Discover the University-backed Coursera UX Design Courses to Follow in 2024
UX Designing has seen many new faces ever since it gained its due share of importance and credibility. Designers have been trying out all sorts of techniques from 3D graphics to skeuomorphism and whatnot. Where all these techniques have had a great impact on the way people interact with a digital interface, their development and understanding requires some practice, learning, and experience.
The pandemic gave a push to online learning bringing more and more people on board every day. Coursera, working as a massive open online course provider, offers a plenty of (175 to be exact) UX courses. However, not all of the Coursera UX design courses have an equal amount of impact. Out of all the courses available on the platform we have chosen the top 10 for your reference.
Top 10 UX Design Courses on Coursera for Every Level
Coursera has different types of entities taking the classes. While some are individual instructors other courses are provided by institutions and colleges. You will find the requisite information in the list to know more about them.
1. UI / UX Design Specialization - caLARTS
- Certificate - Yes
- Hours - 5 hours per week for 4 months
This is a course for beginners and tutors them to formulate a design-centric approach to make adept user interfaces and understand the role of user experience. The duo instructors, Michael Worthington and Roman Jaster come from the School of Art faculty helping the students identify the core visual communication aspects.
The students are taught about UX conventions, formats, preferences, and how to amplify the end-user's screen based experience. Because the UI and UX are high-demand fields, the course is curated to ensure that the students gain the capability to learn and harness the abilities required to utilize the industry-relevant trends and build interactive digital interfaces.
While moving towards the end of this Coursera program, there is a special applied learning project that asks the students to apply what they have learned and build a live project.
2. Introduction to User Experience Design - Georgia Tech
- Certificate - Yes
- Hours - 6
Students enrolling themselves on this program will learn four things once they successfully see it through. These are Usability, User Experience, User Experience Design, and User Interface. This course teaches the students that designing is meant to be a systematic process that is driven by data and the understanding of the same.
The course instructor Dr. Rosa I. Arriaga is a senior research scientist at the School of Interactive Learning and teaches her students about the four-step UI cycle. The students learn about data collection pertaining to the design, how to understand the data, how to use it to create the design, and model the interfaces accordingly.
Although this Coursera UX design course is meant for the beginners, it can be taken by designers of the intermediate level too if they wish to brush up their basics and core tenets of UX designing.
3. User Experience Research and Design Specialization - University of Michigan
- Certificate - Yes
- Hours - 2 hours per week for 9 months
A course coming from the prestigious University of Michigan has to be good, isn't it? Well, it is. This course is meant for beginners and inspires them to create a career in UX designing by laying down a solid knowledgeable foundation for the enrolled students.
The purpose of this Coursera UX program is to help the students learn to create great, memorable, and user-centric products that allow them to advance their careers. A total of 5 instructors take the course, which is headed by Mark Newman and the entire program has 6 sub-courses.
Starting with introduction to the UX designing principles followed by understanding the user's needs, evaluation design with users, conceptualizing and prototyping, UX design surveys, and ends with UX capstone.
4. Interaction Design Specialization
- Certificate - Yes
- Hours - 3 hours per week for 10 months.
Another one of the great courses for beginners available in the list of Coursera UX design programs, this particular course will help you learn several pivotal skills of designing. Starting from storyboarding to heuristic evaluation and all the way to prototyping in User Experience, this is a course you should take if you want to learn a major chunk about this field.
The certificate course is taught by three instructors, Scott Kelmer, Elizabeth Gerber, and Jacob O Wobbrock divided into eight modules. The majority of these modules relate to the theoretical understandings and the literary aspects of UX designing.
They cover subjects like human-centered designing, principles of designing, social computing, input and interaction, UX research and prototyping, and so on. Although, these aspects are very wide and diversified, this UI UI Coursera program covers the basics of them all. Rest assured that you will be able to apply the learnings and create a design at the end.
5. Mobile Interaction Design - HSE University
- Certificate - Yes
- Hours - 118
The course is taken by Pavel Manakhov who is an Associate Professor at the School of Software Engineering. This Coursera UX course is designed to help the students learn the art of shaping products and services that people will use.
