The Google UX Design Program is equal parts good & bad.
Intro
“We partner with the best institutions to bring the best learning to every corner of the world so that anyone, anywhere has the power to transform their life through learning.” So goes the mission statement of Coursera, the most popular provider of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It’s easy to get swept up in their idealism, especially as higher education and traditional degrees keep getting more expensive and less relevant to the needs of the modern labor market. For $40 a month, anyone with an internet connection & enough motivation to pull-themselves-up-by-their-keyboards can access certificate programs and instruction from the world’s best learning institutions: Duke, Stanford, Yale, etc. Work hard, get the certificate, get the job, move up the ladder.
With an interest in this promise & a large amount of time on my hands brought on by the pandemic, I enrolled in the Google UX Design Certificate Program in March. My interest was twofold: Content and structure. As a (soon to be) masters student in Stanford’s Learning Design & Technology program, I wanted to develop a better understanding of digital design. As a teacher & someone interested in education generally, I was interested in the learning experience of a MOOC, especially one put together by a company rather than a university.
Having finished the certificate, I can confidently say that the course will leave most users with a solid foundation in digital design & more than enough resources to begin a UX career. As for the learning experience & whether it holds true to its promise of bringing “the best learning to every corner of the world”? The answer is…..kind of.
I’ve broken down my review into three 5 parts. The first three break down the course and give a verdict for each part. The last two give tips for those taking the course and thoughts on how the course could be improved:
1. Structure & Content
The design certificate program isn’t one course, it’s 7, each of which build off of each other:
Foundations of User Experience Design
Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, Ideate
Build Wireframes & Low-Fidelity Prototypes in Figma
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
Classes build off of each other, but can also stand on their own for those interested in only one aspect of the design process. Each of the 7 courses is taught by a current Google UX employee and calls from anywhere between 4 to 6 weeks to finish (more on this later). This makes for a 6 month experience for most students. Each course is a combination of video lectures, corresponding readings, basic check-for-understanding quizzes and discussion posts. Most importantly, each course will involve activities each week that build into a final project for each course.
Structure & Content: The Good
+ The content is easily digestible. Video lectures are, at maximum, 8-10 minutes. Most are only 3-5 minutes long, making it feel like there’s always time to sneak in a little more content before finishing for the day. Because the videos are so succinct, you never feel overwhelmed and you never have those “Okay, I’ve been talking for a long time, does anybody have any questions?” moments that sometimes happen in traditional classrooms. Check for understanding questions during & after videos or readings help to keep you on your toes.
+ The 7 courses are well structured in that they start easy & become difficult over time. This has the effect of making you feel like you’re making a lot of progress, quickly, when you start the program. If you’re willing to work for 1 to 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, there is no reason you can’t finish the first two courses in the program in 2 to 3 weeks (or less). The resulting gratification you get from this motivates you to keep pushing forward. Who knows if this was intentional on Google’s part, but if so, bravo. That bit of subtle motivation-engineering went a long way in sustaining my interest in the program.
+ The content itself was detailed. Every concept is explained in depth, both verbally and in writing. None of the content feels superfluous. For someone completely new to UX, I found their granular approach helpful, even if at times that detail was almost laughable. In Course 2, when the instructor discusses ideation by sketching and literally explains what “sketching” means then goes into a “let’s-start-with-triangles-and-squares-and-squiggly-lines” level explanation of how it's done, you find yourself fighting the urge to roll your eyes. Be that as it may, one comes to appreciate that detail with more complicated topics later on. It was especially helpful in the final class, which details how to interview for UX jobs and included great interview strategies (STAR was particularly helpful to me) and job search / freelancing techniques. They even give you a free year long membership to biginterview.com.
+ The content was extremely accessible. Instructors always explain what the learning objective is and how you will work towards it. They never introduce a new concept without first explaining it in depth. If they reference a concept from a prior week or course, they always stop to make sure they quickly review that concept or provide a link to it so you can review it yourself. It gets a little old hearing “as you may remember” 8 times a lesson in later coursework, but in the end it’s helpful to the learning process.
