What Degree Do You Need to Be a UX Designer?

Somebody might have asked you, what degree do you need to be a UX designer?

Be ready with a surprising revelation.

UX design is among the most popular fields nowadays, receiving high ratings from the satisfaction and earnings people receive in this field.

UX design is a new field, but it is popular among job-seekers and employers as well.

IA’s specific definition of what UX design is and does is difficult to find since it encompasses many other disciplines.

UX design approaches problems from the user-end, meaning that they design products with the user’s needs and wishes in mind.

The goal of UX designers is to design a product in such a way that will increase the users’ satisfaction by making their use of the product much more manageable, more worthy, and more pleasurable.

Many people want to work as a UX designer but are unsure of the requirements to enter this field.

Let’s look at the requirements and skills you need to enter the UX design field.

Is a Degree Essential to Become a UX Designer?

Almost every job requires degrees and experience nowadays.

It’s challenging to find a job if you do not have a college degree.

The situation has come so far that we cannot imagine a good-paying job that we could do for decent pay.

Often, we have to give up too much of our time and energy to do a job that helps us survive.

This applies especially to degrees of technology fields where we immediately think that you need several years of education and training to work.

It’s also difficult to imagine a person who would give up their job and switch to technology-related jobs that provide better pay.

So, what degree do you need to be a UX designer?

You might be thinking that having a college degree in technology-related fields is a prerequisite, and anyone without will be uncompetitive in the job market.

However, it’s surprising to know that you do not need a degree to work as a UX Designer.

Many successful people who are now working as UX Designers started their education from boot camps in UX Design.

These boot camps include different education programs such as training, workshops, and online courses that are ideal even for those who don’t have any background in UX Design or technology.

The main advantage of these educational programs is that they teach you all the skills within months or a year, making it possible to quickly go back and enter the job market.

To sum it up, a degree is not essential to become a UX Designer, but having the necessary skills will make you competitive in the job market.

There are many online courses and training that help you reach your dream job in less than a year.

Where Should You Start?

There are a lot of opportunities online if you want to start immediately.

You have websites that offer free or paid courses on UX Design or any other related courses.

You have the opportunity to require a certificate for the class after you finish it, but you will typically have to pay for such certificates.

They can be self-paced, but you also have courses taught by instructors that follow the standard class methods online.

So, if you feel like you work better under a self-organized class and pace, then you may sign up for those kinds of courses.

However, if you feel like you could get demotivated or give up without the help of a professor/mentor, you can also sign up for those kinds of classes.

Coupled with these online classes, you can read different books on UX design or listen to podcasts.

Another helpful method might be looking at works that UX designers did and see how they achieved those, the programs and the tools they used, and the time it took them to reach their current point.

Reading or listening to previous experiences from people that started just like you can benefit your experience also.

These can inspire you and show you that this is possible and show you the different tools they used to acquire their skills, which could also help you in the future.

Now, let’s look at some of the online courses that you can access and study.

A popular online education site is Udemy.

Udemy reached more than 35 million students worldwide while offering a wide variety of courses for all fields.

Udemy provides courses with or without certificates, but its main advantage is that you can complete all of the courses based on your timeline.

Which Udemy Courses Could You Take?

 1. Design Thinking in 3 Steps

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This course is among the most popular courses on UX Design for two main reasons.

Firstly, the team that teaches the course contributed to the discovery of the design-thinking process and steps.

Secondly, beginners love to start their UX Design path with this course since it lays the foundation for further development.

The class itself is based on interactive learning, where you can have a lot of discussions and conversations.

The class’ main topics focus on thinking about specific problems in different ways and reach a solution that will be ideal for your client.

After you go through the theory surrounding the design-thinking process, you’ll do a simulation in which you have to apply these skills.

The course’s primary skills are thinking from a client’s perspective and solving problems.

Then, you need to come up with different ideas as solutions to the problem.

Then, use prototypes as tests before taking them to the real world.

Course Requirements

Requirements can be easily met by anyone who wants to understand their client, who has a timer, and utensils such as pen, pencil, and notebook.

The course is available for several groups of people.

Those who just immersed themselves in learning UX Design are more than welcome.

You may also consider those who have been working for a while,

But, you feel like they lack some necessary skills to be competitive.

People who cannot grasp the meaning and theory behind design-thinking are also welcome.

What’s fantastic is that you don’t have to belong to a particular profession to enroll in this class.

No matter your current job, you can always benefit from learning to understand your clients’ needs much better.

The course received 4.4/5 as a rating.

Almost 70,000 students took the course.

A lot of them claim that it taught them to think more creatively about solving problems.

Additionally, reviews claimed that learning the design-thinking steps was significant for them.

This is because, before the class, they used to jump to the solutions immediately without understanding the problem correctly.

2. Master Digital Product Design: UX Research & UI Design

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This course is marked as a bestseller on Udemy.com.

The course’s philosophy is that we’re living in a fast-changing globalized world where humans are distracted and want to complete things quickly.

This situation requires different and improved skills from designers of digital products.

This course’s main topics include:

• User interface design
• User experience research,
• Human perception
• Design process
• Design psychology
• Critical thinking

The course aims to offer skills such as a better understanding of the design process, better analysis of the market and clients, and an improved product design process.

Another primary skill the course aims to teach is making people think creatively and critically about people’s needs and how to achieve those.

It also teaches that you can achieve all of these while focusing on human beings’ psychology, such as the way they think about things or the way they perceive things.

