Learn User Experience

UX or User Experience Design covers the research and design of how people choose, use and experience a product or service. It’s a broad field with a lot of branches like User Interface Design, Usability, UX Writing – as well as specialisations like Customer Experience (CX) Design and Learning Experience (LX) Design.

Here are a range of free and paid courses and resources that will help develop your UX understanding and skills.

Badass: Making Users Awesome – Kathy Sierra

Anything that Kathy Sierra produces is highly recommended. This book is a brilliant resource for foundational UX skills and reading it will 100% make you a better designer (and, no doubt, human). If you prefer video, check out her talk at the Mind the Product conference.

The User Experience Team of One – Leah Buley

This book is a great resource for both those new to the field and more experienced practitioners who don’t have a UX team. It gives you tools and techniques to lead UX design with minimal resources.

This book is published by Rosenfeld Media – they are one of the best publishers in UX and their comprehensive library of UX books is wonderful for upskilling specific areas.

UX Design – Michael Janda

This online video-based course by highly experienced practitioner Michael Janda will provide an introduction to beginners and a refresher for those with more experience. It shares real world best practices in current UX Design, including commonly used tools and production flow.

Learn interface best practices, production flow and understand the common tools used in UX design.

UX Design Fundamentals Course – UX Beginner

This course on the fundamentals of UX Design is created by Oz Chen, who is the founder UX Beginner. It’s perfect for complete beginners who want a self-contained self-study course. It goes through the history of UX and core UX tools and processes. There are some free previews available of selected lessons so you can get sense of the teaching style.

The UX Portfolio Formula – Sarah Doody

Sarah Doody, who also runs the UX Careers Collective (A Virtual UX Career Mentorship), has developed this excellent program to help you create your portfolio and break into the UX industry. It’s a great addition to any of the courses here if you want a career in UX.

UX & User Research Course – Designlab

If completely self-study courses are not for you and you’d like more teaching and social support, Designlab’s online bootcamps are some of the most affordable available and, fortunately, they’re also really good. They focus on developing hands-on practical skills with real-world projects. This course introduces you to the basics of user-centred design, including identifying users, ideating, prototyping and testing assumptions.