How I got my Udacity UX Nano Degree Certification in three months

Isaac Donkoh — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 12:03:56 +0000

It has been an interesting journey for me. I have been dabbling in the UX/UI space for a while without taking it seriously. For now, I will not go into the full details about the course. That will be in my next post. It all started early this year when I wanted to officially be recognized as a UX/UI designer. Fortunately enough I got a link for a scholarship from Techleaders.ea. They were offering a scholarship for Udacity courses. I applied for the Udacity UX Nano degree course and I got accepted. On 16th August 2021, I got my official certificate as a UX designer. During this period I also applied for the Google UX Designer Professional Certification. I am in my final stage of the program, I have been able to achieve six certificates so far and I am left with the last certificate. After that, then I would be certified by Google and Coursera. It was not easy going through this journey. The video lectures were very informative. Udacity provided quality video content. They also provided external content or reading content that served as external resources that were used to complement the video content. The quizzes in the program would really make me re-watch the video, and this made me retain and understand the content much more. Talking about the five projects in the Course, I will say I had to dig deep and I will also use this opportunity to thank the Udacity WhatsApp group that was formed by the students offering the course. We really helped each other a lot. My final project is an ambulance requesting platform that works like the way Uber works. A user will request the services of an ambulance and an ambulance in the vicinity will respond and come to the aid of the user or patient. The Udacity program has been divided into five sections. You start with the User Experience and then you move on to the UX fundamentals and Design research, during this part of the program, they will take you through how to do research, planning a UX research study, how to conduct a semi-structured interview, etc. From there you get to the UX fundamental and design research where you do your design sprint, Synthesis, UI Principles creating Clickable Prototype,s and conducting your usability studies. You submit a low-fidelity rapid prototype sprint for this section. Let me not go into the full details, and I must say the instructors will go through your project with a fine comb and will make sure you do everything according to standards before you pass and move on to the next section. The next section I moved to was the Concept to Low-fidelity prototype all work with tools like Adobe XD, Figma, Miro, and whimsical. From there I submitted my Low fidelity rapid prototype sprint project for evaluation. I got my review and I had to rework it again. I submitted it and this time I passed hurray. I had a fun time when I got to the High-fidelity section. This section involved building interactive designs and preparing designs for Engineering handoff using Zeplin. AS a website developer myself, I found it interesting has designers were able to create design systems for engineers. The last section of the Program was the Caption project. This is where I built my starter Portfolio and UX Portfolio case study. All in all, I have finished my Udacity UX Design Course and I have the skills, experience, and certificate. I hope for the best in the future and this new career path I have taken.

I am available for any discussions which can be for a freelance gig or work on a project or any arrangement. This is my email address degraft87@gmail.com. You can also look me up on linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaacdeveloper/

How I started pursuing my UX Nano Degree and Google UX Design Certification at the Sametime Part 1

Isaac Donkoh — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 12:10:27 +0000

It has been very interesting during this Covid period for all of us. I have worked in the Software and Website Development industry for five years now . It I longe than that but I took it serious five years ago. I have also worked as Co-founder non profit Start-up. The product we are working on is dear to my heart in my country.As someone from Ghana , the tech Space is not understood by by a lot of people not to talk of taking us serious. A client will give you a joband you become the Developer, Designer ,Copywriter and if you are not lucky the Photographer too. A client would want a fully functional ecommerce website with a payment gateway at a cost of $100. I got a little break when I was offered the chance to be a Tech lead for a hub during one of the Incubation for their 2020 co-horts and I would say it was very interesting. I had to do a lot of learn as well as research.

Enough about the bla bla bla.I will write two articles separately in relation to my experience with Udacity and Coursera. Let's go straight to the meat of the story. From where I come almost 90% of Developers/Designers do not buy Courses online , we have our way around it.So we finish with it, haven the skills and experience but no certificate to back it. So I was obviously happy when Google launched their UX Design Certification and Udacity also launched the nano degree programme.
So during the late part of Covid period, there were alot of Scholars by some companies as well as institutions that were being offered both for Google UX Design as well as Udacity. I applied for it and it got both scholarships.

This is just the part one. I will go into details about the two courses in the part 2.
I am almost done with both programs and I will say, so far so good. I am open for any Start-up or Company that needs a UX/UX intern . Stay tune for part 2

DEV Community: Isaac Donkoh

How I got my Udacity UX Nano Degree Certification in three months

How I started pursuing my UX Nano Degree and Google UX Design Certification at the Sametime Part 1