hello everyone welcome to my channel i'm aliana and today i will talk about the google
ux certificate courses so in the last few months i graduated from university and i took the online ux
design certificate courses from google i took the google courses because i had my degree in
business and computer science although i have done some projects related to design thinking
it is not specific to ux design and i don't have an education in ux design and i posted something
on linkedin after i finished the courses got a lot of reaction so i was just wondering
maybe i should just do a review and post it on youtube first thing that i want to tell you guys
is that it's a certificate consists of seven smaller certificates and i've seen some people
posting review online a lot of them only finish the first course which is the intro to ux design
but there's actually a lot more content after the first course so this will be a holistic review
first of all a summary for the ux courses it's a lot of contents quizzes pure graded assignments
and projects it's going to take months if you work really really hard it's going to take around three
months because there are three projects in total the first one it's a app on the mobile device
the second one is responsive web and the third one is for both and web app the first course which is
the intro to ux design is not like a project by itself if you want to finish the entire process
you need to take at least the first five courses and the sixth and the seventh courses are really
really long because um each of those consists of one project each now i'd like to quickly
run through the user interface to explain more about the class so here you can see that there
are one two three four five six seven courses in total and for each of these course it's going to
have three to seven weeks of content for this one there's four weeks of content in total
and for each weeks of content there will be readings
and some of them have peer grade assignment and there will be quizzes if you cannot pass
you have to take the quizzes again until you pass the quizzes will only be in the form of
multiple choice but there will be some open-ended questions that you can respond to the community
the videos are really good i will show you one video as an example so for this one wrap
up planning your ex research studies this is like in the end of week one of course four
great job you're making your way through this course and the steps of the ux research study by
the way you can always speed up if you think it's a bit too slow so i usually do 1.5 or 1.75 and
there's a really good subtitle and basically the video explains pretty much all you need to know
and the reading is just a little bit more content adding to it in the reading for each week's class
it will give you a glossary regarding the terms of each week's content let's see this is the glossary
for course for week one you see everything drop-off rates inside key performance indicators
everything's there very clear and there's also peer graded assignments in which you will have to
do an assignment you will see the clear rubric and you will always see an example of the assignment
and after you submit you will be graded on the assignment by peers who's also taking the class
and you will also have to grade other people's assignments there will be at least two people's
assignment you have to grade and for each of them you just you just choose there's 1.2 points for
each category so regarding what i like about the program well the first thing is that i think it's
really organized and the system is really designed very well to take you through the ux process
and regardless where you're at in the ux design field you can always start from something that's
good to you for me i know a few things about ux and i had some background in ui design but i just
still want to learn everything from the beginning to make sure that i don't miss out the basic
and i do think that even a lot of professional people in the field it's still good to always
review the content and be humble to learn something from day one right so i would still
recommend everybody to take the class from the foundations of user experience design otherwise
you could take the class anywhere you want it will give you a quiz before the course to test
whether you're able to take this class immediately another good thing about this course is that it
consists of multiple tools so it teaches you about how to use figma and also adobe xd and the course
knowledge people to use different tools because ux designer depends on the context you work for
might require you to use different tools so i personally use sketch figma and adobe xd but i
prefer sketch and figma another thing that i really like is designing for social good
almost everything that the course touched on has a little bit of designing for social good and i
do think that this mindset is especially important for ux designer since our job is to think from the
user perspectives and there are different users out there who need different things
the fourth thing that i like is having a lot of useful templates there's personal templates
wireframe templates research templates research outcome inside templates a lot of things from
google and i think those are really well organized i mean everyone can adopt the template to
their personal brand by adjusting the looks the feel or maybe the content but i do think
that starting with the temp is really helpful and if you don't have a portfolio right now it also
gives you a lot of resources regarding how you organize portfolio into pdf plus into a website
regarding what i disliked about the course i really hope that before taking the course
i understood how long it's going to take because i thought that i'm a really fast
learner and i should be able to push myself through multiple projects in like a month or so
that wasn't the case because there were a lot of content and there's so many parts that consist of
user research and you have to interview a certain number of people in order to go to the next step
by the way that was also very helpful for me because it just pushed me to talk to other
people and ask for other people's opinion for my third project i designed an app for senior
population in china and i did a user test on my grandmother and she had to do it remotely
from china through the platform wechat so i have to adapt everything live prototype on an ipad on
the wechat platform the surprising part for me is that there's a lot of things that i thought