Course Requirements

The requirements to enter this course include:

• Open-mindedness
• Equipment
• Computer
• Readiness to go through challenges
• A Figma account

Figma is a website where you can learn to design products and then prototype them.

You can access it for free or through a paid subscription.

The course is open to a large audience, such as user interface designers, user experience designers, and software engineers.

You can also enroll in the course if you’ve just begun designing products or you’re just a beginner in the path of UX Designer.

The course got a rating of 4.5/5 with almost 10,000 students who enrolled in the class so far.

Many people who already took the class claim that the course taught them the foundation of UX and UI design.

It helped them think differently about product design.

Many people also took this course as a first designer class, which offered an excellent foundation for their further training and studies.

3. Build Persuasive Products

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This course is psychology-based.

This means that it’s the ideal class to teach people the critical cognitive processes that affect their decision-making.

Learning this can be beneficial because you’ll know the way that you should design your product.

This main topic of the course will be persuasion techniques that you can incorporate in your design.

They will help convince people to take the action they aimed for.

Another critical topic is the psychological processes of humans that a designer can affect to make their product more desirable.

Analysis of humans’ actions and thoughts is a crucial component of the course.

It will tackle skills such as understanding the underlying motivations regarding actions and thoughts.

Course Requirements

The requirements for this course are that you should understand how technology, different websites, and apps work.

The course is an ideal beginner course for designers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals.

Out of this course, you’ll understand how you can analyze your client base.

After this,  you can then design your products to meet their needs.

Additionally, you’ll get an in-depth knowledge of how you can persuade people to use your designs.

In addition, you’ll know, also,  the way you can keep them loyal.

The course also emphasizes that humans’ needs and motivations change with time, especially in this globalized world.

Understanding people and the client base is an important step that you cannot skip to design your product.

So, user experience and user interface designers, web designers, entrepreneurs, and business developers are welcome to the course.

This course’s rating is 4.5/5, with more than 3000 students who have already enrolled in this class so far.

Most of the reviews on this course emphasize that the course gave them the skills to understand the clients’ needs.

This will help them design a product that will sell among the clients.

Why Isn’t a Degree Necessary for UX Designers?

The field of UX design is evolving since technology makes new tools and programs available almost all the time.

Most of the time, the educational institutions cannot keep up with this pace of change.

So commonly, UX designers with degrees will find their skills shortcoming of the actual requirements in the current job market.

The constant change requires that a UX designer to be ready to keep up with these changes.

This will require them to get some training or enroll in online courses or teach themselves the new programs or tools.

Many disciplines create UX design, such as Interaction Design, Human-Computer Interaction, and Information Architecture.

Additionally, other fields such as Psychology, Entrepreneurship, and Web Design might also be related and needed for UX design.

As you can see, the educational institutions cannot offer a UX design field that teaches each component together. 

It is impossible to gain all UX design skills from a degree.

This means that even if you have a degree, you must have the skills to develop yourself and UX design skills.

Although having a UX design degree is only a benefit, this doesn’t ensure you a successful job if you don’t have the necessary skills.

However, there are also a lot of successful UX designers that don’t have degrees but possess all the necessary skills to complete the job.

Additionally, many of them started with other fields.

Eventually, they switched to UX design, which also shows that a degree is not a pre-condition to starting a job in UX design.

It’s also important to remember that a low number of people, less than 30%, who finish their degrees in one field, end up working for that same field.

What Skills Are Needed to Be a UX Designer?

Many people believe that the most critical skill that’s needed for design fields is to be creative.

Of course, the design fields require specific creativity and thinking out of the box, but this is not the most important one.

Creativity comes in hand, mainly, when you design the product that solves the client’s problem.

However, there is a long process before you arrive at that point.

Soft skills are essential in UX design, such as communication and interpersonal skills.

Communicating with your clients is essential, and knowing the ways to get a deeper understanding of their product needs. 

Sometimes, the solution might come from issues that are not visible to the client itself, so you must have advanced critical thinking.

Empathy is another essential skill to use in UX design.

This is because you must develop a theoretical and emotional understanding of why the specific problem is an issue for the client.

Then, you will be able to help them have a better user experience.

You’re going to use these skills throughout your user research journey.

You’ll have to analyze the issues and problems that are not obvious to the client or anyone else.

Other Skills Needed

Another critical skill is to have excellent time management since the user research and the design process need a fair division of tasks so that you can finish each of them on time.

An outstanding skill is problem-solving.

This contributes to the UX designer being able to identify the real problems, identify many possible solutions, and finally, be able to choose the right one.

This skill makes UX designers independent and successful, which will eventually raise their client base.

So, if you’re uncertain whether you possess the skills to enter the field of UX design at all, you should check whether you have these skills.

If you do have them, you can enter the field and learn the UX design industry skills.

Final Thoughts

Despite the widespread belief that you need an extensive college education to become a UX designer, many successful UX designers started with other fields and then switched to UX design later.

So, the what’s the answer to the question: What degree do you need to be a UX designer?

You don’t need a degree to enter UX design.

There are many online courses and training that provide the necessary skills for this field.

You can find similar courses on Udemy where you can choose among free or paid methods, and you can even pay for a certificate that proves your completion of the course.

Suppose you’re wondering whether you have the skills to enter the field of UX design. 

In that case, you should look for skills like communication, empathy, interpersonal skills, time management, and problem-solving skills.

Even if you’re currently in another field and thinking of switching to UX design, you can do it, and you’ll be ready to enter the market in a short period.

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