Choosing a UX design course is no small task—it requires you consider their ratings, features, pricing, and more. You also need to ensure your chosen course offers credible certification for validating your skills and knowledge. 

We’ve done the digging so you don’t have to—and we’ve laid everything out in this article. Read on to find out everything you need to know about UX Design Institute and Uxcel, starting with an overview of the basics.

UX Design Institute vs Uxcel at a Glance

Before we dive into the details surrounding Uxcel vs UX Design Institute, here’s an overview of some of the key information to consider.

A comparison table of UX Design Institute vs Uxcel by criteria of course rating, pricing, features, offered career paths, and target audience
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About Uxcel Interactive Design Courses

  • Best for: Professionals looking for flexible and self-paced learning
  • Price: $0/month for Starter Plan, $8/month for Pro Plan
  • Duration: Flexible, whatever suits you
  • Format: Online

Uxcel is an online learning platform for building UX knowledge and skills at your own pace. It has hundreds of UX lessons and courses to help you learn about beginner, intermediate, and advanced UX and UI concepts. Alongside these courses, the platform also offers ample UX design assessments and challenges to help you put your skills to the test—as well as course completion certificates following each course.

Learning with Uxcel helps you build a Skill Graph that reflects your UX knowledge in six key areas: research, leadership, visual design, content strategy, core qualities, and interaction design. This Skill Graph helps you identify your UX design strengths, as well as areas for improvement.

The platform also provides a Job Board for finding your ideal UX role. You can ​​add your career preferences and get a curated job feed tailored to you, or you can browse the jobs posted by small businesses and big brands alike. Prospective employers can view your Skill Graph to assess your compatibility with a role, and message you directly on the platform. 

You can even earn professional UX certifications to validate your UX skills and knowledge to potential employers and the wider UX community. The various Career Path courses on offer help prepare you for these role-specific certifications by tailoring the learning experience to your career goals. 

Uxcel offers an easy-to-use platform with an intuitive interface that makes learning UX design simple and enjoyable. Whether you’re just looking to build your UX skills or ready to move into a new UX role—Uxcel’s courses are the high-quality resource you need.

Uxcel's course page

Key Features

  • Lessons:  focus on developing specific UX design skills with Uxcel’s wide variety of lessons
  • Courses: learn about a larger UX concept with courses comprised of relevant lessons
  • Assessments: assess UX design skills with tests on what you’ve been learning, and build your Skill Graph to appeal to employers and identify your strengths and weaknesses
  • Challenges: perfect your UX design process with design scenarios and design tasks based on common real-life design challenges
  • UX Career paths: complete UX design courses, practice skills, and test your knowledge with guided UX career paths to prepare for your UX certification and future roles
  • UX Certifications: earn globally recognized UX certifications to validate your role-specific design skills
  • Arcade: build on your UX knowledge with fun and engaging UX games and compete with other UX designers from across the globe‍
  • Team learning: looking to upskill your team? Uxcel’s Team solution gives your team access to the resources they need to build their UX skills and knowledge
Uxcel's features

What You’ll Learn

Here’s what you can expect to learn about with Uxcel’s online UX design courses:

Plus much, much more.

Top Courses

Here are some of the most popular courses available on Uxcel:

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Now, let’s take a closer look at UX Design Institute.

About UX Design Institute Courses

  • Best for: Professionals looking for a longer UX course
  • Price: $3,250 upfront
  • Duration: Six months
  • Format: Online

UX Design Institute is a self-paced, online UX course that guides learners through ten UX design modules with bite-size video tutorials. It aims to build UX knowledge and help students adopt a UX-focused mindset and approach to design. 

Alongside the ten modules, students are also given 16 real-world UX projects to help build hands-on experience in key UX design aspects and a strong portfolio to match. The course culminates in a two-hour final exam to assess the UX knowledge learnt during the course. Upon course completion, successful students are awarded a Professional Diploma in UX Design. 

