How to become a user experience designer in 2025?
Let me give you my perspective, and I wish we'd done that sooner. The practical path saves so much time it blows my mind! But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
This year we're finally seeing a big change in how learning happens in general. For years the correct way was to look for best UX design bootcamps for 2025. Or find some online courses out there, but it's not the case anymore.
The UX UI Course way
To learn UX UI online usually required purchasing a course. Like the Google UX Course that I took myself and thoroughly reviewed. It's almost 90 minutes long, but gives you all the informatino you need to truly benefit from the Google Course.
Is it worth it?
Still, to this day if you want to learn UX, the Google course is one of the best, basic online courses for UX design in 2025. And you can get financing for it (a scholarship of sorts) if you're from a developing country.
It isn't that great when it comes to UI design though.
And there are some extra problems with the course approach too.
While the Google UX Course does have practical exercises, they face a rather big issue.
Vague explanation
Imagine you're fresh after watching maybe two hours of video on what UX is and you already have a task to do. Those tasks are often difficult and can take hours to complete.
From my experience taking the course, the average student has only a very rough idea on what to do.
The explanations are rather vague and mostly done in text. There's very little visual aid in those UX design exercises.
And that leads me to problem number two.
Peer grading
The assignments are peer graded. What it means is that other students need to "approve" your assignment and you need to look at a couple of theirs.
There are two main issues here.
First one is that you're being graded by people as clueless as yourself. You have no idea whether what they said is even right.They may be feedbacking you completely useless knowledge. And you wouldn't even know.
The second problem is human nature. Many people take these courses for a certificate. They don't feel the need to actually learn some new skill. They want a PDF diploma to look better on LinkedIn. Which leads to countless assignments being empty and saying "just give me a passing grade". Yes. Plain old cheating.
Those two elements combined decrease the total quality of the assignments big time.
Google UX Course in 2025? Is it worth it?
Here's my honest take. I'm a designer with over 26 years of experience at this point and I took the Google UX Course in 2021. Watch my full video review linked in this article to understand the upsides and downsides better.
While I didn't really learn anything new, I believe the UX parts are good. It's still worth taking segments 1-4 of the course.
Certificate in UX in 2025?
But don't do it for the certificate. At this point nobody will hire you because you have a UX course certificate. It's a portfolio that matters.
Stop after segment 4 and just do UI challenges at Hype4.Academy instead. Start with the free Daily UI Challenge.
The daily, organized practice is what makes you a better designer much faster.
Before you start, make sure to learn the basics of Figma (or Sketch) from my Beginners guides. You can find them on YouTube as well in this playlist.
How to learn UI design in 2025?
Once you're at this stage you can also drastically speed the learning up.
The second way of learning around here all happens for the people with the golden circle around their profile. This method of learning includes guides for ALL challenges. And some extra ones on information architecture, best practices of landing page design, pricing sections, testimonials and more.
Guides allow you to still make a unique design, but show you the proper building blocks so it still makes sense.
You get spacing tips, typography preferred sizes or how to pick the right colors for your UI design.
On top of that there's AI feedback and human feedback, so learning is a lot faster. It's not peer graded, but instead the feedback is coming from established designers.
Imagine having a UX/UI mentor that helps you out on your journey.
I sure wish I had that when I was starting. Lucky you!
Daily Design Practice in 2025
We talk to designers daily to see what else can be improved in a truly 21st century learning experience. And almost every day we get messages or posts like this:
And you can check the profile of the poster right here. Follow them, see how they progressed through the challenges so far.
It amazes me what guided practice does to your design skills. No single course or ebook can do that.
Are you practicing Today?