In eCornell Certificate Programs
With digital products on the rise, user experience design is fast becoming one of today’s most coveted careers.
This certificate program approaches UX and other forms of product design through human-centered design, the practice of placing users and their needs as the focus of the work. This includes everything from creating effective and enjoyable user experiences to ethical and safe interactions between the user research team and the product. The courses begin with the foundational concepts of good design: human-computer interaction, usability, user experience, and user research.
Beginning with understanding the user, you will plan and conduct user research to gain insights into real users; their backgrounds, goals, and behaviors. In the second stage of the design process, you’ll use your customer insights to develop scenarios and storyboards to formulate early visuals of the design concept. After gaining a firmer understanding of the design space, the physical visualizations begin to take shape as you lay out prototypes in the implementation stage. You’ll have the opportunity to use leading software tools to bring the design concept to fruition, gaining applied design skills in real-world UX, UI, and product design.
In the last course and the final stage of the human-centered design process, you will evaluate your design. This will involve planning and running a usability testing session with someone from the user group and reporting on the results. At the end of the certificate program, you’ll have a high-fidelity prototype which can be incorporated into your design portfolio to demonstrate an advanced representation of your UX design skills.
The courses in this certificate program are required to be completed in the order that they appear.