Similarly to Designlab, the UX Design Course offered by UXDI has a set start and finish date—meaning there’s only one course cohort starting every month. The course runs for 6 months, and students are expected to commit 5 hours a week to learning and projects.

Enrolling with UX Design Institute also gives students access to the community of UXDI learners and mentors. Through the community, learners can chat with other students, access live webinars with mentors and industry insiders, and book career coaching sessions for landing their ideal role.

UX Design Institute's courses

Key Features

  • Bite-size learning: the app's teaching method separates modules into concise, video lessons that get straight to the point on foundational UX concepts and processes
  • 1:1 career coaching: one-on-one sessions with career coaches focused on helping you find and land your dream UX role
  • Real-life design projects: a total of 16 design projects to help you build a professional UX portfolio
  • Student community: access to an online community of learners and mentors to chat with peers and discuss lessons and projects
  • Student success team: a friendly and responsive team on hand to answer questions, grade projects, and advise students at every step of the way
UX design institute's key features

What You’ll Learn

The UX Design Institute Course includes ten UX design modules:

  • Introduction to UX design
  • User research
  • Analysis techniques
  • Structure and navigation
  • Interactions
  • Design principles
  • Design patterns
  • Mobile UX
  • Workflows
  • Prototyping and handover

Top Courses

Alongside the UX Design Course, UXDI also offers a number of other courses.

  • UI Design
  • UX Design Fundamentals
  • Software and Coding Fundamentals for UX

These courses start at $950 dollars and last a minimum of six weeks.

UX Design Institute vs Uxcel: UX Design Certification

An important consideration when choosing a UX design course is the certification provided upon course completion. You need a certification that’s acknowledged by the professional UX industry in order to help you start your UX design career.

Both UX Design Institute and Uxcel offer users the opportunity to gain UX certifications—but the paths to getting them are considerably different. 

UX Design Lab certifications are awarded upon passing the final course exam: a two-hour written exam based on the previous six months of learning. In order to receive certification, you need to enroll in and complete the $3,250 course.

Uxcel’s UX certifications can be taken at any stage—making them perfect if you already have some prior UX knowledge that you want to validate. However, if that’s not you—there are also dedicated Uxcel career training paths that focus on building role-specific skills to help you prepare for UX roles and the certification assessments that help you land them. 

You can take certifications whenever you’re ready, and access the career paths—along with countless other UX learning and development resources—with Uxcel Pro for only from $8/month. Plus, Uxcel Pro users get a $50 discount for each certification attempt—a win-win.

Long vs Short Courses: Which is Better for You?

Long vs Short Courses

Another key consideration when choosing a UX design course is the duration of the program. There’s no single correct answer: it depends on your availability, flexibility, and goals. Are you looking for a longer, less intensive course? Or, would you prefer a shorter course that improves your knowledge and skills ASAP?

The UX course offered by UXDI is a longer course that only requires five hours of your time every week. It’s a self-paced course—you can choose when and where you engage with the materials. For example, you could do all five hours on a weekend afternoon, or you could spread your work across the week. 

It’s up to your preference, but you’re unable to skip ahead in the course—you’ll only be eligible for examination after six months.

Uxcel, however, gives students a more flexible approach to learning. You can decide to spend as long or as little time as you please learning UX design each week. The ample courses are available whenever you decide to take them, as are the UX challenges, arcade, and assessments. 

This access ensures you’ve always got the resources you need to further your knowledge, without the hindrance of a lesson plan or timetable. You can take it slow, or you can fast-track your learning.

So, to summarize:

  • UX Design Institute is self-paced on a weekly basis, but limits access to learning materials in-line with the six-month learning schedule
  • Uxcel provides all learning materials up-front, meaning you have complete control over your learning schedule 

Again, it depends what you’re after. If you’re open to taking a more relaxed approach to UX learning, both Uxcel and UXDI are strong choices. If you’re keen to get started and maintain UX learning momentum, Uxcel is your best bet.

See How Uxcel Compares to Other Courses