How to boost your user experience design education with IDF

Melissa Ha
Sep 6, 2018 · 3 min read

Yesterday, I received a mail from the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) telling me that I’d be one of the 1% top performers of their courses and they asked me to share my story. As I really appreciate IDF’s design courses because they actually helped me to become an user experience designer, I can honestly recommend IDF.

With the start of my master’s I started to work for a digital agency. I was doing project management stuff but often felt unsatisfied because I wanted to get involved in client projects. So I absolved an internal design thinking boot camp and from then on I supported innovation workshops. When I got in touch with UX design I was fascinated by its creativity and its psychological aspects and decided to become an UX designer. I was already gaining practical experience, however I also wanted to get educated: I really wanted to understand what’s behind the practical application of activities like prototyping, doing research and sketching. I wanted to learn the underlying theory. I had already done some MOOC courses that taught me the basics of UX design and user research, however I wanted to learn more specific aspects that would help me to boost my knowledge. So I signed up for IDF.

I started with The Practical Guide to Usability. It took me about some months to complete it, because I was doing the course besides working and studying. It was fun to work through the lessons as they use both texts and videos and there are some questions to answer at the end of each page. The content really helped me to better understand my work environment and to participate in design discussions. I could directly apply what I’ve learned.

Finishing my masters I got a job offer to work as interaction designer for mobile experiences. To prepare myself for this new task I did the course Mobile User Experience (UX) Design. This one helped me to better understand a very specific field of UX design, which is some of the advantages that I see with IDF: It offers a variety of different courses that go very deeply into a specific topic.

Currently, I’m doing the course Human-Computer Interaction — HCI and I want to do UI Design Patterns for Successful Software. I think that it is nice to continuously work on a course because it is very educating and also refreshing to take some minutes a day — sometimes it’s only 5 to 10 minutes, sometimes it’s half an hour – to do something different from my daily tasks.

Which brings me to my 3 best tips for how to stay focused while learning online:

  • Take notes of the content of the course to capture important hints and rules.
  • Accomplish the course in small steps: I had the feeling that I learn more when I do a course over a period of time instead of rushing through it in a few days. I experienced that it is much easier for me to stay focused when I spend only a small time slot a day for the course.
  • Check your progress and be proud of yourself :)

So, this is my story with IDF and how I managed to educate myself in user experience design as I am new to that field but can’t imagine to do anything else. I hope that it helps people like me who did not have the luck to study design but nevertheless decided to become an interaction designer :)

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