Go beyond the fundamentals with three courses that can help experienced product designers sharpen their skills.
After a few years working in product design, you likely reached a point where learning another prototyping trick or reviewing the basics of user research doesn’t bring much value.
That’s because challenges you face are different from the challenges you’ve faced at the beginning of your career journey: you need to design more complex systems and make sure the products your team builds will satisfy the growing expectations of your audience.
Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) has three dedicated courses that could be particularly interesting for seasoned product design professionals like you. And you will find links to FREE trials to top 3 most interesting courses.
1. Object-Oriented UI Design: Build Interfaces Users Love
45 lessons | 9.25 hours in total
One of the biggest challenges in product design is managing complexity. As products grow, they accumulate new features, workflows, and navigation patterns. Without a proper design process, eventually, the product becomes a collection of disconnected screens.
Object-oriented UI design offers a different way to approach the problem of raising complexity: instead of starting with individual features or screens, you begin by identifying the objects users interact with and the relationships between them.
For example, imagine you’re designing a project management application. Rather than starting with a dashboard, task list, or settings page, you identify the core objects: projects, tasks, team members, and milestones. Then you define what users can do with these objects and how they relate to each other.
Object-Oriented UI Design course explores 3 important topics:
- Key point #1: Turn requirements into structured interface models. You’ll learn how to translate user needs, use cases, and requirements into conceptual models. These models help define the underlying structure of a product before you begin designing individual screens.
- Key point #2: Prioritize features based on user needs. The course introduces persona-based feature prioritization, including matrices that help designers evaluate which features matter most to different user groups. This can be particularly useful when stakeholders have conflicting priorities or when a product has accumulated too many features.
- Key point #3: Create a better connection between design and development. Another interesting part of the curriculum is the use of design maps and different levels of design detail, from essential concepts to implementation specifications. The goal is to help you communicate not just what the interface looks like, but also how the product is structured and how it should behave.
Why I recommend it: I think this course is especially valuable for seasoned designers working on enterprise software, complex SaaS applications, and other products with complex information structures. It can help you move from designing individual screens to designing coherent product systems.
2. Game UX Design: The Ultimate Guide
83 lessons | 18.5 hours
You don’t need to be a game designer to learn something valuable from game UX. In fact, I think game design is one of the most interesting fields to study if you want to understand how people interact with digital products.
Traditional UX design typically focuses on reducing friction and helping users complete tasks efficiently. Game design introduces another dimension: How do you create experiences that people want to engage with?
Games are particularly interesting because they challenge the traditional assumption that every obstacle in the user journey is a usability problem. Sometimes, difficulty is part of the experience. The challenge is understanding the difference between intentional difficulty and unnecessary frustration.
The Game UX Design is taught by Celia Hodent, former UX Director for Fortnite and author of The Gamer’s Brain. The curriculum covers cognitive psychology, motivation, usability, and behavioural design.
Here are 3 important points you will learn:
- Key point #1: Understand how attention and memory influence user experience. You’ll explore how the brain processes information, why people overlook important interface elements, and why users often forget instructions shortly after reading them.
- Key point #2: Design for intrinsic motivation. Another important topic is Self-Determination Theory. The course explores three fundamental psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. These concepts help explain why some experiences feel naturally engaging while others rely heavily on external rewards, notifications, or artificial incentives.
- Key point #3: Understand the relationship between challenge, feedback, and flow. The course also explores flow states, emotional design, reward systems, and how games teach players through interaction. One particularly interesting idea is designing onboarding as part of the experience rather than forcing users through a separate tutorial.
Why I recommend it: This course is a great opportunity to explore UX from a different perspective. Even if you never plan to design a video game, studying cognitive psychology, feedback, and motivation can help you create more thoughtful interactive experiences.
3. Accessibility in Practice: Build Digital Experiences Everyone Can Use
38.75 hours | 63 lessons
Accessibility is often treated as a checklist that designers review near the end of a project. Teams check colour contrast, add labels to form fields, fix a few issues, and assume the product is accessible.
But accessibility is much more complex than that.
Creating a truly accessible product requires understanding how people with different abilities perceive, navigate, and interact with digital interfaces.
For experienced product designers, accessibility is not only about individual design decisions. It’s also about creating processes, patterns, and systems that help an entire organisation deliver inclusive experiences consistently.
Accessiblity in practice, taught by Frank Spillers, covers accessibility from fundamental standards to organisational implementation.
Here are 3 areas I find particularly valuable.
- Key area #1: Go beyond basic WCAG compliance. The course explores accessible interaction patterns, keyboard navigation, focus management, semantic HTML, ARIA, forms, menus, and dynamic content. It also discusses the limitations of relying entirely on automated accessibility tools.
- Key area #2: Learn how to test accessibility with real users.Accessibility cannot be fully evaluated by inspecting a design file. The course covers accessibility testing in context, working with assistive technologies, and involving users with disabilities in research and evaluation.
- Key area #3: Scale accessibility across an organisation. This is probably the most interesting part of the course for senior designers and design leaders. The curriculum includes building accessibility roadmaps, creating organisational programs, defining responsibilities, and making the business case for accessible design.
Why I recommend it: Accessibility is an essential part of professional product design. This course is particularly valuable for designers who want to move beyond fixing individual accessibility issues and start influencing how their organisations build products.
Final Thoughts
What I like about 3 three courses is that they approach product design from different perspectives.
Object-Oriented UI Design course focuses on the structure of digital products. It’s particularly valuable when you need to manage complex requirements and design scalable interfaces.
Game UX Design focuses on human behaviour. It helps you understand the psychological principles behind attention, motivation, and engaging interactions.
Accessiblity in practice focuses on inclusive experiences and organisational maturity. It teaches you how to make accessibility an integral part of the design process rather than an afterthought.
3 UX Design Courses Worth Taking If You’ve Already Mastered the Basics was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.