A New Online Course: Design for Humanity
Published 7 years, 10 months pastAs longtime readers know, my professional focus has been very different the past couple of years. Ever since the events of 2013-2014, I started focusing on design and meeting the needs of people — not just users, but complete people with complex lives. I teamed up with Sara Wachter-Boettcher to write Design for Real Life, and presented talks at An Event Apart called “Designing for Crisis” (2015) and “Compassionate Design” (2016; video to come). I’m not done with CSS — I should have news on that front fairly soon, in fact — but a lot of my focus has been on the practice of design, and how we approach it.
To that end, I’ve been spending large chunks of the last few months creating and recording a course for Udemy called “Design for Humanity”, and it’s now available. The course is based very heavily on Design for Real Life, following a similar structure and using many of the examples from the book, plus new examples that have emerged since the book was published, but it takes a different approach to learning. Think of it as a companion piece. If you’re an auditory processor as opposed to a visual processor, for example, I think the course will really work for you.
Who is the course for? I put it like this:
This course will help you if you are part of the design process for a product or service, whether that’s a website, an app, an overall experience, or a physical product. You might be a product designer or product manager, an entrepreneur or work in customer service or user research, an experience designer or an information architect. If you have been impacted by bad design and want to do better, this course is for you.
I know a lot of courses promise they’re just right for whoever you are, no really, but in this case I honestly feel like that’s true for anyone who has an interest in design, whether that’s visual design, system design, or content design. It’s about changing perspective and patterns of thinking — something many readers of the book, and people who’ve heard my talks, say they’ve experienced.
If you’ve already bought the book, then thank you! Be on the lookout for email from A Book Apart containing a special code that will give you a nice discount on the course. If you haven’t picked up the book yet, that’s no problem. I have a code for readers of meyerweb as well: use MW_BLOG to get 20% off the sale price of the course, bringing it down to a mere $12, or slightly less than $3 per hour! (The code is good through February 28th, so you have a month to take advantage of it.)
If you like the course, please do consider picking up the book. It’s a handy format to have close to hand, and to lend to others. On the flip side, if you liked the book, please consider checking out the course, containing as it does new material and some evolution of thinking.
And either way, whether it’s the book or the course, if you liked what you learned, please take a moment to write a short review, say something on the interwebs, and generally spread the word to colleagues and co-workers. The more people who hear the message, the better we’ll become as an industry at not just designing, but designing with care and humanity.