Though I rated this course above average, it could use some work in certain areas. It's above average because there are many excellent elements, including links to outside reading for further in-depth understanding. I learned a lot and find the content very engaging.

What I found confusing and frustrating were the time assessments and some of the course structure.

Examples:

1. Google tends to underestimate the amount of time assignments will take. I often spent 3-4 times longer to complete peer graded assignments than the stated time calculation, meaning that missed deadlines were common. Other students in the forum, and an off-site chat room, have given the same feedback. I suspect that the time assessments were made by experienced UX designers who can whip through these activities with ease. Many of us UX students are brand new to this, and are still absorbing basic concepts.

2. In this course, topics that will be needed in course 3 were introduced both before and after the competitive audit activity, which was confusing and took time away from the lengthy work of completing my 1st competitive audit. The ideation part, with the Crazy Eights exercise is the main example. It would make sense to complete a competitive audit first before ideating. Again, this feedback is backed up by other students.

3. Now that I've started Course 3, I see that we don't spend any time ideating before jumping in to the wireframing and design prototype phase. In course 2, we did an ideation exercise for the CoffeeHouse scenario. There was no mention that to prepare for Course 3 we should ideate for our personal projects. This means that before getting into the work of Course 3, students must back-track and go through the ideation process.

4. Why is this important? Because the course is designed to be completed in 6 months. While students can take the course at their own pace without penalty, the longer it takes, the more money we pay, and the longer it will take to get a UX job. In future, I think it would be helpful if a little more time were spent on ideation for our personal projects. That could be added to Course 3, making it a 4-week course. I know that these certification courses are new, so I hope that my feedback helps to improve the content and structure of the course.

Thanks!

Course was great but I'm not happy with the fact that my assignment has not been graded and its been almost a month now.

Very wordy and not really any meat to the content.

Beautifully designed course that is user friendly, and SUPER easy to use/navigate. The course has engaging and entertaining content that makes it easy to stay engaged and motivated. Nice job Google!!

My instructor was engaging and communicated very well. The transcription was super handy and I loved that the reading after the lecture re-emphasized the content of the lecture. Excellent. Thank you.

There is not a path to receive feedback from an instructor. Projects are graded by peers who may or may not have an adequate understanding of the English language and do not have experience in UX or an understanding of the project.

IF I could receive feedback from an instructor at the end of the course either via the discussion board or slack, I would give this 5 stars but as it stands, the course is extremely lacking in helping you actually learn what you did correctly and what you did incorrectly (or could be improved upon).

The creators of this course seem to just skip over necessary steps in the UX process. Multiple people have mentioned these issues in the discussion forums.

I love this course! Personally, it took me longer than I thought to complete each challenge, but I loved each step, especially the ideation and research part! I already want to start the next course!

Coursera itself has some ux issues which is funny when taking a course specifically on ux design. Doing the discussions is basically useless because as far as I can tell there is no way to later easily locate your submission or replies to other submissions to actually engage in any type of conversation or discussion. But the rest of the course was excellent! I learned a lot and feel like I really understood the reasoning behind all the steps and methods which is even more important for me.

I wish there was a way to dispute some of the peer reviews or to have an actual instructor double check the peer reviews because I was peer graded incorrectly and had to resubmit the same project three times just to be graded appropriately. I also wish there was an easier way to reach out to an instructor with questions.

This is all just fluff. The entire contents of this course is based around soft skills, overly verbose terminology, and an abitrary academic method to address real-world problems which will undoubtedly change before you even finish the introductory video. This absolutely should not be a part of a technical certification program.

Don't like the speaker

Great course. Helped me learn about UX research, why it is important and how to do it. Learn some amazing techniques like crazy eights and HMW. Instructors are good and explains everything neetly.

Google does a poor job of preparing their new students to conduct their first interviews. There are no examples to watch, like they provide for the Usability tests in course 4. It makes very little sense to give us multiple examples to watch for an unmoderated Usability test (where we have little interaction with our users) more than half way through the course BUT NOT do any of that for the start of the course where we are very new and doing a study with very high interaction with the users.

Provide video examples for the Interview portion of section 2 to better prepare new students for this highly interactive task. Some people have never done this before and you throw us in the pool in the deep end before teaching us how to swim. Google, if you're reading this, be better.

As a researcher myself, I feel that the course could have been improved or made more interesting.

Almost everything feels backwards, the template system never confirms if something was actually saved or confirmed, they have you work on things like your case study before you've even learned how to do everything in it, the order in which they teach subjects and courses just feels incredibly wrong and like I'm simultaneously absorbing nothing and endless useless information at the same time. You have to save info from other sites and you're not told to, and lots of the work is done off of the main site, where it also doesn't confirm if it's saved or submitted or anything. This course has been genuinely irritating at multiple points so far.

This course is very good & massively designed for student's who are biginner in UX field. The lecturers are also self proffessional experienced UX designer. Is not is great for carrier!!! Pretty cool!

I really liked the content but some things are confusing (For example the competitive audit report is quite confusing, I have found simpler audit reports online. The gaps and the weakness thing is quite confusing)

I don't like peer review, I'd prefer if a professional reviewed my work or I was given an exam like in previous lessons.

The course material was great - very informative and thorough. HOWEVER, I have had consistent problems accessing the Google docs for course 2. I can't finish the week 5 assignment to complete course 2 because I'm denied access. The only other option is to download a file that I can't open either, because I don't have a Microsoft account. Others have posted on the discussion forum that they've had the same problem, so it's not just me. I moved on to course 3, but I have no idea if I'll be able to access files that I need to download. If I have the same problem, I'm considering saying that this course was a waste of time and money.

Really interesting but only disappointed that there is no proper guidance for the project we are doing. Discussion forums are useless, since I didn't receive any reply for my very first discussion. So I had to stop and avoid wasting time giving a long paragraph in discussion forum. It will be really good, if we get a chance to consult the lecturers personally, and ask the queries we have and guide us to the good output.

Having other people rate my work that are also students in this program is not reliable. I had some one give me one star for everything and his comment was "Haj". This person completely lied and now I had to go back and resumbit my work in hopes that someone with integrity will rate it properly.

The course is blah blah and don't see the direction of it.

This course has excellent information and guidance that allowed me to get to know my user, know what he wants, how to use it, and for the user to guide me how I can further improve my product design.

I fell off and didn't begin working on the final assignment for a WEEKS. I just got so busy. I kept resetting my deadlines multiple times. It's such a relief to finally have this course completed.

Very good course with a really solid project to follow through each week. Going through all the steps helped me think about project design with an eye towards the user experience in new ways.