Hello there!
A couple of weeks ago, I posted early impressions of my experiences with the first out of seven courses that comprise the UI/UX Design Google Specialization in Coursera. You can find that here.
Now I've gone thru 2 more modules of this course and have a more definite opinion, and I feel more comfortable discussing whether I would recommend it or not to others.
2nd Course: Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate
There's not much to talk about in the second course. If you read my first post, the second course is more of a continuation of what happened there, a good mix between text-based content, videos, and quizzes to get you comfortable with the basics.
It's all theory and some practice research exercises that, although helpful to get into the mindset of working UI/UX, are not the meat of the course. It is not something you will be doing unless you specialize as a UX Researcher in most jobs.
3rd Course: Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes
The third course is where stuff starts to get good. You are introduced to the course and then immediately begin learning theory about paper wireframes, which is the most basic for of UI/UX and then you get to start working on them.
There's a lot of fun to be had doing wireframes with pen & paper, and you're provided a few optional activities if you wish to do so. Still, the focus of the course quickly shifts to the industry standard today, which is doing digital wireframes with Figma, which is a lot of fun as well.
After getting comfortable doing digital wireframes, you are guided into starting your first low-fidelity prototype, which is a way of making your wireframes "functional" to showcase what you intend your designs to do when they are handed over to developers.
Everything is explained pretty well, you're given a decent chunk of activities, and they even have some tutorials made provided by Figma themselves as part of the course, and if you fail to understand something, there's a good amount of resources online and a pretty active course community in Coursera itself. Although by this point, it has been thinned out by the dropouts, there is way more activity on the 1st course than in the 2nd and 3rd, and that's to be expected since people tend to drop out of online courses at higher rates than presential courses.
Here's a link with my first low-fidelity prototype if you're interested in looking at what you would be able to make by following only up to the 3rd course.
LINK
Conclusions so Far
If you're interested in web and app design and have 0 experience with all that world, I think this is a good and cheap way to get started. Feel free to ask any questions if you guys are interested!
