by EJ Makela, August 2022
Comments or questions? Contact me!
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đź“Ś ABOUT THIS ARTICLE
In the summer of 2022, following a couple months of experience as a student in the UX: The Beginner’s Guide course, I wrote down some observations & ideas regarding IxDF and community. I may revise it sometime I hope to revise soon it to incorporate new insights. I’d really like to get your feedback so I can take it into consideration. You can find a comment form at the end of this article.
— EJ, December 2022
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OBSERVATIONS
The material content in the IxDF courses is very high quality.
The price for the self-directed certificate courses are very affordable, especially compared to the Google UX Design certificate program.
- My family is on a tight budget, so this affordability is very important to me.
As I started spending time on the IxDF courses, I encountered issues with the message boards. For example:
- There doesn’t appear to be a search function, so it’s hard to find a post that you want to revisit. Conversations only seem to be sorted in two ways, i.e., most recent and most popular.
- Although I am notified via email when someone comments on or likes something I wrote, it can be challenging to find it. The email contains a link, but this only opens the high-level topic; the actual post needs to be found manually.
- Overall, the built-in system has a lot more friction compared to contemporary messaging and social networking systems.
- These issues were similar to (but still better than) my experiences in the Google UX program. My experience with Google led me to drop that program and try IxDF. (See the “About Me” section for additional detail.)
I spent significant time trying to find and connect with an online IxDF community, but I came up short.
- One of the early assignments was to organize a meetup, which I was interested in doing anyway in hopes that I could meet some fellow IxDF-ers.
- I did find the local IxDF Minneapolis community Slack, but this group was (and still is) pretty inactive.
- I saw a post and comments on the IxDF discussion board about an unofficial international Slack workspace, but joining it required an up-to-date invitation. (The invitation listed on the post had expired, and the person who started the discussion thread was no longer an IxDF member.)
- I’ve posted several inquiries on a number of UX Discord servers, asking how many people were IxDF students or alumni, but it was a small number, especially compared to the Google UX courses.