All about Interaction Design Foundation
Taking an informed decision after reading this would be easier. So shall we start?
Note: This is not a sponsored post by IDF rather a clarification for doubts that IDF poses for itself. This article consists a combination of questions and confusions that has been asked to me by numerous UX aspirants who want to pursue a certification course with IDF.
What is Interaction Design Foundation?
The Interaction Design Foundation (abbreviated as IDF) is an educational organization that provides certification courses in various disciplines — UX design, Interaction Design, Product Management, and a lot of others. It’s Executive Board currently includes Don Norman, Ken Friedman, Bill Buxton, Irene Au, Michael Arent, Daniel Rosenberg, Jonas Lowgren, and Olof Schybergson.
What IDF stands out (at least for me) is for its great value for money. For almost 10% of the cost of other such platforms, it provides access to a vast library of UX and UX related material. All structured and well-written. But let me give you a major heads up here - you have to be dedicated by yourself as you’ll be having all the course material but no mentor to guide you through it. Focus and determination is the key here.
Who all can do this course?
As a sane mind in the industry will tell you, UX Design might have “design” in its name, but it doesn’t mean that you should have a degree in a design-related course. Even the best UX Design teams over the world have a mix of various professional backgrounds from Hospital nurses to Army personnels. Though from experience, I think having a design-related or a psychology degree would be most beneficial in UX design.
What are the topics?
Interaction design foundation offers at least 34 courses which abut to various fields like marketing, front end development, UX design, Interaction Design, Product Design, etc. You can access all courses once you have successfully subscribed to IDF. Courses available are Design Thinking, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), UI Patterns, User research, Emotional Design, and a lot more.
Other courses vs IDF
I would like to compare IDF here with the right kind of competitors. IDF is not a substitute for a Bootcamp (although they also provide a Bootcamp course) but rather an equivalent of self-paced courses. Udemy, Skillshare, Coursera, etc are the right competitors to compare IDF with.
Money — You can get free courses too if your budget is really tight. But if you want to pay a nominal fee, I personally think it is worth it.
Interaction with peers — The greatest benefit of IDF is the community you can clear your doubts with. It’s quite responsive and everyone has something to share.
Content — Streamlined and systematic approach towards content makes it easy to digest.
There are other few perks that IDF suggests it has like “Discount on products” — which is very subjective so I would not consider it for competitive analysis.
What is the structure of teaching?
The complete teaching material in IDF includes text and video-based lessons. The structure of the course material is basically like this -
- Select a path you want to follow — There are currently 10 different paths that you can follow.
- Each Path has an average of 12 courses divided into Foundation, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced sections.
- Each of these courses contains 6–8 lessons. Duration of each course ranges from 8 hours to whopping 22 hours (spread over few weeks).
Look at the content inside the bracket again. That is how IDF sells out its limitation in a very sneaky way. Except for the first two lessons which will unlock immediately as soon as you apply for course, every lesson will unlock on weekly basis (1 lesson per week). So basically, each lesson would take up to 6–7 weeks to complete. No matter if you have a weekend and you want to binge-watch the complete course- NOPE.
But, you CAN do multiple courses at one time. We’ll be discussing about the best strategy in a minute.
Sometimes, the text part is too long to focus. But even after not being an avid reader, I managed to do 6 courses. Your intent of learning is more important than how you are learning that.
Are the topics old-school?
Many of the aspiring UX designers ask me if the study material on IDF is old-school. I had kind of the same confusion. Here is a reply from IDF for that.
Being a witness here, I can say whatever they are suggesting is true. The basic idea behind UX design always remains the same. Overcome your assumptions and put yourself in the shoes of your user.
Other than that, they are updating their websites with new courses which features AR/VR, design strategy and data visualization.
Do they teach you about Software needed in the UI/UX industry?
No. IDF doesn’t teach you the tools, it teaches you the methods. You have to learn software on your own online.
They also do not teach you about various Design systems (which I think they should) like Apple’s human interface guidelines, Google Material design, IBM design system, and a lot of others.
Buying a monthly subscription is best, right? NO.
As I said before. All the courses take at least 6 weeks to complete, so paying out a month’s subscription would not get you any certificate. Rather buy a professional plan for a year. Buying student licenses would not let you strategize as discussed in the next point.
Strategy with IDF
About the secret, the best strategy goes something like this. Apply to all courses in your dashboard at once — but decide on any two or three you would be concentrating on for the next 6–7 weeks.
What this will do is that after 6–7 weeks (and 2–3 courses that you started with are now finished), all the subsequent courses that you applied on your first day would have all its content unlocked. Now you can binge-watch the courses as per your need if you are that kind of a learner.
Update (18/02/2021 : After being contacted by IDF)
During a feedback to IDF, I was told the following details which I didn’t know for past 1 year. It said:
However, I do want to clear out with you that with an annual membership (Student or Professional), it is possible for you to ask our support team for full access to the courses instead of the stepwise, weekly lesson release.
We release one lesson per week as a part of our “stepwise” learning process, and it is proven to be extremely effective in increasing course completion rates. When we release one lesson per week, we create a steady flow of new lessons and also create a challenging but manageable goal for course takers.
That said, we have a special backdoor system to add you to an earlier cycle of any course so that you can access all lessons without waiting, but it only works for yearly memberships as it works based on your membership duration. It’s part of our promise that you’re always in control of your learning journey.
During a feedback to IDF, I was told about the following details which I didn’t know for past 1 year. It said:
Referral system
IDF promotes the referral system. If someone refers you to the program, then you will get 2 months of free subscription + 1 month for the person who referred you.
Click here to get 2 months of free subscription.
Value of certification
I have felt that certification of other courses like Springboard, Ironhack, and other live boot camps are better than IDF. I know it sounds rhetorical, but the main point for any certification is the knowledge that comes with it. In those terms, I feel my knowledge in UX has increased substantially.
More theoretical and less practical
Let me tell you this right before you start and many IDF members will agree to me on this. IDF is a repository of the best content with examples of their uses. But you need to understand the practical aspect too. IDF labels all of it’s portfolio projects as optional but my advice would be
Do the “optional” portfolio projects by getting your hands dirty. No matter, how amateur you think you or your project seems. JUST DO IT.
IDF Community?
What I think is the best part of learning anything is — the community which helps you grow, and this is the reason why I prefer IDF over other competitors like Coursera and Udemy.
IDF community imbibes the culture of sharing knowledge as well as mentoring. I have got a lot of my answers from the community only. And No — there is no official slack or any other group. It’s on their website only. Ask questions that you need answers to, and attend questions that you think you have answers to. Simple.
I hope I have covered every single point regarding the Interaction Design Foundation. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, or put down your thoughts below.
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