++ Along those same accessibility lines, the instructors practice what they preach. I found the course extremely accessible in two ways:
Timing. Lectures & readings are short & “due dates” for assignments are generous, making the course easier for working professionals to fit into their schedule. And even if you miss a due date, as I did when I went through a particularly busy time at work, you can reschedule the course with a click of a button to get you back on track. Freedom to work at my own pace was vital, especially this year, as the pandemic made my work schedule unpredictable.
Lexile level. The course emphasizes the importance of designing with accessibility for all in mind and the entire course reflects that emphasis. Lectures use basic, slowly spoken English, and there’s a screen reader that follows along with each video if you prefer to read rather than listen. That text can also be translated if English is not your native language.
Structure & Content: The Bad
- The video instruction is about as engaging as the mandatory slips-trips-&-falls OSHA training video you had to complete before starting your last job. All 7 instructors read from a teleprompter and have clearly been coached to talk slowly, take deliberate pauses, and use simple words. The resulting feeling of “dear god, please stop talking to me like a kindergartner” periodically detracted from my ability to engage with the videos. The only time this wasn’t the case was when current Google employees were interviewed about their experiences in UX design. Listening to them speak off the cuff was infinitely more engaging & made for some of the best moments in the course. It’s a shame they were so few and far between. That leads to the next point.
- Given that the classes were taught by actual UX designers at Google, you would expect the instructors to pull on their personal experiences & offer insider anecdotes from their own experiences. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. The instructors only occasionally pull from their experiences and are otherwise relatively robotic in their instruction. This is a particular shame given that they are GOOGLE UX DESIGNERS! These are some of the smartest, most creative people on the planet, can we just let them be themselves!? At one point in the final course, the instructor casually mentions that he led the team at Microsoft that came up with the “achievements” system used by Xbox 360 users?! Like, can we do a breakout video where you just talk about that process for an hour, podcast style? Cause I’m here for that.
- As much as accessibility was a strength, it was also a bit of a catch 22. Demonstrating intensity and enthusiasm an instructor improves student learning outcomes (Marzano, Rober, The New Art & Science of Teaching, p.69). Watching the course videos, one can’t help but think that the creators of the course deliberately chose to ignore this teaching principle to instead prioritize accessibility for English Language Learners. Making the course more accessible for all learners at the cost of making the videos a little boring is an understandable choice, but given how many additional accessibility options were available for non-native english speakers, I’m not sure it was a trade off that had to be made.
Structure And Content Final Verdict: Great
Summary: With 6 major pluses and only 2 minor negatives, the structure & content are the star of this course. It’s easily digestible, well structured, detailed, well explained, and very accessible. The few negatives here are minor.
2. Activities
If one were to break down all their time spent in the course and look at each category as a percentage of a pie chart, the overwhelming majority of that chart would be “activities”. They are by far the most important aspect of the course.
Google clearly understands that active learning is more effective; that people learn by doing. Each week, activities and corresponding rubrics are used to put skills discussed in videos into practice. The activities in the course build on each other to eventually be put into a portfolio that will be shared with employers, so they are by far the most important thing one will do in the class. Activities put each of the 5 steps of the design process into action. When learning about empathizing with users, you’ll be asked to conduct user research studies and interviews, develop user personas, create user stories and journey maps, and more. To define design problems and ideate solutions, you’ll create problem statements, conduct competitive audits, and complete ideation activities like crazy 8s or how-might-we activities. Prototyping and testing follow, in which you create paper wireframes, turn them into digital ones, turn those into low fidelity prototypes, conduct more user research, then use that research to finally develop high fidelity prototypes and mockups in Figma and Adobe XD.
Activities: The Good
+ The activities result in meaningful deliverables. Because each activity is a small chunk of the design process, you’re asked to document your work (take pictures, save links, etc) to include later in your design case studies. That those design case studies will be perhaps the most important part of one’s resume when applying for a job in UX after the program, it gives an added sense of importance to activites that is often missing from the work done in traditional classroom settings. The best educators I’ve studied under or worked with have always found ways to build an authentic audience for student work because they know how motivating it is and helpful in creating a sense of value for learners. Google has done a great job of tapping into that concept here.
