User Experience: The Beginner's Guide
How This Course Will Transform Your Career
In This Course, You'll
Get excited when you experience how easy it is to transition into tech and land your dream job with User Experience (UX) design skills. No design background? No problem. You already have transferable skills, so it's easy to fast-track your career!
Learn to combine logical thinking with creativity. Do you enjoy creativity and structure? Do you communicate ideas clearly? UX designers turn ideas into services, experiences, and products. This course helps you structure your existing skills and apply them in an innovative, creative context. You'll use hands-on methods that empower you to continuously test and optimize your products and services from idea to delivery.
Make yourself invaluable when you use the very fabric of being human, such as empathy and intuition, to make users and customers smile. More smiles, more impact, greater salary potential. You'll find out what your users need and want, and you'll build products, experiences, and services that help them succeed. You can benefit from UX design in any job, any industry. Skills in UX design are human-centered and timeless, which is why they'll protect you from losing your job to AI.
Gain confidence and credibility when you master a range of powerful, real-world UX design skills such as user research, user interviews, personas, customer journey maps, sketching, task analysis, low-fidelity paper prototyping, and usability testing. It's easy with downloadable templates.
Craft your personal portfolio with step-by-step guidance. It's completely optional. Your portfolio is your gateway to transition into a career in tech or design. You'll be able to apply your new skills immediately in your current job. If you're new to UX design, this course is the best place to start. Your path to tech starts here. UX design is your way in.
It's Easy to Fast-Track Your Career with the World's Best Experts
Master complex skills effortlessly with proven best practices and toolkits directly from the world's top design experts. Meet your experts for this course:
Don Norman: Father of User Experience (UX) design, author of the legendary book “The Design of Everyday Things,” and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.
Rikke Friis Dam and Mads Soegaard: Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of IxDF.
Mike Rohde: Experience and Interface Designer, author of the bestselling “The Sketchnote Handbook.”
Stephen Gay: User Experience leader with 20+ years of experience in digital innovation and coaching teams across five continents.
Alan Dix: Author of the bestselling book “Human-Computer Interaction” and Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University.
Ann Blandford: Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at University College London.
Cory Lebson: Principal User Experience Researcher with 20+ years of experience and author of “The UX Careers Handbook.”
Gain an Industry-Recognized UX Course Certificate
Use your industry-recognized Course Certificate on your resume, CV, LinkedIn profile or your website.

