I completed 7 IxDF courses with great results (they congratulated with me for being in the top 1% of the courses performers!), I am taking other courses and I am working on UX design projects to showcase in my portfolio, which hopefully will help me land my first UX job. I am confident because I really like what I am doing, and I am really grateful to the Interaction Design Foundation, because it offers the best level of UX design education at the lowest prices, and it really goes into deep in every UX design aspect. I definitely recommend the IxDF to anyone interested in user experience design, and even when I will be a senior UX designer I see myself taking their courses to stay updated.