+ Adding to the sense of importance of given activities is the fact that they build on each other. For example, as the design process is being introduced in the first 5 courses, you will build a corresponding mobile application. As you work through the process of empathizing, defining, and ideating your app, the corresponding deliverables for each activity build on each other; what you created in course one builds into course two, etc. This results in a mobile app and corresponding case study by the end of Course 5. In courses 6 and 7, all content introduced in the first five courses is reinforced by going through all the same content again, but using them in new situations and building them with new tools. Instead of a mobile app, you build a web app. Instead of Figma, you use Adobe XD. That each activity all connects back to a larger deliverable makes every activity feel equally important. I never felt like I was doing something for practice only, it was always building towards something larger.
+ Google provides useful templates to structure all of the activities.Every step of the design process, whether that be empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, or testing, have corresponding templates created by Google that break down each of those 5 steps in great detail. These are good resources to save to your Google Drive to access later for reference and are helpful in scaffolding your ability to create the projects in each activity.
+ Google provides really great instructions for each activity. An intro gives a brief overview of the activity, leading to step by step instructions, templates to use, example projects, and more. You’re even asked reflection questions to make sure you’ve done everything before submitting. As a teacher, I found myself saying “damn, some of my projects need some updating to be this good.”
Activities: The Bad
- Some of the activities involve planning research studies, which means rounding up people to interact with your designs and take part in usability studies. Google suggests that you reach out to “4 to 5 family members or friends” the first time you do this. In my case, I asked my wife and a couple coworkers to click through designs and give me some basic feedback. I’m lucky that my wife is a software developer and has a general sense of good and bad UX and UI, so her feedback was (and continues to be) invaluable. What becomes challenging is that you’re asked to do this more than once per project over the course of three projects. I reached a point where I felt guilty asking her and others to take part in the studies. If you’re going to do them right, it’s at least a 15 minute commitment and should probably be more like a 30 minute commitment. That’s just a tough ask for busy folks. Reaching out to strangers online through UX design groups on LinkedIn or Facebook is an alternative option, but always felt like a total crap shoot.
- This is where the benefits of a self paced class become a double edged sword. Yes, it’s nice to work through content at your own pace, but it means that you don’t get to go through the course with any sort of cohesive cohort. If this were a normal class, fellow classmates could just rely on each other to take part in each other’s studies & give each other feedback. That’s not the case here. I would guess that the overwhelming majority of students in the class aren’t actually conducting usability studies.
Activities Final Verdict: Good
Summary: With 4 pluses and only 1 minor negatives, the activities sit alongside the content and structure as the best parts of the course. This is great, because the activities are easily the most important part of the course. That said, they lead directly to the major flaw of the program: Feedback.
3. Accountability & Feedback
Imagine you’re sitting in an in-person class working on a project. You’re kind of confused about something on the assignment and not sure what to do next, so you raise your hand. When you ask your question, the professor responds “ask you classmates.” You ask again, but your professor responds, “ask your classmates”. So you ask your classmates, but they’re just as new to this as you are and offer almost no help. It’s an important project, so you push through and finish your assignment the best you can. It’s a project that took you a solid week or so to finish. You turn it in, anxious for feedback. Your professor turns it back to you a few hours later with “100%, good job” written across the top. Your professor also didn’t grade it, your classmates did. That’s a pretty bad professor, right?
Welcome to the Google UX Design Certificate Program on Coursera.
Accountability and Feedback: The Good
+ At the beginning of the course, Google shares a link to join the UX Design Group on LinkedIn and to sign up for an account on Dribbble. Not only are these a great way to network and get a sense of professional UX Design work, it’s also one of the only meaningful ways to get feedback on your work. Students that had the courage (I didn’t) to post their work there would get a few detailed comments on what they did well and what could be done better. This is total crap shoot, but for those with the courage to share their work, it can be a very valuable resource.
+ In the last section of course 7, Google pays for a free year on biginterview.com through which you can practice for job interviews and get actionable feedback on how to improve. It seems like a great resource to get feedback on interview skills and is definitely a tool that I will use as I get closer to applying for jobs.
