UX Design Certifications and Certificates

If you’re looking for a way to demonstrate your skills in UX design, you might be overwhelmed by the different certifications and certificate programs available. You might also have many questions, such as will I need a certificate to get a job? How can I become UX design certified? How long does it take to become UX design certified? This article aims to answer these questions so you can efficiently choose the right path towards a UX design certification. Keep reading to find out more.

What is UX Design?

User experience design (UX design) is a field of web design dealing with how a website, application, or other digital product feels to its users. User experience design ensures that an application feels easy and accessible to operate. It is a heavily invested field in user behavior research, prototype testing, and data analysis. It is useful to think of it as the more hands-on counterpart to its visually-oriented sister skill, user interface design. Often, user experience design isn’t isolated to work on a single webpage or digital application and instead refers to a subset of data science that strictly examines user preference and behavior regarding web applications.

Rather than simply gauging how a digital application looks, user experience design aims to rigorously test that application to understand how it feels once it is in the hands of real-life users. Learning user experience design will involve learning how to conduct research, analyze data, and use that data to make informed decisions about the interface design process. User experience design also coincides with market research, as User Experience Designers will gauge how users perceive a web application’s desirability or how they perceive that application communicating brand awareness. UX design also covers attempts to make web applications easier to use and more accessible for users with disabilities or who have other challenges accessing and navigating digital applications.

Read more about what UX design is and why you should learn it.

What Can You Do with UX Design?

UX design skills will allow you to build better digital applications and contribute to a larger pool of knowledge that helps other designers build better web applications. Whether one is working on individual projects or attempting to improve digital design as a whole, user experience training will help professionals build digital applications that are more user-friendly, accessible, and memorable than ever before.

Within the field of UX design, trained professionals will be able to fine-tune and iterate upon designs for digital applications to produce interfaces that respond to user behavior and feedback. This means they can apply their knowledge and expertise to a wide variety of projects to ensure that the finished product is functional, responsive, and accessible. UX design is a particularly enticing field for anyone who feels that digital applications need to be doing more to respond to the needs of their users, as this is the field that gathers the data that demonstrates these needs.

UX design is also the field that affords Digital Designers the most opportunity to engage directly with their users and customers. Between focus groups, user surveys, and interviews, many UX designers will spend more time interacting with the public than they will with their team of designers and developers. This makes the field particularly appealing to students interested in learning the difference between how we think users interact with technology and how they interact with it. For the empirically minded designer, UX design will open many doors for producing compelling research about user habits and behaviors.

Certifications vs. Certificates: What’s the Difference?

For students unfamiliar with the industry, it can be confusing to get either a UX design certificate or a UX design certification; those are different ways of becoming certified. The main difference between the two is how one demonstrates proficiency to become certified.

To receive a UX design certification, students must pass a proctored exam to demonstrate UX design skills proficiency. To receive a UX design certificate, users must complete a skills training course that grants the skills required to demonstrate proficiency, akin to a diploma.

Top Certifications & Certificates for UX Design

Many industry recognized UX research groups, such as Nielson Norman Group, offer proctored exams to receive UX design certification. These exams will vary in the time that test takers are expected to study for the exam, though many expect between 30 and 100 hours.

Noble Desktop offers a UX & UI Design certificate program that teaches students how to conduct research, build prototypes, use the most significant prototyping tools, and work with graphic design programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. This course is an ideal way to become certified in UX design because students will learn many key complementary skills to help further set them apart on the job market.

Noble’s certificate programs are also ideal ways to learn the skills required to pass a proctored certification exam.

Should I Get Certified in UX Design?

Like most design fields, becoming UX design certified isn’t required to get a job. However, becoming certified in UX design will signal to prospective employers that a candidate has received hands-on training in UX design and therefore knows how to conduct research and is familiar with the field's current state. This can help set a certified candidate apart from their competition, making a training certificate an ideal professional accreditation to complement a strong sample design portfolio.

How to Get Certified in UX Design

The best way to become certified in UX design will depend on whether or not you are comfortable with your current UX design skills. Users who feel comfortable with their UX design training or have significant on-the-job experience may wish to forgo certificate training and take a certification exam. Students who feel they need a greater deal of training in UX design should consider enrolling in a certificate course to receive both hands-on instruction and industry-recognized skills accreditation.

Learn UX Design with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop offers students many user experience design courses and bootcamps. These courses, available both in-person and online, offer in-depth, career-focused UX design training and are all taught by expert instructors in real-time. Even taken online, these courses will allow students to interact directly with their instructor in the classroom and during one-on-one mentoring sessions. The small class sizes ensure students won’t get lost in crowded lecture halls. In addition, students can retake any course they enroll in for free within one year. This means students can take their courses a second time to review lessons, cover material they found difficult, or get more hands-on user experience design practice.

For students looking to learn the basics of UX Design, Noble offers a UX Design in a Day, in which students will learn the basic elements of the UX design process. They will learn key terms and ideas, like personas and scenarios, and how to conduct basic user research and interview participants to receive feedback. They will also learn the basic process of sketching and building prototype applications for testing. This is an introductory course, so it will only scratch the surface of the tests and research work involved in UX design, but it is an important course for laying the foundation for more immersive training.

Students looking for a more detailed, career-focused training course can enroll in Noble’s UX & UI Design Certificate. This course prepares students for employment in the UX/UI design field and will provide students with hands-on experience building and testing user interfaces. Users will receive training in advanced research techniques, including conducting interviews, producing written user reports, and running surveys. Then, students will be taught how to interrupt this data so that they may return to their designs and iterate on them in light of the feedback. Students will also be given hands-on training in prototyping and design software, such as Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. At the end of the course, students will have the opportunity to build a portfolio of sample interface designs and user experience case studies. In addition to this portfolio, students will receive one-on-one career mentorship, and by the end of the course, they will be ready to enter the workforce in the field of user experience design.

Key Insights

• Becoming UX design certified is a great way for designers to set themselves apart from their colleagues and to demonstrate to prospective employers that they are qualified to start working as a UX Designer.
• UX design certifications are awarded after a student has passed a proctored, paid skills exam. UX design certificates are conferred after a skills-intensive training program.
• Certifications are ideal for experienced UX Designers, whereas UX design certificates are ideal for students looking to learn skills while receiving industry-recognized accreditation.
• Noble Desktop offers comprehensive training for students looking to pass a certification exam and industry-recognized certificates of mastery at completing many of their programs.