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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Visual Elements of User Interface Design by California Institute of the Arts

4.7
stars
5,841 ratings

About the Course

This design-centric course examines the broad question of what an interface is and what role a designer plays in creating a user interface. Learning how to design and articulate meaning using color, type, and imagery is essential to making interfaces function clearly and seamlessly. Through a series of lectures and visual exercises, you will focus on the many individual elements and components that make up the skillset of an interface designer. By the end of this course, you will be able to describe the key formal elements of clear, consistent, and intuitive UI design, and apply your learned skills to the design of a static screen-based interface. This is the first course in the UI/UX Design Specialization, which brings a design-centric approach to user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, and offers practical, skill-based instruction centered around a visual communications perspective, rather than on one focused on marketing or programming alone. These courses are ideal for anyone with some experience in graphic or visual design and who would like to build their skill set in UI or UX for app and web design. It would also be ideal for anyone with experience in front- or back-end web development or human-computer interaction and want to sharpen their visual design and analysis skills for UI or UX....

Top reviews

RS

Dec 31, 2021

I never thought this is possible. I am very grateful to Coursera and Calarts. This is a starting milestone to changing my career life for better. I am ready to pursue more and more with your support.

BB

Mar 31, 2020

This course is very useful for a beginner who is looking for the basics of UI/UX course.

This course will give you the basic idea of interface design which very important for its advanced studies.

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1 - 25 of 1,463 Reviews for Visual Elements of User Interface Design

By B D

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Mar 4, 2019

Peer reviews is the worst. That is the worst idea, how can you allow someone that has no skill decide the outcome of someone else's grade?

By Dimitrios P

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Sep 22, 2019

This could have been a very good course, but for the idea of peer grading. It just does not work. Most people's comments are purely subjective and come from very little knowledge, skill and/or experience. Shame!

By Andrei N

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Feb 21, 2019

You teach very strange visual design. Straight out of 90s. I don't know what to say, just look at Dribbble and all the design trends happening all over the world.

By René F M

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Jan 24, 2020

The overall information received I feel is really helpful, however, the fact that the grades you get with this course come from the same people studying the course makes no sense.

I would have liked to get actual feedback from the professionals/teachers, someone that actually has a background in this subject and with experience in the field.

I also placed a comment to dispute a grade I received in an assignment, because one of the peers that review it, seemed that he didn't understand English or didn't understand the question. The response from staff was really useless, they simply said that I could resubmit my assignment to have someone else review it. Why couldn't they simply review the same, that I had already submitted?

Coursera needs to look into this because the way these courses are being graded is not working!

By Vanessa C

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Jun 17, 2019

I enjoyed the structure of the course with each week building up to the final project. Logically planned out and effective structure. Videos were clear and easy to understand. I'm happy with what I produced and the class helped me build my confidence to move onto the next course. I was able to complete my project with minimal knowledge of Photoshop.

However, I'm not a huge fan of the 3 peer grades needed to average out our score as it appeared from the comments left that some users misunderstood what and how they should be grading. Requiring a higher amount of grades to even out the average or allowing some grades to be challenged and reviewed by a staff member would be helpful.

By John V

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May 5, 2020

I was extremely excited. Then, into the course, first week, there’s no instructors, all peers, who don’t answer you for days on the forum. No email to anybody. And the worst is it, it says it’s a beginner course, but they don’t teach one thing on how to use any of the programs in Adobe creative suite. So you were unable to do any assignments because some of us have no idea how to use the programs. Most of the people in the program are complaining about something. Too bad, certainly not well done at all.

By Aakash B

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Jul 14, 2019

Does not provide any useful knowledge for improving skills. The course only talks about the basics that most of the individuals pursuing UI UX already knows.

By Huma A K

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Jun 14, 2020

The course is excellent and I got to learn a lot, but I am not a fan of peer grading as they have just as much knowledge as we do. Getting a grade from a mentor would be more accurate and helpful

By MindOrks

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Apr 30, 2020

In my humble opinion, the peer grading system in an abstract field like design is not suited. I submitted one assignment and I was failed. I submitted the same again, I passed because other peers reviewed!

As an admirer of Coursera, I would say that it becomes frustrating to have a professional life, personal life and at the same time re-doing assignments for absolutely non-definite parameters of "what is a good design" since its all subject to personal judgments.

By Benison B

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Apr 1, 2020

This course is very useful for a beginner who is looking for the basics of UI/UX course.

This course will give you the basic idea of interface design which very important for its advanced studies.

