How UX and design education changed my life
By: Isabel Riedel
Tags: User Experience, Learning, UX, Education, Interaction Design

Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

What is this UX thing that everyone’s talking about?

The first time I came across the term “UX Design” was in a conversation with one of my colleagues. We discussed how we could improve the quality of our work. I talked about design, he talked about user experience – we both talked about education.

That happened about six months after I graduated from university. I was working as a graphic designer and was still relatively new to the company. My colleague, an expert from the digital department, had already gained many years of experience and he told me about UX design.

User experience sounded like something that could definitely improve the quality of our products and services. It aroused my curiosity from the very first moment. I wanted to know more.

That’s when I came across the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF), a non-profit educational organization.

Learning with the Interaction Design Foundation

When I discovered the Interaction Design Foundation on the internet and signed up for a membership almost a year ago, I didn’t know much about user experience design and its potential. But the IDF’s offer sounded very promising:

online instructor-led UX courses of Ivy League quality

course material combining the insights and know-how of both academia and high-tech industry

a more than fair price (even if I’m no longer a student… hey, who says no to affordable education?)

and very important for someone who likes to be in control of everything: When and how intensively I work on a course is entirely up to me.

Apart from the courses, IDF offers a lot of open-source material and the possibility to join their open-minded and inspiring community.

The human side of design

First, I took the course Web Design for Usability. Every week I was given access to a new lesson with instructive video content (there are also courses with text-based content or a mix of both). I learned a lot, right from the very first week.

Shortly afterwards, I started taking more UX courses.

The UX design field is incredibly large. It's more than just graphic and user interface design – UX is research, conception, management, development, prototyping, testing, ... and above all: UX without users is not UX. It's all about users. Unfortunately, in our economically driven world, this usually goes unnoticed.

My second course UX Management also taught me this: the whole UX thing, the user-centered design approach, has a remarkable value for the company and the whole business.

Signs of progress

By now, I have completed three more UX courses (including Accessibility: How to Design for All, Mobile UX Design and Conducting Usability Testing) and I am enrolled in many more. I have fully dedicated myself to user experience and my work as a graphic designer has changed a lot ever since.

“True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features.” – Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen

My awareness of user experience has increased. Empathy, usability and a user-centered design approach are now an integral part of my work.

When I design a website now, I always have the user in mind. And I work together as closely as possible with our research and development teams.

The power to make a difference

I am someone who believes that even with the smallest action, you can make the world a little bit better. That’s why I started sharing in my company what I learned from the IDF.

In the beginning, user experience was quite new for all of us. Now, we are taking the first steps towards a UX culture.

The processes have changed (for the better), from first sketches and early prototypes to the finished website. At our company, we now even do usability testing.

UX Design has given my work a new meaning and inspired many of my colleagues to take a new approach. We have the vision to take our work to the next level and offer our customers and our users the best experience they can imagine.

It is an important message: The user is the center of our design and development processes. It is the goal to identify the users’ desires and motivations and to develop a product or service that meets their needs – or better yet: surpasses.

How to stay focused while learning online

UX has become an essential part of my job – and somehow of my life. Still, there’s a lot to learn. How do I motivate myself to keep moving forward? Here are my top three tips:

1. Set a schedule. When you start a UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation, you can decide for yourself when you want work and how much time you want to spend on it. If you are not immune to procrastination (like me), try to set a schedule – and stick to it.

2. Take notes. Every video or text of every single lesson contains an enormous amount of valuable information. It can be hard to soak up that much concentrated knowledge like a sponge. I always take notes and summarize the essential findings. This helps me not only to answer questions, but also to internalize what I have learned.

3. Learn to celebrate every little success. There is no teacher or personal trainer who pushes and praises you. But that doesn’t mean your improvements aren’t worth appreciating and celebrating. The best motivator is yourself. With every lesson, with every question or every discussion within the community, you get closer to your goal of learning something new. At the end, any progress feels like a small success.

Remember: You do this voluntarily – that alone deserves great respect.

The result: It’s just the beginning

Within ten months at the Interaction Design Foundation, I successfully completed five courses, answered 420 questions, collecting 1,676 of 1,702 possible points. (And I must admit: the incorrectly answered questions taught me the most.)

It was a year full of new insights, inspiring thoughts and a lot of valuable knowledge.

The best thing about it: There’s a lot more to learn and to discover.