Review: Advanced User Experience (UX) Design

This is a review of the online course Advanced User Experience (UX) Design by Dr Bob Bailey. This is part of our series of reviews of online UX courses.

You may also want to check out our comprehensive list of online UX courses.

Course Information

• Course Name: Advanced User Experience (UX) Design
• Author: Dr Bob Bailey
• Hosted by: udemy
• Length: 118 ‘lectures’ (approx 6.5 hours of video content plus resources). This course usually takes a couple of months to complete.
• Intended Audience: Web developers, bloggers, and students, right through to full stack developers.
• What You’ll Learn: Which tools are available, what they cost, how you use them, and when they might need to be replaced.
• Assumed Knowledge: That you already know and can apply most of the basic UX techniques (and now need to know what other professionals are doing, how and why they are doing it, and how you can stay up to date).
• Price at time of review: US $199

Review

I confess to being a bit confounded by this course. It claims to teach a ‘new, different but very effective way to create user interfaces’. What it is, in actual fact, is a something between a course on how to use the webusability.com website, and an advertisement for it.

Make no mistake – webusability.com is an amazing resource. You’ll find up to date tools, books and research curated and well organised, but I’m just not sure that quite such a comprehensive (and expensive) course is required in order to figure out how to use it.

At times (albeit very occasionally), there is movement away from directly demonstrating webusability.com. Unfortunately, during those times, the slide quality is sub-par. Amateur presentation and low quality imagery are a distraction from the information that is being imparted. During the second half of the course, things change up a bit. We move away from such a direct focus on the website, and tips (like how to run a speed test) are introduced, which while useful, are not ground-breaking (or particularly advanced).

I have another confession to make. At around the Section 8 mark, I started losing focus. I found myself looking out the window,  surfing the web… in short, everything but paying attention to the course. This could largely have been avoided by cutting the length of course in half, which would be easily achieved if the webusability.com walkthroughs were removed. To be fair, the course does come with the warning that it usually takes a couple of months to complete.

The Presenter

Dr. Bailey is the president of Computer Psychology, Inc., an education, research and consulting company based in the United States. Before starting his own company, he worked for many years as a usability professional in the prestigious ‘Human Performance Technology Center’ at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

Dr. Bailey has trained computer professionals and web designers internationally, both in the classroom and online. He is a web designer, consultant and author, and holds a Ph.D. degree from Rice University in ‘human performance psychology’.

He certainly has a lovely smile, but the constantly recurring presence of Dr Bailey’s static image (above) at the start of every lecture (and in some cases, throughout) is a little disconcerting. By the same token, he has a very pleasant voice, but I found myself almost hypnotised by around Lecture 15. This course could do with mixing things up a little, in order to keep the audience awake and engaged.

Pros

• webusability.com is a great resource;
• The Udemy interface is intuitive and enjoyable to use;
• The lectures are short, concise and each clearly illustrates a section of the site; and
• Dr Bailey has a pleasant demeanour and voice.

Cons

• The course a lot like an advertisement for the webusability.com website;
• The course is very long, and needs to be taken over a long period of time in order to avoid boredom;
• The tips that are delivered come way too late in the piece; and
• The slide quality is sub-par.

Summary

I was disappointed with this course. I felt like I was watching a series of promotional videos for webusability.com, rather than taking a course to learn new skills. The real meat came in so late in the play that I’d already lost interest.

• Content (how useful, up to date, practical, and comprehensive): 5/10
• Delivery (presentation style, pace, clarity, authority): 7/10
• Production (video quality, audio quality, editing): 4/10
• User Interface (reliable infrastructure, usable interface, convenient): 9/10
• Overall rating: 5/10

Take this course.

Advanced User Experience (UX) Design is hosted at udemy. Note: This post contains affiliate links, so if you do decide to enrol in the course, we’ll receive a percentage of the sale, to help pay the hosting bills.