First off I LOOOOOOOOVE this Cert! I'm learning alot and its at my own pace and from a great established company. But course 4 was definitely a lowlight for me. Allow me to explain. Let me start with my appreciation for thorough teaching and explanatory practices when relaying information to a body of individuals for the purpose of educating them. That being said. This course #4 was dragged out ENTIRELY too long. While I understand that research is a huge vital part of the UX process, this seemed a BIT MUCH. Especially the parts where we have to do the same things voer and over different ways. I think there should be a separate practice modules for each task. So that if someone is not catching on to the content, they can review as much as they want and come back. I myself dont plan on being a UX researcher, so I personally felt that the constant looping around the same subject felt like a very cumbersome and restricting experience. Please update and polish for those that come behind us. Keep up the good work!

I felt while Jason was knowlegeable thogh his weekly assigments could be confusing for many students, incluiding myself. I had to re-read the instructions more than once on a few of the assignments. On the most recent assignment for week 4, I graded 7 assignments and many students were missing different parts of the assignment or were not clear on how to present the assignment.

I believe an exemplar or some type of example would have helped immensely. Also, I found that in general most of the assigments took twice or three times the amount to complete.

Reading the discussion boards I found that there are quite a few confused students. Considering that many of these students do not speak English well or it is their second language it would behoove Jason to really examine how he is presenting the weekly assignment. I think Jason needs to revisit the way he is presenting the assigments and possibly re-write a few of the instructions.

It's a really boring course compared to the other ones.

I think the course is magnificient, but the idea that students are grading others is not fair at all. I already finished all the materials, but because some smart people reviewing I wont be able to get a certificate which is frustrating.

All the 4 courses I enrolled in were ok!. I didn't find it great. The instructors were just reading out from the screen. I wanted to experience real teaching. Some assignments were fun, but overall it's time to change the teaching style. 

I feel the course 4 is too long (content repeats itself throughout the weeks) and somehow It seems unnecessary to the UX learning journey as a standalone course. I strongly believe it could be added as a section to another course.  Thanks

First of all, do not trust the estimated time of completion of these courses. Just make sure you have plenty of time to complete the tasks as some will say 20 minutes and take you less than a couple of minutes to complete, and others will say 20 minutes and may take upwards of a couple of hours. Most of this portion of the course is focused on public speaking and building your resume. I took public speaking at University because I grew up as a performer and loved being in the spotlight. Luckily I don't get nervous. I also really appreciated the fact that we are building our portfolios in this part of the Google UX class. This is something that will directly impact your future in the field. While much of this course is boring and difficult to push yourself through, keep in mind that it will get more fun in the next section and you will simply have to do it to progress. My only big complaint in these Google courses is Google's bizarre and unwarranted obsession with non-binary people being used in almost every single example given to us students. I am a proud member of the LGBTQIA+ community, AND I minored in english and creative writing while at University. Non-binary people are just as awesome as the rest of us, HOWEVER, my complaint is that the people in these scenarios are made-up and there is no reason to use They/Them in every quiz question. These pronouns are a real part of the LGBTQIA+ community, BUT when someone is learning something new the examples, quiz questions, and answers presented should be straight forward, and simple to understand. There are moments where the literature will state three peoples names and then pose a question about one of the people referring to that one person as They or Them. AGAIN, this is fine in real life, but when you have to power to formulate your quiz questions you have to be mindful of the USER'S EXPERIENCE (go figure) and use proper english. They and Them mostly refer to groups or are pluralisations of some kind. I am new to what is being discussed and I did NOT appreciate having to guess about what was being asked of me to answer or what was being said about someone in the text. Join the rest of us in the real world and start using language as it's intended. AGAIN, I am in that community, I get it when someone doesn't want to identify, but that is a rare instance and does NOT need to be the formula for EVERY scenario presented to the students when the students are attempting to learn something new.

The most valuable aspect of this course was learning about usability studies and conducting our own on our family and friends using the low-fidelity prototype we created. I learned a ton from this.

