In this self-paced, online course consisting of 9 units students will learn the basics of human-centered design and receive constrictive feedback from mentors who are industry professionals. Although this program may not be cheap for some (cited by coursereport at $8,200 USD) students will receive access to high quality content as well as career support and personal 1-on-1 feedback from senior professionals.

The Springboard UI/UX curriculum consists of the following 9 units:

Design Thinking

Conducting, synthesizing & presenting user research

Ideating and Designing

UI design, heuristics and interaction design principles

UI practice exercises

Sketching and wireframing

Style guides, design elements and prototyping

Design sprints

Working with developers and stakeholders

Treehouse has recently launched a new UX TechDegree. This track teaches the basic skills needed for a role as a UX designer, including user research, wireframing, prototyping, information architecture, and conducting user tests and analyzing feedback.

Although this 32 hour long course will probably not be enough to land a fulltime position, it can be a good starting point for folks looking to familiarise themselves with the basics in a fun and engaging way. At $25 USD a month for a basic plan (and $49 USD for a pro plan) you’ll get access to this course along with other great tech content. Also, if you are looking to learn to code and build interesting projects from scratch, be it in programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, or Java, Treehouse is an amazing place to learn almost everything about design and coding in a fun and engaging way with an amazing support community.

Digital Accessibility: Enabling Participation in the Information Society

Accessibility matters. Unfortunately, accessibility for many teams and practitioners is viewed as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a necessity. Don’t be a person who doesn’t advocate for accessibility and inclusive design for users with disabilities and/or impairment.

In this free course from FutureLearn in partnership with University of Southampton, you will get an introductory understanding of how people with sensory, physical and cognitive impairments may be disabled by barriers encountered when using digital technologies. The course will highlight how the use of accessible and inclusive design can help overcome many of these difficulties.

This course consists of 9 main topics:

What is digital accessibility?

Digital accessibility and business

Relationship between ‘usability’, ‘accessibility’ and ‘user experience’

Challenges and barriers met by disabled people

Video and audio barriers and subtitles, captioning and audio description

Desktop, laptop, mobile and self-service terminal accessibility

Creating, checking and evaluating document, web and self-service terminal accessibility

Input and output devices e.g. screen reader, Braille, switch access technologies

Digital and web accessibility guidelines, standards and principles of Universal Design

For more insight into researching and designing for accessibility, check out this article from Gov.UK

For more affordable and free online UX educational offerings, check out the link below which will take you to an article I wrote a few years ago discussing several other UX related MooCs

Books

There is no shortage of UX-related books on the market. With the sheer volume of books, blog posts, marketing material, and video content out there it can sometimes feel overwhelming to try to cut though the noise and find high quality reading material suited to exactly what you are trying to learn.

Here are some UX Research-related books that I personally enjoyed and that have come highly recommended by Senior User Researchers in my network.

This book is a practical guide that shows readers how to use the vast array of methods available. Covering all the key research methods including face-to-face user testing, card sorting, surveys and A/B testing, the book gives experts insight into the nuances, advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches, while providing guidance on how to interpret, analyse and share the data once it has been obtained.

With Think like a UX Researcher you’ll discover how to plan and conduct UX research, analyze data, persuade teams to take action on the results and build a career in user research. The book will help you take a more strategic view of product design so you can focus on optimizing the user’s experience. UX Researchers, Designers, Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Business Analysts and Marketing Managers will find tools, inspiration and ideas to rejuvenate their thinking, inspire their teams and improve their craft.

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research aims to bridge the gap between what digital companies think they know about their users and the actual user experience. Individuals engaged in digital product and service development often fail to conduct user research. The book presents concepts and techniques to provide an understanding of how people experience products and services. The techniques are drawn from the worlds of human-computer interaction, marketing, and social sciences.

Remote research allows you to recruit subjects quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment. In Remote Research, Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top to bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.

User research war stories are personal accounts of the challenges researchers encounter out in the field, where mishaps are inevitable, yet incredibly instructive. Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries is a diverse compilation of war stories that range from comically bizarre to astonishingly tragic, tied together with valuable lessons from expert user researcher Steve Portigal.

Human-Computer Interaction: An Empirical Research Perspective

Human-Computer Interaction: An Empirical Research Perspective is the definitive guide to empirical research in HCI. The book begins with foundational topics including historical context, the human factor, interaction elements, and the fundamentals of science and research. From there, you’ll progress to learning about the methods for conducting an experiment to evaluate a new computer interface or interaction technique. There are detailed discussions and how-to analyses on models of interaction, focusing on descriptive models and predictive models. Writing and publishing a research paper is explored with helpful tips for success. Throughout the book, you’ll find hands-on exercises, checklists, and real-world examples. This is your must-have, comprehensive guide to empirical and experimental research in HCI-an essential addition to your HCI library.

This is Service Design Doing

This is the first comprehensive book on how to actually do service design to improve the quality and the interaction between service providers and customers. You’ll learn specific facilitation guidelines on how to run workshops, perform all of the main service design methods, implement concepts in reality, and embed service design successfully in an organization.

Great customer experience needs a common language across disciplines to break down silos within an organization. This book provides a consistent model for accomplishing this and offers hands-on descriptions of every single step, tool, and method used. You’ll be able to focus on your customers and iteratively improve their experience.

Sketching User Experiences

Sketching User Experiences approaches design and design thinking as something distinct that needs to be better understood―by both designers and the people with whom they need to work― in order to achieve success with new products and systems. So while the focus is on design, the approach is holistic. Hence, the book speaks to designers, usability specialists, the HCI community, product managers, and business executives. There is an emphasis on balancing the back-end concern with usability and engineering excellence (getting the design right) with an up-front investment in sketching and ideation (getting the right design). Overall, the objective is to build the notion of informed design: molding emerging technology into a form that serves our society and reflects its values.

If you’re looking to explore more options, Google’s Simon Pan put together this amazing reading list a few years ago breaking down some classics. This is a great article well worth checking out