Review: Google UX Design Professional Certificate
Starting at the beginning of march 2021 Google published the certificate program “Google UX Design Certificate” https://grow.google/uxdesign. I immediately got interested because it’s something I’ve been waiting for a long time. I have one and a half years of experience in the UX field and wanted to test myself on this course so here’s my review of this course in detail.
Google UX Design Professional Certificate is made of 7 courses:
- Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design
- Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate
- Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes
- Conduct UX Research and Test Early Concepts
- Create High-Fidelity Designs and Prototypes in Figma
- Responsive Web Design in Adobe XD
- Design for Social Good and Prepare for Jobs
The first one is all about basic information about UX a whole, what User Experience is what types of companies are using UX Designers, and so on.
On courses from 2 to 5, you will build your first case study for your portfolio. It’s up to you what you will choose as a project but it should be a mobile app. In this courses, you will use Design Thinking as an iterative process to build your first application design.
As the image represents, in Course 2 you will be working on Empathizing with end-user (eg. interviewing them), defining (eg. problem statements or value propositions), and ideating (eg. crazy 8s activity)
Course 3 is all about low-fidelity wireframes (both in paper and digital in Figma) while on Course 4 you will be testing lo-fi prototypes in form of usability tests.
Course 5 is similar to Course 3 and 4 but now we’re working on high-fi designs on Figma.
Deliverables / artifacts that every person attending this course will gather:
Course 2:
- Interview
- Persona
- User stories
- User journey Map
- Problem statement
- Value proposition
- Competitor audit
- Competitor audit report
- Crazy 8s
Course 3
- Goal statement
- User flow
- Storyboards
- Wireframes
- Wireframes in Figma
- lo-fi prototypes in Figma
Course 4
- Research study plan
- Research spreadsheet notes
- Affinity diagram
- Themes and insights
- Presentation
Course 5
- Mockup
- stickersheet
- hi-fi design
- Case Study
As you can see there’s plenty of artifacts to choose from to create a story for your first case study.
Course 6 is all about the new project and design in a new tool called Adobe XD. You will be doing a responsive website so not only designing mobile version but also tablet and desktop simultaneously.
Course 7 is designing for social good so you will be focused on the non-profit idea that can help other people.
My opinion about this course is straightforward. It’s a really good course for beginners and even for intermediate-level UX designers. Most of the assignments at the end of the week are peer-reviewed so you have to do your work and also you can check what other participants are making.
For people with no experience, it’s great because it teaches you about the whole process of building digital products with easy steps. One thing that I would keep in mind is that this course is created from Google's perspective so every aspect of it is global. To elaborate, I mean that if you’re starting with a small company in country X where you won't be building complicated applications there’s a chance that some of the activities from this course you won’t be using often or at all.
For people like me, that don’t have a degree, have 1.5 year+ of experience in the field, and worked commercially on numerous projects from different industries this course comes in handy in at least two aspects: systematization and certification.
With systematization, I meant that I was able to make detailed notes and organize once for all my UX/UI theory notes. Certification comes in handy in ensuring to your potential employer that you have structured education from a well-known organization like Google.
So here it is, Google UX Professional Certificate in full.
I hope you find this review informative and can’t wait to hear about your accomplishments in your career.
You can find me on Linkedin, I’m open to any questions related to the Google certificate.