i was designing it for senior people so everything's so clear there's like arrow printing
down on the screen showing that there's more more content below the screen but she interpreted it
totally different from what i expected and i had to do the design all over again in order to make
people understand it correctly um and those user research was really helpful for me oh
i was talking about what i disliked okay another thing that i dislike is the weight of the course
the sixth and the seventh course i almost lost hope it was like five courses of content packed
into one course basically one project per course but the first five courses are just one project
so i thought that oh maybe i could keep up my momentum and continue the course based on the
speed that i had before but it wasn't the case and i had the feeling that i want to
rush through each step to to get that certificate which wasn't really good but i managed to you know
calm myself down even though i have to look for a job right now or else i have to go back to china
yeah so that was something that i hope i know before taking the class
finally something i didn't like is the prompt choosing tool it was actually a cool tool but
it wasn't very helpful for me because i feel like a lot of things that i see from the prompt
is something that i have no idea how to design because of my life experience for
example design a wedding organization app and i'm like just graduated from university
just got a boyfriend had no wedding experience before but i mean you can always you know renew
the prom to see something new but everything was like um not very applicable for me but
i managed to you know get the idea from the prompt and choose something similar
i think that was basically is regarding what i disliked now i'm going to move to the most
exciting part which is my project yay so i did three projects in total the first one is a
postcard scanning app i called it dodo postcard dodo is that bird that had gone extinct sadly
but it's really cute and cannot fly the idea of this app is that i've seen some of
my friends writing postcards lately postcards is something that my friends use to maintain
long-distance relationships not just relationship but also long-distance friendship and family ship
family ship okay so in my portfolio i usually just give a summary sentence a and
personas user journey map paper wireframes let me show you guys probably um the high
fidelity prototype that i did okay oh that's like 100 years ago i forget about what i did
yeah so yeah so it's kind of like this um this is the car that you send out this is the car that you
received and you can view the car by clicking them um taking some notes you can see the card
just like this you can add a scanning here um you scan the card there's a grid to to tell you
where to line things up take a photo adjust it an angle mask in the back
side of the card and take the photo next and then yeah say something here and done
and that that's basically it for the first step so i decided to start with something simple because
um that's basically what i learned from seeing those prompts is start from something small um
yeah that's just like the first thing i did there's something that i learned
the second the second project i did is for web app on adobe xd by the way adobe xd
was not very friendly to me i just prefer figma in sketch i never had good experience with adobe
products by the way in the second project i called mamo book it is a physical notebook customization
user flow basically i also asked a lot of friends around me um regarding their notebooks some
of them like my roommate like to have some customization in it especially for journals
just noting down how many times to drink water to take medicine to exercise
and some daily challenges um and that's the inspiration of this project
oh that's my initial wireframe drawing i love drawing wireframe i'm getting better at it
this is the initial wireframe i changed everything later
after the user interview this is the design system the mock-up the final polished design
oh by the way this is a responsive web i have
to do everything for the mobile version and for the web version
that was kind of it for mama book the third project is kind of cute it's called dudu
it's a chinese app because the third project needs to be something that's really designed
for people who's kind of in an underrepresented situation and i chose to design something for
my grandmother because my grandmother is my inspiration to ux design so this application
is for her and for senior population in china basically most chinese app is designed for
mass population so there's a lot of functions in it designed for everybody for old people it's a
little bit difficult for them to know what they need to do this application is for old people in
china to browse contents that they care and this one is more tailored to traveling content because
i think senior people in china deserve to travel more like americans and they also deserve to know
more about where their children and grandchildren are living so this app is in chinese i would like
i will i will just kind of go through the um the prototype here's the tablet prototype the tablet
is an ipad that my grandmother used the version that she used that's me and my friend everything
with this night great content is like a collection and you can scroll down you can also scroll down
by clicking this button because some senior adults that i interview who haven't got into technology
that much doesn't know what it means to scroll even though a lot of people think that scrolling
is so easy but for a lot of them it's difficult for them to control how to scroll at a specific
point like my grandmother can do this but not like this if you understand what i mean and
they feel dizzy after like scrolling and see they kind of throw up so i designed this little thing
you can just screw a little bit and stop yeah there's like three three main categories at home
is just look at things randomly the second one is more about things near me or travel location
near me the third one is something recommended by your family member in this button is the
search button in this app basically you press it and talk in order to search okay that's almost
it for the review of the course and feel free to look at my and feel free to look at my portfolio
at elenate.com i know i have a lot of things and to improve and but yeah i wish you all the best
for taking the class and i hope you continue learning it's never too late to learn see ya
you