Google UX Course Review by a Senior Designer

hey friends so i've been asked this question a lot mike can you recommend a good ux course for beginners and up until now i could only say that not really so naturally now when google made their own course on ux design i decided to give it a try because well it's google right so it has to be pretty good quality and i've been a designer for over 22 years now so i didn't really learn a lot from the course but my goal for this wasn't really to learn my goal was to evaluate the course so i can let you guys know if it's worth it or not but halfway through the fundamentals i realized that my experience can actually give me a bit of a bias towards the course because i've been doing this for so long a lot of the concepts that they're mentioning aren't really that new to me so it can get pretty boring so i spoke with two other people magda and daniel and they are just learning they're just starting their journey to become a ux designer so i think that their feedback combined with mine should give you more of a perspective if the course is even for you and normally people do this at the end of the video but if you want they're too long didn't watch version here it is i believe that this course is actually quite good it has some issues and those issues can actually influence your future work so it's important to know about them and to actually take them into account when starting the course so let's start with something very high level here before starting the course you need to be aware that this is a course by google which means that this course is done in a very certain way that is gonna be making future google employees and if you don't want to work for google or if you're planning to work on an adult startup or building your own company there are some things that are going to be done in a very google way and you might have to relearn them or just get a different perspective on them but that's something that was to be accepted from the start so the knowledge here is really good and you can adjust the things that you learn to another work scenario later it will require a little bit of extra learning but you'll have a solid foundation to build on and here is an example of something like that while going through different design roles they mention something like this there are also visual designers who focus on how a product or technology looks they might be responsible for designing logos illustrations or icons and this is a good example of how google is trying to teach you their own ways because visual designers are mostly ui designers and of course there are also graphic designers and these are the people that are making the logos and illustrations while ui designers are actually the people who are working on how the product looks so just this one thing is showing that if you're gonna apply for a ui ux design role there is really nothing about ui design mentioned in the fundamentals of the course it's just called visual design and this is a little bit different than what the rest of the industry is calling it i liked however that they are also mentioning a trend of simplification of ux roles that has been happening for a couple of years now and i've been mentioning this for over three years and initially i was faced with a lot of negative feedback and now we see google actually saying that i was right so what they mention is that there's three main roles in the ux world ux researchers ux designers and ux writers so that basically means that if you're a designer you're responsible for the actual design so the trend of 2009 and a little bit later of designers who don't do any design just talk is going to be a thing of the past and it's good that they acknowledge it the structure of the course is pretty simple so you have videos you have some reading material and you have quizzes and writing assignments and the good thing about the videos is that they are pretty short so it's easy to actually digest everything in smaller chunks and i really like the fact that you can play them at double the speed most videos are also paused about halfway through with a quick one question quiz and this is a good way to actually memorize something that they said in the video but in many cases it's actually pretty weird because they are asking you for something that they just said like five seconds ago and what i also really liked is the instructors especially michael who is the lead on this course my name is michael he speaks in a very clear and fun to listen to way and i think this is important because you'll be listening to him the most in the fundamentals and if you're doing this course as a beginner ux designer chances are that you've already seen some of the ux memes and google understands that and they actually used some of them in the course and while this is not really a bad approach in general because it gives you some familiarity with the concepts that they're mentioning some of those examples aren't really that great because they used a very overused ux versus ui ketchup bottle example in which they say that the plastic bottle you can squeeze it so the ketchup is a lot easier to apply and that is a better user experience compared to hitting the glass bottle on the bottom to get the ketchup out and while this is technically true there is another thing to consider here that i talked about in a previous video which is that if you're using a plastic bottle you're also eating micro plastics which is not really good for your health in the long run so your long-term user experience might actually be better with a glass bottle okay let's talk about the bad things about the course i found a couple of them and one of them is actually very major and two are not as major but you should still be aware of them before taking the course so the first problem that i see is that google is using their own naming conventions for things and ux is a very weird industry in which a lot of the naming conventions actually differ from company to company so sometimes a name for something that they mention if you try searching for it you'll realize that it has a couple of different names and it can create a little bit of a mess and make it harder for you to find what you're looking for and of course it's just the name the processes have all the same steps it's just some of the names are different between them you want an example search for user centered design in google and then filter it by images and as you can see the flow of this ux approach is practically the same in all of these but the names of individual steps can differ depending on which company produced the infographic so google just uses one and never mentions the possible other naming conventions the other thing that i notice is that the initial part of the curse is a little bit less polished than the rest of it