What makes an interface intuitive? How can I tell whether one design works better than another? This course will teach you fundamental principles of design and how to effectively evaluate your work with users. You'll learn fundamental principles of visual design so that you can effectively organize and present information with your interfaces. You'll learn principles of perception and cognition that inform effective interaction design. And you'll learn how to perform and analyze controlled experiments online. In many cases, we'll use Web design as the anchoring domain. A lot of the examples will come from the Web, and we'll talk just a bit about Web technologies in particular. When we do so, it will be to support the main goal of this course, which is helping you build human-centered design skills, so that you have the principles and methods to create excellent interfaces with any technology.
KH
I liked particularly the course about running web experiments with A/B testing and learning a lot about comparing data with chi-square testing.
LF
Great, if brief course. Some occasionally ill-worded test questions. But this course piqued my interest for the ones that follow.
PV
The course was simple and crisp yet covered it all - interaction, visual and usability. Liked the duration of the videos followed by reading material that covered the highlights of the topic.
TB
I really enjoyed this segment of the course, it made me pay more attention to the not so mundane things around me!
AB
This course was very informative and well structured. I feel like the concepts stacked and that by the end I had a better understanding surrounding the "why" behind a lot of these concepts.
BB
Good course. The leactures could be better structured, but with some complementary reading and insistence, you bust right through.
SD
I liked this course - new ideas and formalisation of techniques... a nice mix of hard and soft skills in the assignments.
NS
The basic principles of design and their philosophies were covered well in this course, and it was taught in a quick, efficient manner. I liked undergoing this course and would recommend it.
CB
Just in week 1, this course has me examining and evaluating things I normally would take for granted...including work arounds!
MK
Very informative and fun. Good mix of practical examples and theory, made me wish every university course I've taken was like this
PS
Very interesting. The assignments test the learning are and more related to what we see around us. It is a test of our perception on interactive design. This is very helpful.
MP
Really good and professional content! There was a small mistake in one of the assignments but it doesn't really matter now. There were a lot of people ready to help you.
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This course was very informative and well structured. I feel like the concepts stacked and that by the end I had a better understanding surrounding the "why" behind a lot of these concepts.
Thank you very much for this interesting course! I still do these excersizes and try to notice good and bad design solutions in everything what surrounds me. I love this course and I am reading now Don Norman's 'The Design of Everyday Things' to understand design principles more deeply. It's an upgrade for me!
An essential course for any job in the field of Design, it teaches the core concepts such as Typography, Colour, Positioning, Spacing, etc. and requires one to work hard on the assignments.
I finally understood how to evaluate hypothesises. Great!
This course as much content in it and it's difficult to have an holistic idea how it all fits together. Some videos are taught having the same problem like, for example, some tools/themes are presented without us knowing what they are for. E.g., Chi-squared test and null hypothesis. Only after a while we understand their use. This bring a lot of overhead to us who are learning.
Some videos seem to have been re-worked over time and present cuts or jumps.
As for assignments, they should be better worked because some questions are not clear or misleading regarding the criteria that you want to evaluate.
For example, I already reported that in Question 2. and 3. of the assignment for the 3rd week. The example you give is a short introduction with two problems: 1) "I did the website", which can make the participant not to be at ease to criticize and 2) we're no evaluating the participant performance but the website. Next, you ask us to rewrite the introduction, which we do with those two problems in mind. Now, when we do the peer review we realize that you're expecting for us to rate the new introduction based on having "early prototype" and "user feedback". The original problems just seem not to count. Only by chance you can eventually write the new introduction touching the points that count for grading.
It was a good course overall, but some of the material was very complex and would require more than 3 weeks of study. I am not sure whether it will be useful in a real life, especially calculating Chi-squared and such. I also wish the professor would simplify the language in which he speaks in the lectures.
The third week assignment and cumulative quiz are divergent to the course content.
I feel that this specialization is not focused enough on developing portfolio pieces. One portfolio piece at the end of an 8-month course does not seem adequate to me. So I wish we focused more on developing high fidelity work - in addition to the need-finding, user research, sketches, short weekly assignments. This high fidelity, digital work could even be optional, but I need some guidance on what work to develop and how the overall process should look.
Even being allowed to enroll in the capstone before completing the first 7 sections would be helpful.
The review is kind of about what you are looking to get out of these classes. If you just want to LEARN about UX and human centered design, then it's a 4-5 star course. But if you want to PRODUCE some great work that will help you land a job in the industry, it might not be for you.
"Design Principles" is a bit of misnomer when considering the entirety of this course. Be prepared for design (literal, graphic) the first 2 weeks and statistics the 3rd week.
The lectures during week 3 felt rushed.
The course material seems old
Don't be a fool and expend any money in this courses. If you are lucky, someone will review your assignments, but chances are you are not going to receive enough reviews to pass the course, just like me. I have payed for two months subscription and have received nothing at all, as my course is not complete, although I have submitted all of my assignments.
(My reviews assumes you follow the whole specialization process by UC San Diego) As the second part of the specialization, this is a good introduction towards design, and specifically in the end, towards UI design with mentions about typography and gridlines progressively throughout the course. The assignments are also useful for learning process without any complicated steps. I think this course is clear enough for people who want to dive into design principles especially for non-design people.
This course is suitable for those who are new to design. I found the course to be a bit basic (I have a background in design) but I still enjoyed the lecture content and was able to extract several useful concepts. The assignments take a decent amount of time and I'd recommend taking notes throughout the course in order to efficiently complete the last assignment (Q&A) and final quiz. Overall, a worthwhile course in intro to design.
This is my 3rd class in this specialization and I experienced some issues from peer graded assignments. I had to edit it again because some of the answer that were completely correct been selected as incorrected from the peers. It took me extra time and I think it could be avoided by having more mentors for grading process too. That is the only pitfall, otherwise it was in a good way very challenging course.
I have to commend UC San Diego and the Instructors who created this course. This course gives you an introduction to begin your design journey with powerful suggestions of recommended books to explore further. Even only reading The Design of Everday Things by Don Norman is worth it. Though no course is ever a perfect 10, this is a great starter.
This course is boon for designers. Very detailed and absolutely rewarding specially for those starting a new career in this field.You have the best faculty here. You not just learn the tools of the trade you are walked through this course by one of the authority in the field.
This course raised my awareness of the design of everyday objects that I had always taken for granted before. It's definitely a great intro course into design -- and to raise everyone's awareness about how things are presented to the user -- and why that matters so much.
Fantastic course! Learned a lot from it - both theoretically and practically. The hands on exercises were very smart and applicable. I'm left with a lot more interest in the subject, a bunch of books for ruther reading and some new tools under my belt. Thanks!
I am a junior visual designer. I think the course is great in general. However, the last parts of week 3—"Comparing Rates" little hard to understand. And the difficulty level jumps drastically from week 2 to week 3 which is little hard to adapt for me.
This course is a bit challenging for students without mathematical backround. Yet, the lecturer illustrates the idea of mathematics part in a simple way so that art students can also understand the course material. I enjoy this course very much :)