Designing the User Experience

I am honestly shocked by the quality of this course. I've taken a number of online courses, including the first two in this series and this was incredibly disappointing. I'm going to bucket the feedback but suffice it to say that if you want to learn about Designing the User Experience -- this course will not help you get there.

Content:

So disappointing. I honestly was really excited about this module because I was hoping to get to learn about user journey mapping methodologies, collecting feedback, aligning business and technical objectives, building for flexibility, etc. Instead, I got a really poor overview of cyber security, debugging software, Industrial Design for the "seat belt cutty thing" (are you kidding me?), and robust design for manufacturing. The content was completely off in terms of the structure and the delivery. I can't tell what happened -- did the course designers lift this from a course on entrepreneurship and just failed to recognize that it didn't actually fit in with the rest of the topics? If you're looking to improve your skills as a Product Manager for software -- this is NOT the course that'll teach you anything about that.

Delivery:

The instructor is high-ego and concerned primarily with telling you about her achievements rather than delivering anything useful in the course. So, I can tell you about how her stove top has a tv in it; how she owns an expensive African gray parrot, the amount of money she made in her first 9 months of a company, that she's (self-proclaimed) hard to work with because she doesn't like having to listen to investors so has to boot-strap everything, and that she's interested in buying an island before she's 40. Oh right, and that she makes motorcycle gear out of old sofas because she's #Sustainable. She's also super judgmental in terms of the make-up of the team and is consistently trying to make jokes about roles she wouldn't want to have because "she's the idea person." I think she believes this is engaging and endearing but it's super off-putting. Her base assumption in this course is that we all just want to get super rich when, really, I was hoping to get more of a sense of how to design the user experience in a structured, efficient way rather than hear the ramblings of an entrepreneur on the "lessons she learned the hard way" (all of which seem to come down to not wanting to pay employees or taxes -- I couldn't make this up if I tried.). I haven't even touched on the fact that it seems like she's seeing the slides for the very first time and just reading them and inserting her feelings in a completely ad-hoc kind of way. There was just no structure. For example, there would be slides that would have a header like "Cheetah Project Example" that the instructor would fail to actually give the example and just randomly highlight 1-2 takeaways with no context whatsoever.

Platform:

This was maybe the most jarring piece just in terms of my interaction with previous EdX courses, which I think - in general - are tightly prepared and delivered. The first time I watched two required videos showing slightly altered versions of the same slides I thought: okay, it's a glitch. But then I was treated to at least two more videos where, after 1-2 minutes of presentation, the instructor got frustrated, sighed dramatically, commented to the camera-operator, and then just started the presentation over. The lack of editing was really poor.

Knowledge Assessment:

This was a joke. The questions asked were so ridiculous. I had one question that was just: "what does this acronym stand for?". In some modules, the transcript shows that the instructor gave totally contrary information to what the quiz says is the right answer, and in another case, the question was just duplicated. Often, also, since the instructor did so much rambling, she never actually even answered the basic questions -- you'd have to go back and find the slide that she clicked through while talking about her parrot or whatever in order to get the actual content. Reading a $15-20 book would have been far more useful than this.

And, given there's only 5 questions per module, there is just absolutely no reliable assessment actually happening. So: yeah, I aced the course -- but did I learn anything? Way harder to say.

The videos are too long, bordering on rambling, trying to cover too much material in one course. It's supposed to be about designer user experience, but veers into very short overviews of project management, manufacturing, sustainability, and software testing, which add to the length of the course but don't give you a deeper understanding of user experience design.

The presenter seems uncomfortable, and makes lots of mistakes that are not edited out, making the videos difficult to watch. In many videos, she reads the slides and adds nothing to them or just says "the book tells you what you need to know"... then why am I watching the video?

Some of the quiz questions are not even complete sentences and others ask questions about topics you haven't covered yet.

The content of the course is necessary and would be interesting if it were not for the amateurish and unfocused presentation. I feel that my money and especially my time would have been better spent just looking at the slides and completing the quizzes since the presenter rarely ever added anything beyond reading the text and was often positioned directly in front of the needed information. The presenter presumably has lots of relevant work experience, but seemed unprepared to provide any specific insight from that work to add to a bald recitation of the words on the slide and endlessly repeating phrases like "I love this stuff", "You only have 24hrs in a day" and "I can tell you from experience".

This has been a very disappointing outlier in my experience with edX which thus far has been wildly positive. While I recognize the necessity of covering this information, I feel that the money I spent for the verified track would deserve a more professional presentation.