UX Courses at Interaction Design Foundation are Too Much Information
How I Joined the 1%.
When Mads Soegaard from the Interaction Design Foundation told me that my course work had earned me a place among the top 1% of IDF’s course takers, I was thrilled, even if this wasn’t the exact “one percent” I was hoping to join. When he asked me to write a short essay telling how IDF’s courses have enriched my UX knowledge and practice, I remembered someone else’s unwanted writing assignment: a young girl who had been assigned a Science book report on beetles, and began it with this immortal topic sentence,
“This book taught me more about beetles than I ever wanted to know”
That’s how I feel about the courses I’ve taken at the Interaction Design Foundation. They taught me more about UX than I ever wanted to know — but in a good way. As in any worthwhile educational curriculum, they pushed me out of my comfort zone and forced me to amass practical skills and tackle arcane theories that weren’t cool, trendy or on any version of my UX bucket list. And for that I am very grateful.
Origin Story
Several years back I found myself hitting the wall in my UX work. Like many practitioners who had entered UX via front-end design and production, I was intrigued by the possibilities of User Experience Design, but saw it as mostly about wire framing. I had done well applying what I’d learned about wire framing, Information architecture, content strategy and UI on the job. The rest came from from online sources like A List Apart, UXmatters and of course, the venerable Nielsen/Norman Group. Often, I sought out articles on specific UX topics because of a challenge I was facing right then and there, and what I learned in those crash summaries was enough to get me through that stage of the process.
This kind of on-the-job training was great as far as it went. But I soon discovered how much it limited my knowledge and experience to the types of UX projects and processes that were available in whichever workplace had hired me, which in turn was constrained by the universal tendency of UX teams without well-informed, powerful advocates to devolve into opinion-based wire framing.
I also came to realize that my buffet-style UX self-education was not serving me well. Like most self-directed learners, I suffered from too much ‘self’ and not enough direction. I focused in on what I needed to know to complete this job, or that and supplemented this ‘agile’ (“just enough, just in time”) course of study by reading whatever caught my eye on the various UX sites. In the process, I gained valuable knowledge, but succumbed without realizing it to the intellectual tunnel vision that afflicts everyone who learns just the things that most interest them. I’d seen the doleful results of that sort of ‘self-education’ online and didn’t want it for myself.
I knew enough the value of structured tutorials and often used them to master the digital UX tools like Omnigraffle, Axure and Sketch/InVision, but just like countless others in this field, I mistook software proficiency for domain knowledge. And domain knowledge, of a deep and fundamental sort was what I needed to grow in my UX practice.
Of course, I didn’t realize any of this at the time. That sort of insight only comes in retrospect. All I knew was that I was stuck. For me, “stuck” meant that the UX project challenges I found myself facing were greater than the knowledge I was equipped with. I couldn’t move forward because I not only lacked the tools for moving forward, I lacked a good sense what tools I needed to move forward.
Enter The Interaction Design Foundation.
My stuck-ness eased considerably when the contract client unstuck me from their payroll. It wasn’t the kind of freedom I had been seeking but did underscore the need to expand my UX skills and knowledge in a hurry. I needed to acquire UX knowledge and skills quickly, on my schedule but without sacrificing depth of knowledge. And I didn’t have the time or money for a three or six-week intensive boot camp. I looked at the offerings online and found:
- A big, eponymous e-Learning site whose UX education offerings were sparse and focused mainly on teaching commercial UX software.
- An advanced UX site featuring seminars by top professionals demonstrating the latest UX methodologies, but short on the basics I needed.
I’m not sure how I found IDF, but I’m glad I did. They charged a very affordable flat, yearly fee that gave me access to the basic and advanced UX education I was seeking. And I knew they were giving me good value because nearly every course I’ve taken with them has required me to give my attention on lengthy, wide-ranging lectures I would have preferred to skip, write long answers on arcane topics and submit exercises on topics that held little interest.
(Artist: Ed Fisher ©1962, The New Yorker Magazine)
For example, I’m right now working on a UI exercise that asks me to wire frame and annotate five distinct variations on the theme of pagination controls. For a research and systems thinker like me, this holds as little appeal as a sales pitch for condominium time shares. But I pitched into the assignment, read the Nielsen/Norman article on the topic , made notes, looked at gangups of UI patterns, sketched a bunch myself, and learned things I didn’t know before.
Even though I acquired this new knowledge with some difficulty and largely against my will, I have it. It’s mine now, to apply, share and maybe suggest a better solution on some future UX project. That’s the value of a thorough education, which is what IDF will give anybody who wants to be a better UX practitioner.
