A UX Pro reviews Google’s 6 month UX Course
After spending decades working in UX and UI, though never having taken a professional course, I thought it may be interesting to try out Google’s UX design professional certificate to see if there’s any gaps in my workflow.
The TLDR is yes there were some gaps in my workflow and no, knowing them now probably doesn’t make be a better designer. Though I do suddenly feel more confident that my current process is robust and comprehensive which is a big stress reliever. I’ve also added some elements of the course to my processes.
My usual process to create a new website from just an idea to final design is roughtly 34 steps, yes that sounds insanely large but after going through the Google UX course they proceed to train you in roughly 38 steps to achieve the same result. Which really surprised me, that’s a whole lot of things to think about just to create one website or mobile app. So what are these steps exactly?
Well what Google does in this course is teach the well known ‘5 Steps of Design Thinking’, which are: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test’, which I call EDIPT, and then they break these 5 phases down into roughly 6 steps each.
We’re not going to go through them all now, but some of the steps/processes you learn about are: personas, user stories, problem statements, competitive audits, Crazy 8s, User Flow Diagrams, Low and Hi-Fidelity prototypes.
Google teach these in an incredibly straighforward and linear way, nothing is rushed and everything is incredibly clear. The lessons taught are then taught again, to really lock them into your long term memory. There’s also a lot of focus on inclusivity which is great and a little focus on accessibility, which I think could be improved on. As accessibility becomes a huge focus for UX/UI designers as their role becomes more senior (as they need to teach the juniors what and what is not ‘accessible’), especially when working for government agencies.
Overall though the course is really interesting, really comprehensive and for UX/UI beginners an absolute goldmine of information. For more experienced UX/UI designers (1–3 years experience) it may improve your knowledgebank an extra 10–20%, which is better than nothing, and for senior designers taking this course may help you to understand the most modern design processes and improve you 1–2%, which may make you question if it’s worth it. Especially as it’s meant to be a 6 month course, though you can really compress this course into a month or 2 depending on what you want to rush through.
The Good: The course teaches you as if you’re a complete, complete beginner which is great if you are one, but if you have some knowledge in UI/UX it means large segments of the course can be fast-forwarded through.
The Bad: The course gets you to design a website, and also design an app, then design a website and an app, all using the exact same process. So it gets extremely repetitive by the final project. Also your work is graded by other students which means you can get completely random or just plain incorrect scores.
Final Thoughts: The Google UX Certificate takes complete beginners through the whole UX design process in a very clear and well defined manner, everything is explained completely and when you finish you’ll be confident you have a big toolkit to apply to your next UI/UX project.
