Free UI/UX Design Courses online

User experience work is mostly deciding what not to build, then proving it with people who aren't you. Visual polish comes later and matters less than anyone expects — research, structure and testing are where the job actually lives.

Three courses in this category. It's a small shelf for a large field, and the way they divide is by what you have at the end: a portfolio, a mental model, or a reading habit.

The portfolio route

The Google UX Design Professional Certificate is eight courses through research, wireframing, Figma prototyping and three portfolio projects. Those projects are the whole product here — hiring managers in UX look at work, not certificates. Auditing on Coursera is free and strips the projects out, which leaves you watching videos about a process you never run. If you take this one, pay and do the work, or don't take it.

The free reading

Laws of UX collects around thirty principles — Fitts's law, Hick's law, Jakob's law, the Gestalt groupings, and the cognitive biases sitting behind common interface decisions — with the reasoning attached to each. Short, free, and it gives you language for critiques you already half-had. Hack Design takes a slower route: fifty lessons curated by working designers, delivered one a week by email. Free, broad, reading-list based, and mixed in age — some of the linked material is considerably older than the rest.

What three courses can't give you

None of these teaches a tool. There's no Figma tutorial here, and Figma fluency is an unspoken requirement in nearly every UX job posting. Nothing on interaction design specifics, nothing on design systems or component libraries, nothing on accessibility as a design practice, and nothing on UX writing, which is a real discipline we have zero of. Two of the three are reference material rather than instruction.

Our take

Read Laws of UX this week; it costs an afternoon and changes how you see interfaces. Take the Google certificate only if you're switching careers and will finish the portfolio. And learn Figma from its own tutorials, because we can't point you at one yet.