UI/UX Design Courses Co-op Diploma Program

The course’s objective is to help the student acquire foundation knowledge for the upper-level design courses. It introduces the graphic design principles to the students and covers topics such as form, typography, type styles, color theory and their applications in user interface and user experience design.

• Understanding the foundations of graphic design
• Problem-solving with design tools and techniques

This course introduces the students to theories, tools, and techniques of designing visual representation of information in a context of a design problem. It discusses varying forms, structure, categories, and architecture of information and how they could be visualized to provide meaning to the users of the visual product.

• Applying different information architectures
• Using information visualization in UI/UX design

The course introduces the students to the foundations of human-computer interactions and interfaces. It discusses the user mental model and how it impacts the interaction design as well as the impact of affective and cultural factors and how they inform the interaction design.

• Learning human-Computer basic principles
• Demonstrating design tools and techniques

This course introduces the student with the concept of design systems and how they are used in designing computer applications for varying platforms. It covers the current common design systems such as Google material design, Apple material design as well as web design systems.

• Practicing the different design systems
• Creating responsive design across multiple platforms

The course introduces the concept of design evaluation and the tools and techniques for design evaluation. The students will study research methods and how to design user study experiments in order to understand the mental model of the users to whom the application is designed and developed.

• Qualitative and quantitative user study design
• Designing user study experiments

During the course, the students get familiar with Design Sprint practice designed by Google Venture. It is a 5-day process through which the student will learn how to answer the product-related business questions through a five-stage process including understanding the problem through mapping out the problem and picking one problem to focus on, developing low, medium, and high-fidelity prototypes, launch and test the prototypes and learn from the process.

• Mapping out the problem to solve
• Performing design sprint

The objective of this course is how to communicate the design to different members of the team including product, development and sample target customers. The students will learn about tools (like Zeplin, InVision and so on) to deliver their design unambiguously to other team members so that they can make their related decisions based on the given design.

• Design communication tools and techniques
• Collecting feedback process on design

This course aims to introduce the students with some special topics and trends in UI/UX design. The goal is to provide the students with each topic by discussing very basic and core topics and terminologies used in each area and how they are impacted by UI/UX design process.

• UX design for games (games analysis from UI/UX perspective)
• What are gamification and its applications in other sectors
• The Psychology of Design

This course gives the opportunity to the student to practice the knowledge they have gained to work on a real project. The project involves all the students have learned including UI/UX design, evaluation and communication.

In this course, the students learn about how to use applications (like web or mobile applications) usage by users to inform and improve user experience using tools and techniques such as Google Analytics.

• Defining user experience metrics
• Improving the design based on data collected

This course provides some technical foundations for designing high-fidelity prototypes using web applications. The course covers both technical challenges of developing web applications and evaluating web applications from UI/UX perspectives such as vertical and horizontal prototyping.

• Learning user experience topics in web design
• Understanding design prototypes

UI/UX designs are informed and impacted by the product decision made by the product manager. It is beneficial if the UI/UX designer can understand the reasoning behind such products decisions. This course is an introductory course to product management and responsibilities of product management and particularly the communication between the product manager and the UI/UX designers.

• Developing stages in product design
• Covering product evaluation and assessment

Many software development companies adopt agile methodology in developing their products. While developers are trained in subjects regarding Agile development like lean product design and scrum, the designers do not usually receive such training and therefore they become a bottleneck in the product development cycle and many Agile books suggest replacing a non-agile designer with a non-designer who knows how to work in an agile environment. This module is one of the core topics to become an expert UX designer.

• Agile methodology in product design
• Advancing scrum and lean strategy

This module introduces core topics in digital marketing that could help UI/UX designers better design products. Also, the course covers some core topics in digital marketing such as SEO, content strategy, content creation and content distribution.

• Running user experience studies on social media
• Collecting user’s feedback on UI/UX decisions

UI/UX and product designers work very closely with the business team. Understanding the core business topics will help the designers a lot in designing the company’s product. The course covers topics such as business model, value propositions, user segmentations, brand promise, minimum-viable-product (MVP) and design for MVP.

• Learning business models & value proposition
• Practicing market and user research

This is a second project course of the program. While the first project course only focuses on UI/UX design in product design, this second-course project is a more comprehensive project where the student will work in a group and will go through different stages of product design from business, product and UI/UX design perspectives.

• Understanding the product from a business perspective such as business model, vision, brand promise, MVP, etc.
• Creating product hypothesis and user personas and how they are informed by business requirements