Our courses and Course Certificates are trusted by these industry leaders:
Why Learn User Experience: The Beginner's Guide
User Experience (UX) design is your fast-track to a meaningful, secure, and rewarding career.
Worried You'll Lose Your Job to AI? UX Design Skills Make You AI-Proof
UX design builds on your core human strengths such as emotional intelligence, deep human understanding, critical thinking, intuition, and imagination.
AI can't replicate your uniquely human ability to design for real emotions and needs such as joy, comfort, curiosity, safety, and a sense of belonging. These deeply human insights are your superpowers. With UX design skills, you'll turn them into products and experiences people truly love. You become irreplaceable, confident and in demand.
And yes, we'll also show you how to use AI to accelerate your results.
Feeling Stuck in the 9–5? Design Your Freedom
Tired of feeling undervalued, anxious, or trapped in your career? UX design skills open doors to freedom, flexibility, remote work, and a career you're excited about—without starting from scratch.
Stop wondering if you could be more. Start realizing your full potential today.
UX Design is Booming: Accelerate Your Career to Higher Salaries and Impact Across All Jobs and Industries
Salaries for people with design skills are soaring, often surpassing $200K in cities like San Francisco, and job growth is strong (13% globally). Why? Because companies thrive when their users are happy. Companies that invest in great design outperform the S&P 500 Index by a whopping 228%.
Design a Life You Love
Great design is all about helping people meet their needs and achieve their goals through intuitive, meaningful, and delightful experiences. Skills in design will empower you to create experiences and products that make people's lives easier and more fulfilling. And when people love what you create, your business thrives, and your salary potential grows. You get the ultimate double win:
You'll feel deeply fulfilled by designing experiences and products people love.
You'll be financially rewarded for your real-world impact.
Course Overview: What You'll Master
- Each week, one lesson becomes available.
- There's no time limit to finish a course. Lessons have no deadlines.
- Estimated learning time: 24 hours 24 mins spread over 6 weeks.
Lesson 0: Welcome and Introduction
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0.1: An Introduction to Courses from IxDF (37 mins)
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0.2: Get Help, Career Advice, and Job Opportunities (1 min)
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0.3: How to Get Your Course Certificate (16 mins)
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0.4: Grow Your Global Network and Build Your Brand (11 mins)
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0.5: Global Skills, Local Jobs: Build Your Network in Your Area (1 min)
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0.6: Gain Timeless Skills Through Courses from IxDF (21 mins)
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0.7: Mandatory vs Optional Lesson Items (7 mins)
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0.8: Learn Smarter: The Perfect Mix of Video and Text (6 mins)
Lesson 1: What is User Experience Design?
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1.1: Welcome to User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide (20 mins)
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1.2: What is UX Design? (52 mins)
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1.3: Why is UX Design so Important? (20 mins)
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1.4: The 5 Elements of UX (23 mins)
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1.5: 7 UX Deliverables: What will I be making as a UX designer? (48 mins)
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1.6: Key Factors of UX (43 mins)
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1.7: What is a UX Portfolio? (24 mins)
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1.8: What Skills do UX Hirers Look for in an Applicant? (34 mins)
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1.9: What is a UX Designer and How do you Become One? (25 mins)
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1.10: Conversations: Community-Based Learning and Networking (7 mins)
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1.11: Congratulations and Recap (13 mins)
Lesson 2: How to Think Like a UX Designer
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2.1: Welcome and Introduction (8 mins)
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2.2: Human-Centered Design (42 mins)
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2.3: What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular? (46 mins)
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2.4: Activity-Focused Design (40 mins)
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2.5: Conversations: Understanding Users through Their Activities (7 mins)
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2.6: How to do a Google Design Sprint (34 mins)
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2.7: Why You Should Analyze Your Competition to Design Better Solutions and How to Do It (26 mins)
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2.8: Heuristic Evaluation: How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation (40 mins)
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2.9: Build Your Portfolio: Competitive Analysis (10 mins)
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2.10: Congratulations and Recap (22 mins)
Lesson 3: UX Methods and Tools — The Problem Space
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3.1: Welcome and Introduction (9 mins)
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3.2: What Is Empathy and Why Is It So Important in Design Thinking? (57 mins)
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3.3: User Research: What It Is and Why You Should Do It (24 mins)
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3.4: Pros and Cons of Conducting User Interviews (1 hour 16 mins)
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3.5: Build Your Portfolio: User Interviews (10 mins)
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3.6: Personas (50 mins)
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3.7: Build Your Portfolio: Personas (8 mins)
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3.8: Customer Journey Maps - Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Shoes (20 mins)
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3.9: Build Your Portfolio: Build a Customer Journey Map (10 mins)
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3.10: Conversations: Community-Based Learning and Networking (6 mins)
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3.11: Congratulations and Recap (26 mins)
Lesson 4: UX Methods and Tools — The Solution Space
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4.1: Welcome and Introduction (7 mins)
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4.2: What Is Ideation and Why Is it Important? (40 mins)
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4.3: Learn How to Use Sketching as an Ideation Method (1 hour 20 mins)
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4.4: Build Your Portfolio: Sketch Ideas (9 mins)
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4.5: Build Your Portfolio: Task Analysis (8 mins)
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4.6: Why You Need to Prototype and How to Start off Right (52 mins)
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4.7: Build Your Portfolio: Low-Fidelity Paper Prototype (8 mins)
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4.8: Evaluating Your Designs with Usability Testing (57 mins)
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4.9: Build Your Portfolio: Usability Testing (14 mins)
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4.10: An Introduction to User Interface Design (37 mins)
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4.11: Conversations: Community-Based Learning and Networking (7 mins)
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4.12: Congratulations and Recap (19 mins)
Lesson 5: How to Design in the Real World
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5.1: Welcome and Introduction (7 mins)
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5.2: The Product Development Process (32 mins)
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5.3: How to Succeed as a Designer on Agile Teams: Embrace Imperfection (24 mins)
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5.4: How to Ensure a Smooth Design Handoff (31 mins)
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5.5: Key Soft Skills to Succeed as a UX Designer (18 mins)
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5.6: How to Change Your Career to UX Design (35 mins)
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5.7: How to Sell UX Design (11 mins)
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5.8: Congratulations and Recap (12 mins)
Lesson 6: Course Certificate and Final Networking
How Others Have Benefited

Margaret Benkard, United States
“This course provides a thorough overview of all the different components of UX design. The lessons have a good appropriate amount of content to learn, but the balance of video to text, and the variety of people speaking, not just one person for the whole course, keeps it from being boring or monotonous in any way.”

Prudhvi Raj Midasala, India
“The strength of this course is its content and the way all the lessons are organized. The experience the instructors possess is also a huge advantage to the course and its members in understanding the design methods effectively.”

Barbara-Anne Tane, Australia
“The course has given me a great overview of the foundation of UX design, the processes, players and understanding of the expectations of / on designers.”
How It Works
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Take online courses by industry experts
Lessons are self-paced so you'll never be late for class or miss a deadline.
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Get a Course Certificate
Your answers are graded by experts, not machines. Get an industry-recognized Course Certificate to prove your skills.
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Advance your career
Use your new skills in your existing job or to get a new job in UX design. Get help from our community.
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