UI/UX Design Fundamentals Professional Certificate
About Course
This beginner course teaches the foundations of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. It is written for young people and for staff and volunteers of small NGOs and businesses in South Sudan and East Africa who want to design apps, websites and forms that people can actually use, often on modest phones with limited data.
You begin by separating UX from UI and learning the design process: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. You then practise simple user research with interviews and observation, treat participants ethically, and turn your notes into personas, journeys, problem statements and a clear information structure tested with card sorting.
The middle of the course covers sketching on paper, digital wireframes in free tools such as Figma (free plan) or Penpot (free and open source), layout, typography, colour, contrast and icons, design systems, mobile-first and responsive design, designing for low bandwidth and low literacy, forms and error messages, accessibility, usability heuristics, prototyping and usability testing. Software screens change between versions, so you learn the ideas and are encouraged to check current documentation.
Each lesson has objectives, a fictional example, a hands-on activity using pen and paper or free tools, reflection questions and key terms. The course ends with handoff and presentation skills, a capstone in which you design and test a five-screen prototype for a fictional community service and assess it against a checklist, and a final examination. You receive a Bang Ti Lenydoor certificate of completion, which is not an accredited qualification.
Course Content
Module 1: Design Foundations and User Research (Weeks 1-4)
-
UX versus UI: What Designers Actually Do
-
The Design Process: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test
-
User Research: Simple Interviews and Observation
-
Research Ethics, Consent and Making Sense of Notes
-
Module 1 Quiz: Foundations and User Research