A well-designed user experience can set a business apart, attract loyal customers, and drive growth. A poor UX, on the other hand, can lead straight to high churn rates and lost revenue.
For individuals, having basic UX skills opens doors to new career opportunities. It also gives you an edge even in non-design roles. Because, again, digital products are absolutely everywhere.
When an employer sees you’ve done your homework on how to create a user-friendly experience for customers, they’ll jump at the chance to work with you.
But learning these skills can take a lot of time and money. If you’re short on one or both, we’ve got good news: there are three reputable places to get a low-cost education on UX design:
- Interaction Design Foundation
- Memorisely’s UX/UI Bootcamp
- UX Design Institute
The Least Expensive UX Design Bootcamp That’s Also High Quality
When you’re short on cash and time, it can feel impossible to add yet another to-do to your list (and budget). But that’s where Interaction Design Foundation comes in. This online platform offers courses taught by UX pros. Many course instructors have taught or worked at the big leagues—think Harvard Business School, Apple, and Experience Dynamics.
And you can learn from them at your own pace, and for a fraction of the price you’d pay for a UX design degree or expensive boot camp.
Here’s what to know about Interaction Design Foundation.
Interaction Design Foundation
Interaction Design Foundation offers high-impact UX courses that teach you practical, job-ready skills in as short an amount of time as you’d like.
You set the pace for your courses, establishing deadlines and class times that work for your schedule. This means you can finish them as quickly or as slowly as you want.
Plus, the courses are all held online. Once you finish a course, you’ll get an industry-recognized course certificate.
If you want a little more guidance, you can pick a learning path, like UX Designer, Usability Expert, Front-End Developer, and Marketer. You’ll see an entire course layout that includes the foundational, beginner, intermediate, and advanced courses you need to gain the right certificate.
We picked the UX Designer learning path to get a feel for the course schedule.
If you were to pick this path, you’d start your education with courses like:
- User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide
- Design Thinking: The Ultimate Guide
Then you’d move on to 10 User Designer beginner courses with titles like these:
- Journey Mapping
- Design for the 21st Century with Don Norman
- AI for Designers
Following the beginner courses, you’d dive into intermediate lessons. Here, you dig into more complex topics, like:
- User Research: Methods and Best Practices
- Agile Methods for UX Design
Finally, you’d cap your UX Designer learning path with advanced courses, such as:
- Emotional Design: How to Make Products People Will Love
- Accessibility: How to Design for All
You can click on a course to get a detailed breakdown of what it entails. If you click on the foundational course, “User Experience: The Beginner’s Guide,” you’ll see this:
Watch the video to learn about your course material or browse the practical info section. Scroll down a bit more and you’ll see what certificate you’ll get and which companies recognize it as a valuable certification.
You can also check out user reviews on the material and the course instructor, plus see a super-detailed breakdown of what’s in each lesson.
We love all the information you get before you ever sign up for a course, or even a plan, with Interaction Design Foundation. Whether you choose a learning path or chart your own way, you’ll come away with deep knowledge on UX design that you can carry with you to your next role.
You can finish a learning path within weeks or squeeze the courses in whenever you have time. This flexibility is a huge part of what makes Interaction Design Foundation stand out.
Plus, it’s super affordable.
Interaction Design Foundation Pricing
You can access all of the Interaction Design Foundation’s UX design courses for one flat fee. Here’s what the two plan tiers get you:
Professional Plan: For $22 a month, billed annually, you get access to:
- All courses
- Industry-recognized certificates
- Heavily discounted 1-hour master classes
- Local meetups
- Online forums
- Literature from 100+ design pros
- Discounts on UX/UI tools
Design League Plan:
- If you spring for this plan, you’ll pay $240 a month, billed monthly, and get everything in the professional plan plus a personal coach to guide you through it all.
2 More UX Design Bootcamp Choices for Those With More Time & Money
If you have a little extra time and money to spare, try Memorisely’s UX/UI Design Bootcamp or the UX Design Institute’s UX Design Course. These bootcamps are more structured and time-constrained than Interaction Design Foundation’s classes. If you thrive on organization, this is a big plus.
Here’s a closer look at these two UX design bootcamp choices.
Memorisely’s UX/UI Design Bootcamp
Memorisely’s UX/UI Design Bootcamp is a micro-class held around the world. It can help you start or advance your UX or UI designer career with classes on all the latest tools, workflows, and best practices.
Unlike Interaction Design Foundation, Memorisely’s bootcamp is structured to take place during 15 weeks. Class cohorts begin every four months or so, and for those four months, you study with one group of UX designers from around the world. The classes are all live, and you’ll attend 30 classes in total.
Throughout your studies, you’ll:
- Put your skills to the test with desktop and mobile app case studies
- Get weekly feedback on your work
- Build a portfolio to show your next job prospect
- Graduate with a certificate of completion after 15 weeks of part-time study
The way this bootcamp is structured takes you from the very beginning of your UX design journey and gives you hands-on projects to work on every step of the way. It’s divided into three terms, as follows:
- Term 1: Learn how to do qualitative research, identify patterns in qualitative data, map out user flows, and learn how to use Figma, the leading UX design tool.
- Term 2: Advance your Figma skills, create reusable UI components, understand design systems, create prototypes, and run usability tests on those prototypes.
- Term 3: Find out how to run user interviews to inform your UX design, map out intricate user journeys, and refine prototypes to finish building and polishing your portfolio.
By the end of your 15 weeks of this bootcamp, you’ll know everything you ever wanted to know about the foundations of UX design. Even if you know literally nothing about it coming into the class.
Memorisely Bootcamp Pricing
Memorisely isn’t cheap, but it’s doable if you’re serious about gaining marketable UX/UI skills.
- $3,450 if you pay upfront, saving $500
- $987/month if paying monthly, for a total of $3,950
You’ll attend two live, online classes a week. The rest of the week is filled with on-demand classes, career mentorship, and getting personal feedback on your portfolio and case studies.
The biggest plus, in our opinion, is the hands-on education. This isn’t a PowerPoint-heavy curriculum. Instead, you learn by doing—with an instructor to guide you. You can get 1:1 support in Slack or Figma and will have weekly mentorship sessions.
UX Design Institute UX Design Course
During the UX Design Institute’s UX Design Course, you’ll learn the full UX process and gain a deep understanding of UX design. This course is an industry-standard qualification, and you’ll earn a professional diploma in UX design upon completion.
You’ll also leave with tutor-graded projects and a professional portfolio that showcases your skills and expertise.
With such reputable results comes a big time commitment. This is a meaty, six-month course that requires you to set aside five hours a week for classes. But the classes are self-paced. You just have to make sure to meet the required monthly deadlines and submissions.
You’ll get expert feedback and support in weekly, mentor-led workshops and build projects from the ground up with industry-standard tools like Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch.
And once you complete the bootcamp, you get a university qualification—credit-rated and quality assured by Glasgow Caledonian University—to show potential employers.
UX Design Institute Bootcamp Pricing
To enroll in this class, you can pay $3,450 upfront or make nine monthly payments of $400 and a $150 admin fee. The UX Design Institute offers sales around holidays, though, so keep an eye out for lower prices!
And remember—you get a bonafide university credit with the UX Design Institute, which can be super appealing to employers.
