Where to Get Basic UX Training? See Sites & Resources
Let’s suppose you’ve decided to start a career of UX designer. Why not, it’s an interesting, well paid job that is in high demand now-a-days. It throws you new challenges every moment, preventing your mind from growing rusty.
In order to avoid any confusion with the terms, let’s specify what user experience (UX) is. Nothing too complicated – just users’ feelings and attitude towards the interfaces they interact with. Are they easy to use? Do they look good? Do they bring any value? These questions are simple, but user’s backoff to your website depends on the affirmative answers. Under this angle the profession of UX designer doesn’t seem so simple any more. A smart professional should step into user’s shoes and foresee every inconvenience in order to eliminate it on the stage of project development and create a welcoming website full of useful content, stirring positive emotions and easy to navigate through.
Today, to create a cool, creative website, perfectly representing the brand is not enough as the competition became too hard. Only better UX can turn an occasional visitor into constant paying customer. In short, smart UX designers should be able to build websites where each and every form and element is created for the utmost comfort and pleasure of the user, i.e.: not for website owner, fancy wed designer’s vanity or luxury brand; only user-centered designs as the way to beat the competitors and benefit from the increased income.
Now, when the preamble is finished, we can move to the essence of our blog post – where to get basic UX training. All of us understand that even a good education in the sphere of UX design is not a guarantee of the immediate hiring. To get a good job, you need to have a certain experience in the field, something that will convince the employer that you are worth your salary.
However, without strong knowledge on the matter, your chances to make up a decent UX portfolio are second to none. That’s why herein under you will find a list of various sites and resources offering basic UX training. We hope that this first step into captivating world of UX design will lead you to the terminal point of the career plan you’ve sketched for yourself.
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User Experience: The Ultimate Guide to Usability
This user experience training will teach you how to boost sales & conversion rates, increase usage and improve customer satisfaction.
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With special approach of NN/g you will start to create better experiences for real people and improve the bottom line for your business.
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UX Magazine is a comprehensive resource for everything related to user experience. It provides current, diverse and credible information for expert UX designers and novices just exploring the field.
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The UX Booth is a publication by and for the user experience design community, posting articles on usability, user experience, and interaction design.
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User Experience Stack Exchange is a free question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts, where no registration is required.
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Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and amateur programmers. Due to community efforts, a library of detailed answers to every question about programming is being built.
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User Interface Engineering
User Interface Engineering, founded by Jared M. Spool in 1988, is a leading research, training, and consulting firm specializing in web site and product usability. Company research findings based on user observation let development teams create usable web sites, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
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Founded by Pabini Gabriel-Petit in 2005, UXmatters provides insights and inspiration to both UX professionals and students. UXmatters offers good basis where the leading experts in user experience can teach UX best practices. The articles cover lots of urgent UX topics, ranging from focused, practical, actionable advice and best practices; to concise overviews of broader topics; to deep thought pieces that explore strategic aspects of user experience. Some authors write about innovative ideas that are important to the development of the UX industry in general.
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Boxes and Arrows is an online journal devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design; including graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and the design of business.
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101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
Here you will find a set of short, easily digested lessons from the world of Interaction Design, inspired by “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School”, by Matthew Frederick.
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A website to look for news, resources, and tools for interface designers.
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Dark Patterns is a collection of working interfaces that has been carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology to trick users into doing things, such as buying insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills.
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At UX Storytellers they collect and publish stories out of the life of IA-, UX- and IxD professionals.
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Carnegie Mellon
The Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) is an interdisciplinary community of students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), which is dedicated to research and education in topics related to computer technology in support of human activity and society.
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Carnegie Mellon Design
The Master of Design in Interaction Design (IxD) is a two-year professional degree program that accepts students from diverse backgrounds and educates them as practicing interaction designers.
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Hyper Island creates intensive, short and long-term programs and experiential environments for individuals and organizations to learn and grow, using the power of transformative technology.
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The MFA in Interaction Design explores the strategic role of interaction design in shaping everyday life, and intends to increase the relevancy of design to business and society so designers can make a difference. It requires students to be intimately attentive to human behavior and to think more holistically about the products and services they create.
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3TU. School for Technological Design
The User System Interaction (USI) Program is a two-year post-graduate program leading to the degree of `Professional Doctorate in Engineering`. The User System Interaction post-graduate program requires an internationally recognized master degree. The content of the curriculum is regulated by staff of the university, working in the field of USI and HCI and is carried out by nationally and internationally recognized experts from university and industry.
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Institute of Design at Stanford
Their intent is to create the best design school period, prepare future innovators to be breakthrough thinkers and doers. They use design thinking to inspire multidisciplinary teams. They foster close collaboration between students, faculty, industry and tackle big projects and use prototyping to discover new solutions.
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Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht
The MA Creative Design for Digital Cultures is a master’s program that trains students as specialists in the creative industry. The MA CDDC has 4 pathways: Games and Interaction Design, Film, Animation and Media Design, Music and Sound Design, Editorial Design.
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Indiana University Bloomington
Here Human-computer interaction (HCI) is approached from the perspective of design. Their focus goes beyond simply using technology to solve a problem. It is about creating a technology experience that will be functional, intuitive, and even delightful for the people who use it. The goal of the program is to teach you think like a designer.
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Here you have an opportunity to improve your User experience UX with their hub page.
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American Graphics Institute
AGI instructors are experts and authors in the field of user experience design, which deliver user experience design training for clients around the globe. In their user experience design courses you also gain a strong understanding of layout and design and how it relates to creating successful user interfaces.
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This is a UX Blog, where Ben, Leon, and Mike talk about the user experience of their products, showing what they’re thinking and how they’re evolving. They share tips and tricks to help you use Mockups better and faster and talk with you about the stuff addressing your UX needs.
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Lynda.com
The author of the website, Chris Nodder shows how to design a study answering your questions, recruiting the right participants and setting up the test environment. The course also teaches you how to moderate and observe a usability session, interact with participants and ask the right kind of questions, and then analyze the results and share them with your team in a meaningful way.
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