but it does pick up later so if you're discouraged by the beginning just stick to it and it's gonna get better i did facepalm a couple of times during that very first initial stage and one of those phase poems is a very early exercise that they give you they show you two apps to compare them and to figure out which one is better this is a very good exercise you know just comparing two different approaches to things but the problem i have with this that the bad example or the bad app that they chose it's so bad it's just comical it's just exaggerated to an extreme where it's not really easy to compare with any logical thinking or any good ux approach because one of them is like a pretty standard mobile app and the other one is like a chaotic mess the biggest problem with this course however is not really google's i think the biggest problem and the biggest issue that most people find about the google ux course is the horrible ux of coursera which is the provider of the platform here is an example so here's an example of an iframe with two scroll boards and once you start scrolling the form at some point you're gonna see a progress bar and at that point you might stop scrolling but then you'll realize that there is a button underneath that that you need to push to actually proceed because naturally at this stage i would assume that i should just click on the mark as completed but no i need to scroll down and click next and once you get through the entire forum and you click on done there is another window with a done button that's inactive so clicking on it doesn't do anything at all marcus complete doesn't do anything either except for maybe mark it as complete and then you just have to click this little next link on the top right is barely visible and i know it's not easy i know it's not easy to create a platform from scratch or to rebuild a platform that somebody else has made to have good ux but if you're google and if you're trying to teach people ux i think you should do better they certainly do have the resources to actually create a learning platform themselves just for their own course and the main problem with this is that the bad ux of the platform combined with the fact that this is google can actually make a sort of false impression on those junior people those junior designers learning to be a ux designer that this is good or that this is good enough and no it's really not things like that should be avoided and things like that are very far from good ux so looking at it from the perspective of my 20 years of experience in design i can't say that i really learned a lot from this course but that's to be expected i finished it in a little over a day playing most of the videos at full speed but my perspective is a little bit distorted by all that experience so as a true ux person i decided to actually do some research here and i spoke to magda and daniel who are just starting as designers and for them this course is a completely different experience than it is for me so their feedback is actually more aligned with what the target audience of this course should be thinking about so this is what magda said i found the course to be quite interesting they introduced new concepts one by one with examples that are sometimes good and sometimes not that great i think for a beginner the curse is a good fit it shows where ux is heading and what future problems will be solving like the next billion users and their problems and i think that this course focuses a bit too much on creating global experiences because google is global and in reality most designers work on creating products for specific markets so pretty local i like the course structure with videos reading and discussions with plenty of links to extra reading and diving deeper and she also mentioned the ux of coursera so this is not just my thing even junior designers are noticing it which basically means that this is something that should be fixed right away and she also said that some of the quizzes and some of the exercises were a little bit too easy and not challenging enough daniel actually explored ux as a hobby for some time now so he didn't start from the very beginning but for him the outlook of this course wasn't truly that he's gonna become a ux designer because of finishing the course it was more about structuring the knowledge that he has and filling the gaps he also pragmatically understands that having this certificate and a nice portfolio is gonna make it easier for recruiters to make an informed decision so that's a win what he liked the most about the course is the clear structure of it so how videos and text and extra reading intersect and how they all complement each other to make a much fuller learning experience he also said that it's really good that you can go at your own pace so you can go faster on some easier topics and then slow down on some more difficult ones he also believes that the price is pretty good for the scope and size of the cars because it's actually a lot cheaper than most ux courses out there right now he also said that the coursera interface is pretty bad so nothing new here and he also noted that this is a google course so it's kind of really skewed in the direction of working for google in the long run and it's not necessarily reflecting the entire ux world or ux community and he said that the idea of interacting with other students in the forums is a pretty good one but most of the discussions were just one word answers that didn't really contribute too much so should you take it if you're just starting you want to learn what ux is get the fundamentals and then be able to explore on your own i think this course is for you it's pretty good it's also relatively cheap and if you're struggling financially you can get grants or scholarships to actually help you pay for it so the knowledge is there it's pretty good it's very well structured and it's delivered in a very nice and friendly way my name is michael and i only finished the foundation which is the very first beginner chapter of the seven main courses that google prepared so if you want me to cover other parts of this let me know in the comments and also if you finish this course or you're thinking about taking it let me know in the comments what are your thoughts and what you're most afraid of or what you're expecting and as usual thanks for watching don't forget to like subscribe and share the video and i'm gonna see you guys in the next one cheers [Music] you

Channel: Malewicz

Views: 131,729

Rating: 4.9455657 out of 5

Keywords: Google, Google UX, UX Course, Google UX Course, Coursera, Coursera Google, Learn UX with Google, Learn UX, Learn Design, UX Design Course, Google UX Design, Google UX Design Course, ui design, ui design course, ui ux

Id: 9jPOK8j3gOI

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021