By Amanda P

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Jul 14, 2020

The initial coursework was actually incredibly helpful. The professor was clear with what he was teaching, although from time to time became long-winded and highly repetitive. The single thing that I strongly disliked about this course? The peer reviews. That makes no sense. It's the blind leading the blind. However, this was clearly originated with good intention (more spots for people to take the course.) it wound up being extremely detrimental. For instance, I had a project geared towards emergency workers (primarily firefighters) and a peer reviewer not only gave me a failing grade because she, "hated cops" (which I understand, but again....firefighters.) but proceeded to then look me up on social media to voice dislike for my project. I can't get behind that logic. Again, pretending that didn't happen, it just doesn't make sense to have someone just as inexperienced as you review and grade your work. Makes it difficult to be proud of yourself for completing the course.

By Valentina L

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Jul 10, 2020

+ videos are short and there are quizes that help to check your understanding

+ the information is well structured with examples

- if you are from design field it will be unsuitable if you want to upgrade your skills, not just refresh your knowledge

- peer reviews have absolutely no value, in my point of view, I had been expecting that the teachers would have took some place in the course

- the overall level of students in terms of design skills is low, or they don't have any skills at all, so you are going to be assessed by people who are not in the design field. Of course, they are the users as well, but don't wait that they will give you a valuable feedback.

- it is a course in design field, the authors should think more about a modern design look of the course as it is not up to date

By Rizwan s

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Jan 1, 2022

I never thought this is possible. I am very grateful to Coursera and Calarts. This is a starting milestone to changing my career life for better. I am ready to pursue more and more with your support.

By Karolina T

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Feb 24, 2019

The content is really good.

The peer-scoring doesn't work really good though. It happened that the same work got scores varying from 1 to 3 points (in the scale of 4). The comments were not always adequate, e.g. pointing the lack of elements that were not expected to be included in the submission, calculating incorrectly the amount of pictures included. It would be interesting to know if it's controlled and standardize in any way.

By Roberto W S

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Nov 21, 2018

I never thought this is possible. I am very grateful to Coursera and Calarts. This is a starting milestone to changing my career life for better. I am ready to pursue more and more with your support.

By Myroslav O

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Nov 6, 2018

Very decent and applied course.

The only thing for possible improvement I can think of is the form of the requirements for the assignments. Since from the very beginning of the course you are free to choose the application idea from one of the given options, but then in the end of each week your submitted assignment has to meet some particular strict requirements (such as some fixed amounts of visual elements, buttons, etc.), maybe it makes sense to restrict options you can choose of, or to mention all the strict requirements from the very beginning of the course, because sometimes it felt like I had to intentionally complicate my application (e.g. add more visual elements that do not make much sense, but in order just to meet the required criteria set in the assignments).

All in all, thanks for a great course!

By Anastasia A

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Aug 11, 2019

Pretty good course, I'm more excited for the UX Design one, but this part of the Specialization is quite decent. If you're considering it, go for it. Just try to learn how to use Illustrator a bit beforehand. Sucks that its peer graded- but its straightforward and if you just follow the instructions, you should be fine.

Quick tip: it was not clear what you needed to do for week 2, but its basically ONLY the moodboard and colour palette. I did week 2 and 3 in week 2, and exhausted myself for no reason!

I was skeptical at first but its pretty good!

By Rafaela R

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Jul 11, 2019

Really for people who doesn't have any knowledge about design and user experience.

By Iñaki C S

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Mar 25, 2019

This is a fantastic course for anyone who wants to get started in UX/UI design. The curriculum is well thought, the lessons in the videos are well paced, clear and thorough. Finally, the proposed activities work great as a practice for the concepts learned in the course. Totally recommended!

By Richa K

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Sep 1, 2020

Very Nice course, this has helped me to grow and learn more about the world of User Interface Design. It has developed and increased my enthusiasm and interest moe and more in the field of UX/ Ui.

By Dusol J

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Apr 24, 2020

The course itself is really good, for beginners or for people with experience but who never really "labellised" this experience. But indeed, peer review is probably not the best option here. For example, it is very frustrating to spend a lot of time reviewing my peers, giving feedback, taking the extra 3 minutes for them (that is really all that it takes!), when all you get is only zeros without any explanation from a random guy. Maybe a clear explanation (with a video) of what it means to review others would help?

By Dominic H

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Apr 17, 2020

The course itself is good, however, the grading system and moderation is absolutely mad. Peer reviews, if they are honest, are a good thing. But in most cases, peers rate you bad and CalArts staff cannot ban false or really stupid reviews. This results in doing your assigments multiple times until you get into a cohort of fair peer reviewers...

By Rachael B

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Mar 28, 2019

I liked how the course was structured in such a way that even with my limited design skills, I was able to create an interface that looked professional. I credit this to the structure of the course and the journey it takes you on to get to this point.

By tran n m

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May 23, 2021

This course is very useful for a beginner who is looking for the basics of UI/UX course.\n\nThis course will give you the basic idea of interface design which very important for its advanced studies.

By Lakkhana T

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Oct 19, 2018

This course is a good start for the beginner. I hope everyone in the class enjoyed it as I do. Thanks all of my classmates who have reviewed my peers. I look forward seeing you in the next course.