Accountability and Feedback: The Bad
- Student accountability doesn’t exist. The only mechanism holding students responsible for the quality of their work are fellow peers, which is essentially meaningless. When you complete each activity, you can’t get credit until you grade at least two other students’ work on the same project. You are given a link to your fellow students' work, a “yes / no” rubric based on core tasks, and a comment box in which you’re asked to give some feedback to your peers. This is problematic across the board. First of all, as a student, you can’t get credit for your work until you give feedback. This incentivizes you to go quickly. Give the submission a quick once over and, if it looks okay, just click “yes, yes, yes”, type a quick “good job” and move on. Because students aren’t held accountable for the quality of their feedback, there’s no incentive to be thorough. And because this is a global course with almost 170,00 active students, many of your peers are English language learners that may or may not be capable of giving you meaningful feedback. This is not a criticism of them, but rather of a structure in which people that don’t even speak the same language are expected to give each other meaningful feedback at a college level and hold each other accountable to tasks that they’re brand new at.
- At the end of Course 7: Design for Social Good and Prepare for Jobs, you are asked to submit your design portfolio. It’s the most important, and by far the most time consuming task, you will do in the course. All the work you do across all 7 courses has been building to this moment. When I submitted my portfolio, I was hopeful. I thought, “You know, in order to get this far in the course, it had to have weeded out people that weren’t taking this seriously.” Wrong. The image at right is the only feedback I got on the solid 3-4 months I
spent building my first ever UX Design portfolio. Not only that, when I went to grade the submissions of peers, one of the two was a stock template from Wix with nothing on it. Considering this is the last project of 7 classes, I would guess this user was able to get this far away because no one in the previous six courses ever even clicked on their submitted work. Everyone just clicked “yes yes yes yes” on the rubric and moved on without even looking at what was submitted. That this person likely currently holds the “Google UX Design Certificate” shows how meaningless the certificate is, in and of itself, and speaks to the larger issue of accountability for MOOCs in general.
- As much as LinkedIn and Dribbble help in alleviating the feedback issues mentioned here, they are also a total crap shoot that rely on the kindness of randos to give you feedback.
- The rubrics used to grade peers’ work are all completion based rather than quality based.
Because your work is always being measured by “did you do this?” rather than “did you do this well”, the rubrics perpetuate the issue of meaningless feedback that does nothing to push learning forward. For example, at the end of Course 6, you are tasked with creating a case study for the web app you built. This is a massive project in that it involves compiling, summarizing, and presenting all steps of your design process and the resulting high fidelity prototype of your web application in Adobe XD. On the rubric used to score this monumental task, “Did you build an advanced prototype of your application” is worth one point. “Did you include a brief overview of the goal of users” is also worth one point. One of those tasks, if done well, took at least a week or two, if not more. One of those tasks took 5 minutes. Equating them in value is absurd. It’s like saying that your ACT Math score is equal in value to putting your name on the test. This absurdity doesn’t really matter though. Even if it were a more qualitative and accurately weighted rubric, you likely wouldn’t get much actionable feedback from your peers.
- All these negatives stem from one simple problem: The course doesn’t have a teacher. A teacher gives expert feedback. A teacher takes in what you’ve done, digests it, and uses their expertise to critique it and guide you into becoming better at whatever it is you’re doing. A teacher lets you know what kind of progress you’ve made, if any. This is entirely missing in the Google UX Design Certificate. The result is a boat without a captain. You will get where you want to go if you can wing it and figure out how to steer to your location on your own. But if you can’t, or don’t have the resources to, your boat’s guna drift into the abyss….and you may not even realize it, because no one was there to tell you how off course you were. Mounds of research prove that, if you’re going to do self paced learning like this, the most important determinant of student success is specific, clearly explained, actionable feedback from an expert. This issue around feedback is particularly problematic given how subjective “Good UX Design” can be. What makes one button style or layout look, work, or feel better than another is tough for a newbie to know intuitively. Without the detailed instructions of the Material Design framework to measure my designs against, a wife with experience in software development, and 6 years of experience in teaching and learning, I don’t think I would have been able to have the experience that I did.
Accountability & Feedback Final Verdict: Bad
Summary: With five big negatives and two minor positives, the accountability and feedback in the Google UX Design Course are the giant flaw of the program.
