Awesome

I like the practical assignments a lot.

One of the best courses in this specialization! Personally I sometimes need to be pushed to understand that you can do it. With each assignment, you start realizing that everything is possible and you can quickly come up with ideas both for desktop, mobile, watch, and wall interfaces. Thanks, professor Scott Klemmer for this course and the specialization!

This course addresses key skills for UI design (wireframing and mock-ups), and with enough time and insight, the pieces could be portfolio-worthy. Unfortunately, unless you look ahead, you don’t realize in week 1 that whatever site you choose will be carried through the entire course. I happened to choose a rather boring wireframing subject, because it really needed a redesign, and ended up stuck with it for the entire course. And as Ben Fry says much too late in week 3, if you choose something you’re “personally curious about and invested in, it will show in the final outcome.”

The course is good overall, though my rating is a bit generous. My main issue is the conflicting way that the basic instruction is written in all of the assignments. The assignments say to mock-up the homepage and one other screen, while the submission criteria and grading rubric say two distinct key screens for two common tasks, or two screens for one task. If you follow the assignment and mock-up the homepage and one other page, you’re left describing tasks that you haven’t shown. I’m done with the course and still not totally sure on the intent here. Perhaps this could be edited for future sessions.