This course took me 12 days of study to complete with an average of 2h per day (over 20 calendar days). I was able to breeze through the videos (using 1.25x speed) and the readings and quizzes in a fraction of the estimated time but the weekly assignments were time consuming! I regularly exceeded the weekly assignment estimated time of 60m. Here is the actual time I spent working on weekly assignments: 1. build a research plan (25m); 2. conduct a usability study (3h8m); 3. observations into insights and affinity diagram (2h40m); 4. update your prototype and research presentation (2h50m). Conducting the usability study took up the most time because it required emailing friends and family and recruiting them to send a screen capture video of them interacting with the prototype. I'm posting this review to help other students get a better gauge of how much time the weekly assignments will take. Don't be intimidated! Just get started and you'll find it's not that difficult to complete, just time-consuming. I found some parts of this course unhelpful and redundant (i.e., tips for creating a strong presentation, presentation tips, overcome stage fright, tips for giving an effective presentation, etc.). I think it would've sufficed to consolidate all the public speaking tips into one reading and point students to extra resources. Afterall this is a UX design course not one on public speaking.

This module wasn't the best it didn't provide as much information as other modules and required a lot of work with very little information provided. This resulted in a lot pf people submitting work which wasn't formatted correctly or hadn't been shared correctly. Could you get a job based on the information provided in this course??? no, you would need to seek information and experience from else where. Also with no qualified UX professional marking the assignments you submit you are reliant on other course participants who are not experienced in UX to understand your work and mark it!

In my opinion, this is the hardest course in the series, due to this course provides a lot of knowledge on how to build a user research plan (UX Research), how to collect and process data, how to analyze data, write Insights and presentation of research results. If the learner has never heard of “Marketing Research” or has no experience working on these issues in practice, it will be relatively difficult to follow. However, do not worry too much because the course provides many examples and templates with detailed step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

The course gives you best practices while doing UX research. With the usability study templates, you are able to summarise all of the participants' key insights and recommendations.

I am a gay latino man of colour and I know firsthand how and why diversity is paramount when developing solutions and services, however, If I knew how much half baked indoctrination attempts I'd get from this whole UX/UI course, I would have saved my money for a more serious learning platform for this course is just Lib Twitter with extra steps.

It's not even subtle and 60% of it isn't even relevant on an educational level, at every week of activities the subject is hammered in videos, text, not even the illustrations are safe, sometimes I find myself wondering if I logged in on Netflix by mistake.

I totally get the need for big companies like Google to pat themselves in the back, congratulating one another for how woke they are but I don't feel like paying a monthly subscription to watch that.

If you find it in your heart to actually give an UX/UI course instead of parroting buzzwords hoping that they'll stick, please let me know, this methodology is not the revolutionary approach to diversity you think it is, if anything, it undermines the discussion.

Peace out.

I recommend this course to not only beginners, but also UX folks like me! This course helps you understand the importance of UX research studies. And even helps you understand why it's important to involve research early on. This helps you learn how to conduct research or collaborate with a research counterpart.

Explenations,resources on to the point.Such a great learning through the course.Also the instructor explaining why we do something and why do not.Again,Great explanations!Thank you.

Super nice flow to the whole course. Presenting it sensibly and clearly. Super nice trainer too. Loved it. Shows general research insight. This was one of the easiest to go through.

This part of course is trash

A highly details course on UX research and testing. The information you receive from testing in the course really opens your eyes up to the value of user feedback.

Felt this course placed to much emphasis on the usability study. Without real participants, this was struggle. I've been drawn to design for the creative outlet but found myself stuck working in Power Point for much of this course.

I really enjoyed this course! Testing out our lo-fi prototypes and getting feedback from our participants was my favorite part because it showed us first hand what it meant when a user experiences a pain point. The only part I was confused about was when some random person failed me for an assignment but gave no insight as to why, while another student gave me a passing grade. I hope Google would add a feature that if someone tries to fail you, without justification, that they have to put a reason somewhere, such as this student is missing multiple factors and I had to fail them. Maybe that way someone can't be spammed with failing? I just didn't want what happened to me to happen to someone else. Other than that good luck everyone! :D

As a person with a background in UX writing, I have participated in many usability studies, but never really put all of the pieces together, or understood the principles and the "why" behind user research. After this course, I feel confident that I can not only participate in user research, but I could also move into the field of user research and apply for jobs. My understanding of qualitative and quantitative research, how to conduct it, and report the findings has grown so much. Can't recommend enough!