The State of the UX Education Ecosystem

User Experience design matters and more and more people and companies are taking note. AirBnb, Warby Parker, and Uber are all companies that made a conscious effort to focus on design and as a result, created great experiences that their customers love.

It’s clear that experience design plays a critical role in attracting audience, building trust, and getting users to take action. Because of this, it’s not surprising that there is increased demand for User Experience designers today. Companies realize the return on investment when they hire good designers.

But, the rapid increase in popularity of UX has lead to increasingly broad definitions of what a User Experience designer actually does. Ask five people what a User Experience designer does and you’ll get five answers.

Companies understand they need to invest in User Experience, but they’re not sure what that means in terms of what types of people to hire. Many times, they simply look to hire one person who can do it all (cue the unicorns) rather than a team of people with a balance of generalist and specialist skills.

As the perceived definition of design has matured from “make it pretty” to “make a great experience,” the skillset of the designer has also matured. However, the ecosystem of how to learn about UX is unfortunately more confusing than ever.

If you do a Google search for “UX courses” you’ll be flooded with a wide range of options to match any budget and schedule. For example, Udemy has a two-to-three week course for $40, General Assembly has a 10-week part-time course for $4,000, and Center Centre has a 24-month program for $59,980. The School of Visual Arts in New York City offers three types of education programs on interaction design alone, ranging from workshops to a Master’s degree. And that’s only a very small sample of the diversity of courses available today.

“Obviously there’s a huge difference between a one-week course and a six-month course. It depends on what the end goal is,” says Alex Rainert, VP of Product at Nucleus and former head of product for Foursquare. “To be a UX designer and think like a UX designer, it takes a lot more. It’s not something you can do in a vacuum, understanding users, understanding behavior, interaction design, it takes experience to know those things.”

We have nothing against design education. The point is that most User Experience courses are a great entry point for people who want to learn about the field. But completing a course should be the beginning of your journey, not a badge of competency.

When we created and taught the first iteration of General Assembly’s UX Design Immersive in 2012, we fully intended it to be a foundational course where you could learn the basics and then continue your learning with future courses that would focus on specific aspects of User Experience. What we fundamentally disagree with is the idea that in a matter of weeks you can have enough knowledge to make a career switch and get hired as a junior User Experience designer. Yet, so many of the courses are marketed this way.

“The problems I’ve seen are folks coming from those programs whose book looks polished and professional, but they’re actually more green than their book reflects,” says Ron Goldin, a product design consultant, founder of New York based product design firm Akko, and former Director of Design at Kitchensurfing.

“In one case, I had one designer looking for a relatively senior salary and role based on an intensive, which makes me think it’s actually how they frame those courses and what kinds of expectations they’re setting with students.”

With the vast number of UX courses and programs pumping out graduates with certificates of completion, the market for junior UX designers is completely saturated, as echoed above by Kearney. It’s wonderful to see so many people who are excited about the industry and who want to be a part of it, but if they truly believe it’s the right career path for them, we’d rather they earn the experience than try to buy their way in.

Does this create a supply and demand problem? According to this Quora thread, the answer is yes. One anonymous graduate said, “GA seems to be intent on reckless and exponential expansion. UXDi (UX design immersive) has 2 classes, and WDi (Web Design immersive) has 4 classes, each semester. This doesn’t take into account the other part time courses. Combined with lack of admissions standards, the graduation rate only appears to make things hard for each graduating batch.”

The same person went on to say, “I received several competitive job offers within a month of graduating, didn’t have to apprentice / intern at all, and I’m fully employed as a User Experience designer in what is pretty much my dream job. I do extensive research and usability testing, steer project strategy, and also do wireframing and prototyping.”

However, this should not be considered a normal outcome. Rainert says, “That’s not to say there aren’t people that are empathetic and get it faster,” but the reality is that “someone with a 12 week experience joining a team where there’s an opportunity for great mentorship and a path to growth, that can be a great foundation.”

The rapid rise in UX courses creates many false perceptions about what it takes to succeed in the “booming” and “exploding” field. Here are just a few that stand out:

Certification does not matter

Many courses offer certification, often after as little as one week. In our careers, never once in an interview did someone ask if we had UX certification. Similarly, never once in the process of hiring someone did we ever look to see if they had UX certification. To be frank, we’d have to do a Google search to actually know what certifications are even out there. Would someone with a degree in interaction design or human factors stand out? Of course. But at the same time, a certificate doesn’t equal competence. A certificate doesn’t mean you can do “it” in the real world. A certificate just means you showed up and are a good test taker — if there was even a test at all! We often ask ourselves, if we had to take the certification exam, would we pass it? Maybe not. Because User Experience design is so subjective — there are no true rights or wrongs for the most part — working through problems may have the same process but there could be ten different answers.

Best practices aren’t always the best practice

A couple of years ago, we were whiteboarding with someone who had taken a certification course. When most of us had agreed on the solution to the particular problem, the “certified” UXer objected, saying that the instructor had said you can never use that specific interaction paradigm. The issue is, there’s no such thing as never. In design, the idea of best practices and design patterns is rampant. The concern we have is that every product you make will have a different context — the users will be different, the purpose will be different, the device could even be different. What works well for one audience may be a disaster for another. You must carefully dissect whether or not a best practice or design pattern actually fits the context in which you’re working. It’s not enough to know best practices and patterns — what matters is that you know when to use them, and when not to use them.

Knowing how to think trumps knowing a tool

When we interview potential UX team members, we rarely get to the portfolio. It’s generally a conversation about what’s going on in digital, how we all approach solving problems and, in some cases, geeking out over both our favorite and most mortifying experiences. With the rise in prototyping and design tools available, it’s not that difficult to get a good template or stencil set and start arranging things on a screen. A lot of courses focus on using software. We never start by putting pen to paper because anyone can learn to use a tool. It’s all the thinking and conversation that lead up to creation where most true experience work is done.

One of Sarah’s first bosses gave her some great advice: know your tool, know your tool as fast as you can, know your tool as well as you can. So that’s what she did. But then she realized she had to learn how to think like a designer in order to use the software to create smart, thoughtful designs. A great designer doesn’t just create a deliverable.

Great designers justify every decision they make along the way to getting to the final product. And learning to think like a designer doesn’t happen in a few weeks.

Process is not a deliverable

A lot of courses teach processes and formulas. But every project is different — different timelines, budgets, and goals. Not to mention the different personalities you’ll deal with, and the challenge of navigating clients and stakeholders who often times want to be very hands on. Therefore, the process constantly needs to be tailored to each project. Being able to tailor your process requires confidence that only comes from experience.

Creating truly successful products starts with understanding people — and not just the people you’re designing for (though that’s critical as well). Often the User Experience designer is sitting in center of the conversation, navigating the challenges faced by business requirements, conflicting users needs, technical limitations, and design opportunities. Marrying all of these into a single product means gaining as much of an understanding of all sides as possible, and then communicating effectively, fairly, and clearly to all team members. And that is before the pen ever hits the paper.