Best UX courses on LinkedIn Learning for a career change
The pandemic has put a lot of pressure on the job market and I’ve realized it myself by getting more messages every week through LinkedIn from unknown, but friendly people asking me about resources or simply opinion on their career situation. People trust me with their details — which I extremely appreciate — seeing that I’m on the UX field for years on my profile and also mentoring people at Designlab. There are always the ‘does it worth it’, ‘what should I know’ and ‘how hard is to getting into the industry’ dance we play in these conversations, which I find personally really insightful getting to know how they got here asking about these and also what’s their motivation and last but not least, how could I help them.
After plentiful of these discussions it’s crystalized that not everyone has the budget or the time to go through a really thorough course like the UX Academy, but they would be happy to see more aspects of UX design on their own time and willing to learn, so I’ve decided to put together a series of courses separated based on different areas of learning UX design, so if anyone interested in changing a career they might be able just go this way, before considering a more complex program.
Important! These courses require a LinkedIn premium membership, which you can acquire as a free trial on LinkedIn, or as I’ve seen quite many employers giving as a benefit to their leaving or current employees to extend their skills. If not maybe you can try to convince your boss?! I’ll back you up!
The LinkedIn Learning courses (ex. Lynda.com) are in order in terms of subject, or at least how I would group them 😇 for the committed self-learner:
Product development process
What is Design Thinking?
While it’s not magic, design thinking can help you save time and find more creative solutions to your customers’ needs. Having a good understanding of the process will help you explain the benefits to management and clients and implement design thinking at your organization. In this course, Chris Nodder explains where design thinking fits into product development and what it can help you achieve.
How to apply Design Thinking?
In this course, you can learn what’s involved in setting up a design thinking exercise to kick off a new project or subproject by following along an example project with a development team.
How to define a product? What research methodology to use to explore?
With design research, designs are more meaningful and effective because they are grounded in a real-world context. The goal of this course is to introduce the process of design research and to help you understand how critical it is to being able to develop a mindset about user-centered design.
Information architecture & content strategy
How well-defined content can support UX?
This course takes you through the process of analyzing and reshaping your content — not only text but also video, imagery, social interactions, and the metadata that underlies it all — so that it accurately communicates your brand and message and keeps your users coming back.
Information architecture
In this course, Chris Nodder teaches you how to perform card sort research to get information about user interactions, analyze the results, and create a validated information architecture plan. Then translate your plan into refined menus, content classification, and page layouts. Finally, test the success of your new structure with reverse card sorting and by monitoring feedback from server logs, site searches, and help desk calls.
What can you achieve with a good story?
In this course you can learn how to apply storytelling principles to your UX design process and craft more engaging, user-centered experiences. Sarah Weise teaches the foundations of good storytelling, from defining the story arc to orchestrating the action and emphasizing your message.
Interaction Design
Where to start with interaction design?
In this course, learn about the psychological reasons why good UX/UI design works, so that you can build websites and apps that work the way users think. Instructor Chris Nodder helps you get started by discussing how brains work, and how to design around the limitations of it.
How to create user flows?
Diane Cronenwett discusses how flow relates to creating great user experiences and outlines the role of technology in designing flow. She demonstrates how diagrams communicate underlying system logic and conditions to produce an effective user experience. Diane covers the ways designing a flow takes into account various entry points, exits, and conditional states a user might encounter while using a product interface.
What and when to prototype?
Rather than focusing on specific tools, he helps you understand what and when to prototype, to transform good ideas into interactive, emotional user experiences.
UI design
How to create nice color palettes matching your brand identity?
This course is about learning how to use color, not only to create more effective designs, but also to tell a story. Illustrator, professor, and author Mary Jane Begin explains how color intertwines with brand identity, how it affects the mood of a piece and directs the viewer’s attention to areas of interest, and how it can connect images or create space between elements.
Typography which makes you better than the most
In this course, Jill Butler distills her many years of teaching and design consulting into 33 laws of typography. These laws are the details that designers can overlook or, in some cases, never learned, but that make for stronger compositions.
Layout and composition with grids
In this course Sean Adams applies his patented illustrative teaching approach to grids: the tool that defines the underlying structure and central proportions of any design.
How to use design systems within an organization?
From this course you can learn how to build in consistency, creativity, and flexibility so your team can build amazing user experiences that reflect a coherent and recognizable company voice. Plus, discover how to create a design system of reusable interface components, complete with code snippets, to ensure your company’s design language is consistent from product to product.
Testing (User Testing, A/B testing)
This course focuses on the testing phase of the five-step design thinking process. After briefly reviewing previous steps, learn about testing and how to refine your testing purpose. Learn how to find the right methods and strategies for your testing, then dive into how to determine if your testing is successful — and what to do if it’s not.
Fundamentals of UX research
This course introduces the fundamentals of user experience research so that anyone can understand the benefits and start integrating research into their everyday design and development process. Start watching to learn how to use UX research to find the answers to the most basic questions about your customers — who, what, when, why, and how — and drive better user experiences and business outcomes.
Design implementation and handoff
Learn how to prepare a Figma (don’t know what is Figma yet? Watch the tooling section below!) project for developer handoff, including how to export design assets from Figma in a developer-ready format.
Tooling — choose your weapon or rule them all
There is no best tool for UX design, so learn any of the design tools mentioned below and you’ll see yourself they’re pretty much similar in ways of working and on interface-level. My personal advice is to just pick one and try to fully master it by knowing the shortcuts and being up-to-date about the software by either joining their closed Slack channels (for friends) or by actively following their blogs or social media accounts.
I hope this article helped you to put things in structure and perspective when it comes to learning resources and the overall design flow, and I hope this extensive list of learning materials were not too frightening for the motivated self-learners! Designing an experience is a large topic (as you can also tell by now) and within this article I tried to chop it down strictly in the design land and still missing a few points, some might argue.
Thank you so much for reaching so far in this article! 👏
If you have any additional recommendations for a LinkedIn course to add to the list, or a question about UX/UI design happy to answer you within the responses section below.
