Background

Interaction Design Foundation is a non-profit community founded in Denmark 17 years ago. I decided to become their member in July 2018, with a recommendation from a colleague who is also a UX designer, like me.

 

 

As a member I got a lot of benefits, such as:

• access to 32 free both beginner and advanced certified UX courses (accredited and recognised by LinkedIn, Adobe, etc.)
• an access to IDF community and a chance to connect with other designers, UX professionals and managers
• information about the most important UX events worldwide

 

My Experience

When I signed up, first thing I wanted to do was to check the courses they had. I faced the first problem here because I didn’t know what to choose because I liked too many things! Eventually, I decided to enroll for Mobile User Experience (UX) Design and Emotional Design — How to Make Products People Will Love and study both courses at the same time.

What’s also worth mentioning is that at the same time my office location was moved on the other part of the city. This meant I had to commute every morning for 40 min, so I decided to use this time for studying because my evening free hours free busy with classes on college I had after work. As much as I could take this change in my life as a bad one, I decided to use the maximum of my time, and in return I got a lot!

I particularly liked mini quizzes at the end of each lesson, which is there to ensure that you are keeping up and not just skimming through the text or videos, which is great! The questions become more complex as the course progresses, and their score increases.

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One more thing I saw on IDF and nowhere else are open-ended questions, graded in-person by experts. After you’re graded, you also get a proper feedback based on the answer you submitted. IDF doesn’t offer to mentor for each course, but you have the full online support of their community.

When you reach 70% of the course completion, you can retrieve the certificate straight away and post on your LinkedIn profile. But, you can also try to continue with studying and if you achieve more than 90% — you’ll get a Top 10 in a Class note on your certificate which is really cool.

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Impact of IDF in my career and life

I was so excited when I got my first certificate and published it on my LinkedIn profile, but even more when I started to receive a lot of various UX job offers. Seemed that the recruiters know and appreciate when they see IDF certificates, so they continued to contact me even more often when I added all 4 certificates.

After finishing the course for Conducting Usability Testing, I decided to apply the learnings and reuse the scripts, pre-test and post-test questionnaires when doing testing at my work. It turned out great, and I got some good and valuable feedback afterwards.

Emotional Design — How to Make Products People Will Love course widened my knowledge in UX, but I also learned some great things about psychology and how we can influence users’ decisions. It was great to see a big picture of how things work and how with a certain design we can affect and manipulate human behaviour.

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Courses Mobile User Experience (UX) Design and The Ultimate Guide to Visual Perception and Design have taught me some important UX rules about the priorities of the elements and content we put on UI, and how with colours and visuals can impact both users’ decisions and entire look and feel of the site or the mobile app.

And finally, not to forget the last course I’ve completed in Management (Strategy and Tactics), which sharpened my managing skills so I can create and execute a UX strategy, ensure that UX values are embedded into the company culture, manage and support a UX designer and wider UX team and effectively hire for a UX team.

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How to stay focused?

Here are 3 tips I’ll share with you:

1. I read 2–4 chapters every morning and it took me 10–20 min. Amazing, right? 20 min every day changed my life, my career and my approach to work. I became more confident about the things I do and I enjoyed my day-to-day tasks a lot more!
2. Worked for me, don’t know if it will work for everyone.. I enrolled for 2 courses at once, so I can switch. For example, I can choose — whether I prefer to do the Mobile UX of Visual Design. And at the end of the road, I got 2 certificates instead of one 🙂
3. Even if you’ll feel overwhelmed sometimes, don’t worry. Take a break and continue when you want. That’s the power of a self-paced course — you can sign up for one or more courses at once and read anytime you want. And the best thing is — the content will always be available to you, even when you finish it!

 

Conclusion

UX design is one of the fields that is constantly emerging, so you need to make sure you’re always on track with everything. IDF certificates are great because they don’t expire, so you don’t need to renew them like it’s the case with other similar certs.

Another great thing is the ability to do everything online, attending courses and getting graded has never been easier. You can finish a course and get certified in one month, or in six months. It’s up to you. And once you do, trust me – everyone will recognise the IDF certificate, approved by Don Norman 🙂

If you want to avail the 2 months off your yearly membership, make sure you register via this IDF link. You will also get $200 off your Bootcamp price, in case you decide to opt in for that too.

Try it out, and let me know how you like it!