4. Tips for Current Students & Google / Coursera
Tips for Current or Future Students
If you’re comfortable with English, watch the video lectures at 1.25X speed and only slow down the videos when the content becomes more complicated.
If you want real feedback on your work beyond “good job”, post your finished case studies to online UX design communities asking for feedback. Give the context that you’re new to UX and still learning so that people realize you’re not a professional yet.
Create a “UX Design” bookmarks tab in your browser and save all the external resources they share in the course. There are so many, they are awesome, and you will find yourself wanting to reference them later on in the course without having to pick through old coursework to get to them.
If you don’t already, use a second monitor. It was extremely helpful to be able to have the video open on one screen and design on another.
Think of yourself as a cover band when you’re starting out: You’re just learning how to play, you’re not ready to write your own stuff. Everytime I tried to create my own components and layouts without first consulting a design framework or Dribbble inspiration, my designs came out looking like sh%$#. It takes twice as long and looks half as good to make your own stuff when you first start out. Use the experts to learn how to do it right and don’t try to do too much on your own. Listen to Picasso: Learn the rules like a pro early on so you can break them like an artist later.
Building off the last point, while designing low fidelity and high fidelity mockups, one of my displays was always on the Google Material Design website for reference in those “what should I do with this piece?” moments. I found it extremely helpful, even if it did make my stuff look a lot like Google’s.
If you really want your UX Case Studies and Portfolio to stand out, you should probably not use the Google templates provided by the course in your final versions. They’re great as training wheels, but they make everything look the same and feel unoriginal. I’m working on transitioning my stuff away from them,
Be aware that courses at the end of the program are going to take you much longer than courses at the beginning because there are many more labor intensive activities in them. After zipping through the first two of the seven total courses I found myself thinking “I’m guna be done with this in like two months!” I was wrong. Just be prepared
Thoughts for Google / Coursera To Improve the Course
I would have paid extra to be able to submit my work to a professional UX designer for them to review and give me meaningful, actionable feedback on.
I would have paid extra to be put into a cohort that I could rely on to discuss course material, participate in each other's user research projects, give each other meaningful feedback on work, hold each other accountable for what we did and didn’t do, and just generally network with. I know this might change the ability to do the course at my own pace, but I would've been willing to make that sacrifice for the improved learning experience.
If you can group students into cohorts, you should definitely group them by which language they can express themselves in most fully.
Make the sign up process more rigorous. For example, I took part in Stanford’s free Code in Place MOOC this past spring. It took a fair bit of work to get into the course. You had to read 5 sections of a textbook, complete 3 practice programming problems, and answer two or three short answer questions. It was clearly a test of “how much do you really want to do this, because we only want people that are serious.” Coursera had no such requirements to gain entry to the course, and the resulting effort from students was apparent. I suppose you could say the Coursera weed-out process comes in the form of money, but in my opinion, time and effort are a more significant measure of someone’s learning intentions than money. I suppose this all would challenge the nature of an “open” course if you’re declining admission to large numbers of people. But there has to be some sort of admission process to ensure that people in the class are serious about being a part of things. Then again, by doing so, you’d probably hurt the bottom line of the course…..which leads to much larger questions around Coursera’s business model. Can you really offer world class instruction for profit? Because who you take the course with is as important as who's teaching it.
5. Summary
The juxtaposition of world class content, structure, and activities with abysmal accountability and feedback make the Google UX Design Certificate on Coursera a hard course to process. It can be really good. It can also be really bad. I walked away from the course with a much better understanding and skill in digital design, but I also know that many of the reasons for this outcome were a result of my unique situation. I could easily see where many students could finish the program with little to no understanding of good UX design.
As a teacher & someone interested in studying the learning experience of a MOOC, I have mixed feelings about their potential after taking part in the program. Google and Coursera have made world class content, structure, and activities available to anyone with $40, a computer, and an internet connection. This is incredible and will be super helpful, potentially life changing, to thousands of people. But just making the content available doesn’t mean as much when it’s not paired with accountability and high quality feedback. Those two flaws call into question the entire operation.
All things considered, I will leave The Google UX Design Certificate Program the same feedback my peers left me: Good job!
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