UI/UX Design
Design products people can actually use. Research first, then structure, then interface — with Figma taught to a professional standard and three portfolio case studies that explain your thinking, not just your screens.
What this programme is really for
Most design portfolios are a collection of attractive screens with nothing behind them. Hiring managers can tell within seconds, and it is why so many self-taught designers stall. The work that gets people hired shows a problem, a decision, and a reason.
So this programme teaches research and structure before visuals, and every project ends as a written case study. You will still learn to make things beautiful — but you will be able to explain why they are the way they are.
What you will be able to do
- Run user interviews and turn findings into decisions
- Map user flows and structure an entire product
- Wireframe quickly and prototype convincingly
- Use Figma at professional speed, including auto layout and variants
- Build and maintain a design system with tokens
- Design accessibly to WCAG standards
- Run a usability test and act on what it shows
- Hand off to developers without endless clarification
Curriculum
12 modules · 14 weeks · a live critique session every week
- Visual hierarchy and directing attention deliberately
- Alignment, proximity, contrast and repetition
- Grids, columns and consistent spacing scales
- White space as a tool rather than leftover room
- Critiquing existing interfaces without just saying "clean"
- Typeface anatomy, pairing and reasonable choices
- Type scales, line height, measure and rhythm
- Colour theory applied to interfaces, not paintings
- Building a palette with semantic roles and states
- Contrast ratios and designing for light and dark modes
- Arabic and Latin typography side by side
- Planning research that answers a real question
- Interview technique and questions that avoid leading people
- Surveys, analytics and competitive analysis
- Synthesising findings: affinity mapping and themes
- Personas and jobs-to-be-done, used honestly
- Journey maps and finding the actual pain points
- Sitemaps, hierarchy and content inventories
- Card sorting and tree testing
- Navigation patterns that scale
- User flows, task flows and mapping edge cases early
- Writing interface copy that removes confusion
- Low-fidelity wireframing and moving fast on purpose
- Figma interface, frames, layers and pages
- Auto layout until it becomes second nature
- Constraints, responsive resizing and breakpoints
- Styles, libraries and keeping files organised
- Keyboard shortcuts and genuine working speed
- Components, variants and component properties
- Design tokens for colour, spacing and type
- Figma variables and modes
- Building a component library from buttons to complex patterns
- Documenting usage so other people follow it
- Studying real systems: Material, Apple HIG and others
- Interactive prototypes with real navigation
- Smart animate, transitions and micro-interactions
- Motion principles: easing, duration and restraint
- Designing loading, empty, error and success states
- Prototyping fidelity: how far is far enough
- Mobile-first thinking and thumb zones
- iOS and Android conventions and where they diverge
- Responsive versus adaptive layout decisions
- Touch targets, gestures and forgiving interactions
- Right-to-left layout considerations for Arabic interfaces
- WCAG in plain language, and what actually matters
- Colour contrast, colour blindness and not relying on colour alone
- Keyboard navigation, focus order and visible focus
- Screen readers and how your design reaches them
- Forms, error messaging and cognitive load
- Accessibility annotations for your handoff
- Writing test tasks that do not give the answer away
- Moderating a session and staying quiet
- Remote and unmoderated testing tools
- Turning observations into prioritised changes
- Presenting findings to people who commissioned the design
- Enough HTML and CSS to talk to developers properly
- Specs, annotations and Figma Dev Mode
- Exporting assets correctly, including SVG
- What is cheap to build and what is expensive
- Reviewing an implementation and giving useful feedback
- Structuring a case study: problem, process, decision, outcome
- Writing about your work without jargon
- Building the portfolio site itself
- Presenting your work in an interview
- Freelance design: scoping, pricing and contracts
Tools you will use
Case studies you will produce
Redesign of an existing service
Research a real, poorly designed local service, find the actual problems, and redesign it with evidence for every change.
Mobile app, end to end
From interviews and flows through to a complete, tested, interactive prototype with a full design system behind it.
Product design with full handoff
A complete product: research, IA, design system, accessible interface, usability testing round, developer handoff package, and a written case study reviewed by an instructor.
Questions about this programme
No. Product design is closer to problem solving and systems thinking than to illustration. The sketching we do is boxes and arrows on paper, done badly and quickly on purpose. If you can arrange things carefully and explain why, you have what this needs.
Yes, for the whole programme. Figma's free tier covers everything we teach, including components, auto layout and prototyping. We will point out the few professional-plan features as we pass them so you know what exists, but you will never be blocked.
They are already very good at producing screens, and we teach you to use them. What they cannot do is decide what should be built, sit with a confused user, or defend a trade-off to a stakeholder. That is why this programme puts research, structure and reasoning ahead of visuals — those are the parts that hold their value.