What to Learn After UX Design

UX design is the aspect of digital design that concerns the feel and functionality of a digital application. UX design examines how users interact with an application and collect data and feedback by iterating on prototype designs to make applications more pleasurable. If you already know how to use UX design, you might consider learning user interface design, front end web development, or data science. We’ll cover these skills below, so you clearly understand what skill you want to tackle next.

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.

User Interface Design

UX Designers often work closely with UI Designers, the creatives tasked with creating the visual appearance of the user interface. Since they work closely with one another, it helps for each side of the design process to be familiar with the other side to help optimize workflow and build better digital design. In addition, at many small firms, UX and UI design will be handled by the same few people.

For students hoping to learn UI design, Noble offers a comprehensive UX & UI Design Certificate program that teaches students the skills required to work as both UX Designers and UI Designers.

Front End Web Development

UX design is primarily concerned with how an interface should function and how to optimize the application’s functionality during the design phase. Once the design phase is over, the project is handed over to a Web Developer to be coded. Some UX Designers may find that learning coding skills will help them develop their designs or code better tools for accessibility and usability. These students may wish to learn coding languages like HTML/CSS and JavaScript to build the interactive elements of digital applications that users will interact with when the project goes live.

Students interested in learning front end web development should consult Noble’s website to see what web development courses are currently available.

Data Science

Since User Experience Designers deal with large amounts of data, they may find it difficult to store and organize this data. These students may wish to follow up their UX training with training in Python, SQL, or other data science programming languages. These skills will help designers who collect more data than human beings can reasonably organize and analyze. They will let users automate many of the data collection and collation processes. In addition, data science careers are in high demand, so pairing research training with programming training can open up many professional opportunities.

Students looking to learn more about data science may wish to explore the course lists offered by Noble.

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 field concerned with how users interact with a digital application. UX Designers will design an interface's functional elements, perform tests, and collect feedback from users on those designs.
• UX Designers work closely with UI Designers, and in some cases, both positions will be held by the same person. This makes user interface design a useful skill to pair with UX design training.
• UX Designers will also work closely with Web Developers, the team members who will code a digital application. UX Designers may wish to learn programming languages such as HTML/CSS and JavaScript to build new interface assets that can ease their design process.
• UX Designers interface with huge amounts of data during their prototyping and testing phases. Owing to this, they may wish to learn a data science language like Python or SQL to build systems that can better store and organize the data they are collecting and analyzing.
• No matter what skills you would like to learn to complement your UX design training, Noble has a comprehensive training program available both in-person and online.