UX Certification from NN/g

I’m giving myself one post to brag a little. I just completed my UX certification from the Nielsen Norman Group.

For most of us in the user experience or design industry, Don Norman’s the Design of Everyday Things is the standard gateway drug. Getting certification from the organization that he and Jakob Nielsen went on to found is a huge honor, gives a sense of validation to my work and has inspired my to learn even more.

Some thoughts on the experience:

UX writers should consider themselves UX professionals first and writers second. The fundamentals of usability, information architecture and design are the same regardless of the medium you work in.

Go for “hard” UX courses like information architecture and designing complex apps. This is precisely the type of information that you won’t get at more content oriented events.

I found each course to be a teaser with great resources to dig deeper. I now have a stack of books about data visualizations, accessibility and information architecture to dig into. Nonetheless, I’ve still gotten practical info that I’ve already used.

The community is supportive and encouraging! This is a great chance to try out some part of UX that you might babe interested in specializing in down the road.

I don’t recommend this conference for beginners. It’s better if you already have a few years of practical knowledge under your belt.

The bottom line: I highly recommend doing a Nielsen Norman conference if you’re a UX writer with a few years of experience and want to really dig deeper into UX fundamentals.