To help the students deliver good and memorable user experiences, the course will take them through the basics of interaction design, identify the user research methods having a qualitative focus, and understand the usability inspection along with empirical usability.
We have listed this program in the list of Coursera UX courses because of its ability to create a unique way of thinking that a person can follow a design process. Furthermore, it teaches apt representation of making a designer's decision in the form of asking the right design questions.
In the end, the students will learn to eliminate the interaction problems in designing and create large scale user interface designs with adept user experiences.
6. Web Design: Wireframe to Prototypes - caLARTS
- Certificate - Yes
- Hours - 41
Offered by caLARTS and instructed by Roman Jaster, this course is focussed on the early application of UX Research and creating user interfaces, mockups, plus clickable prototypes. Web designs need to be responsive and interactive, this Coursera UX design helps overcome these challenges.
The students enrolled in the program will learn more about mobile-first approach, web typography, and the relationship between design and programming with handoff procedures. All this means that this course is meant for those who already have the basic understanding of UX designing and need to get into the more integrated concepts.
Since it is a more application-related course, the users will learn to work with Sketch, AdobeXD, Adobe Illustrator, Balsamiq, and HTML/CSS.
7. User Experience: Research & Prototyping - University of California San Diego
- Certificate - Yes
- Hours - 11
One of the intermediate and advanced Coursera UX programs that focuses on teaching the nuances of research and prototyping. Within this program, the students will learn a lot of user experience via persona creation, user research, and human-computer interaction.
The instructors of the program are Elizabeth Gerber and Scott Klemmer who devote their time to teach the core of user experience and take all the time to help the students completely get thorough with the associated concepts. A student whose focus is to create something of his own and not just get a job, can join this program.
More than this, it helps understand the fundamentals of design and research. A design is only as good as the research conducted prior to its creation. Moreover, the course teaches practical techniques to the students.
8. Human-Centered Design: an Introduction - UC San Diego
- Certificate - Yes
- Hours - 14
Now we have come to the advanced programs related to UX designing and offered on Coursera. This particular Coursera UX design program will make you an expert at rapid prototyping, storyboarding, heuristic evaluation, and paper prototyping. Another course that was individually offered by Scott Klemmer, the course gives an introduction to the aspects of human-centered design.
In addition to this, the students will learn to conduct the fieldwork for designing and go through a comparative evaluation of the aspects. Working through the end of the course, you will learn how to make paper prototypes, low-fidelity prototypes and high-quality interfaces.
9. User Research and Design - University of Minnesota
- Certificate - Yes
- Hours - 8
Another one of the advanced Coursera UX programs, this particulate course is taken by five instructors headed by Loren Terveen. Beginning from a small introduction, the course takes the users towards a more advanced understanding of user research methods and helps the students learn to analyze and deliver the required user research.
There is not only but multiple methods and strategies to infer the impact of user research in the final design. This course takes you through these novel and innovative methods while taking you through the older methods too. The most common methods like surveys, log-analysis, and other similar techniques are taught.
10. User Experience Design - Creating User Profiles
- Certificate - No
- Hours - One
Among all other UX design courses, this one is made by Coursera and helps understand the core skills possessed by the UX professionals. It is a guided project and only runs for one hour, but that is an hour well spent as it will take you through a journey of creating user profiles from scratch.
Taught by Mark Veljkov, this is a guided project, which means that you can follow everything that is taught by the instructor simultaneously. The syllabus of the course includes gathering research information, organizing that information, and conveying the same to create better and oriented research findings. The course ends with sharing the final user persona.
Conclusion
Coursera has a large repository of courses pertaining to almost every industry and sector. Today we have discussed the top 10 Coursera UX design programs targeted to help individuals across all levels create a great understanding of how to navigate through the concepts of User Experience designing.
Depending on your level of understand about UX design choose a course that you can follow and start learning. As a beginner, it is recommended to start with a beginner's course and then move onto intermediate and specialized advanced courses.
