How Long Does it Take to Learn UX Design?

Like many aspiring User Experience Designers, you might want to learn UX design but worry that it will take too much time. User experience design is a fairly complex field, and because it responds to user behavior and technological advances, the field is changing quickly. This means that it is a skill that will take quite some time to master, and professionals utilizing UX design skills will never fully stop learning. For novices, the basics of user experience design can be learned in a few months. Of course, this depends on several factors. Keep reading about how you can learn UX design and some resources to help speed the process along.

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.

Average Time it Takes to Learn UX Design.

Learning UX design will take a few months to a year for the average user. The field is constantly evolving and responding to new technologies, so students must learn how to apply concepts to future designs and projects. In addition, since UX design is such a research-centered field of design, students will need hands-on experience in conducting research and interviews, which is time-consuming to learn and execute.

Other Factors

A few other factors will impact the amount of time required to learn UX design skills. Students with previous research experience will have an easier time learning the skills than those with experience with design and prototyping tools. Additionally, students who can more easily attain hands-on experience outside of the classroom will have much more time to train, giving them a leg-up on their studies.

Previous Research Experience

UX students who have worked in market research or other data science fields will find learning UX design much easier. By contrast, students who aren’t familiar with basic research methods will need to spend more time learning the basics of the field, slowing them down.

Experience with Prototyping Tools

Prototyping and wireframing tools like Adobe XD, Figma, and Sketch are vital for UX design students. These tools let users build interactive prototypes for testing and iteration. Therefore, anyone with experience with these tools will be able to use them more easily and prototype faster, allowing them to test faster, and speeding up the process of learning UX design.

Opportunities for Hands-on Experience

Unlike most other design elements, which students can easily practice on one’s own, user experience testing requires other participants and subjects. Therefore, it can be difficult for some students to get hands-on experience outside of the classroom, making the practical skills of UX design more time-consuming to learn.

Level of Difficulty, Prerequisites, & Cost

UX design can be challenging because it is a fairly research-heavy field of study. Even for new students, most of their UX design education is about collecting and analyzing data to understand better how users interact with your designs. This can be difficult as it is unlike most other skills students learn in a digital design context. Also, there aren’t nearly as many tools to streamline the UX design process as there are for fields like graphic design, meaning UX design students will spend more time learning about design philosophies and processes rather than learning to master a program.

Those looking to learn UX design should have at least a basic understanding of user interface design, which is focused on the look and appearance of digital applications. While the creative and artistic skills won’t be strictly necessary for UX design projects, both fields use a number of the same tools.

The general skills involved in UX design don’t have an upfront cost, but there are some tools that users will need to be able to access to start working on UX designs. UX Designers will need to be able to prototype their designs to receive feedback and perform user testing. They must acquire a UI design tool like Figma or Adobe XD. Each program has a different cost, so users should consider Noble’s free introductory seminar explaining the differences between the major UI applications.

Read about how difficult it is to learn UX Design.

Watch a Free UX Design Online Course

Interested in learning more about the philosophy behind UX design but unsure if you want to enroll in a professional training course? Students can use many free online learning resources to learn UX design basics. Since UX design is such a research-heavy field, these courses won’t be able to cover everything you will need to know, particularly concerning practical issues of testing and interviewing. Still, they can give users a solid introduction to the field of UX design.

Noble provides users with many pre-recorded lecture courses that will provide users with an introduction to the concepts and tools most commonly used within the field of UX design. For example, Noble offers a Getting Started in Digital Design tutorial explaining the basic tools and career paths open to those studying digital design. For students looking for more specific user experience instruction, Noble offers a free Intro to UX Design course that will teach students the philosophy behind user research, user testing, and other important UX design concepts. These courses and many more are available on both Noble’s website and the Web Development and Development playlist on their official YouTube page.

Free online UX design courses are also available through service providers such as General Assembly, CareerFoundry, and LinkedIn Learning. These courses will all vary in content and scope, so users are encouraged to see what kinds of offerings are available.

Read about more free UX Design videos and online tutorials.

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

• UX design is the digital design field that concerns how a digital application feels and how users interact with that application in the real world.
• UX design skills normally take a few months to a few years to master, partly because the field constantly evolves, and research can be time-consuming.
• Some factors can impact the pace at which a student learns UX design, such as their prior research experience, how comfortable they are with prototyping tools, and how easy it is for them to practice user testing outside the classroom.
• For students looking to learn UX design as quickly as possible, Noble offers comprehensive UX design training both in-person and online.