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Searching for a way to further improve your design department and create an even more skillful team of specialists within your company?
Well, you are not alone. Product managers and other executives in charge of design teams in companies are scouring the internet for the same reason.
The biggest problem you face is finding an affordable solution that will visibly improve the skills of individual designers within your team, and not take months to complete. There are many traditional and modern platforms that offer this service to their clients.
Today, we will compare Uxcel Teams vs Interaction Design Foundation, and leave you with enough relevant information to decide which of these two platforms suits your needs.
Uxcel Teams vs Interaction Design Foundation Overview
Interaction Design Foundation is one of the oldest online education platforms, founded in 2002. They offer beginner to advanced UX courses, and some of their authors include Don Norman, who is the godfather of the term “UX design”, and Clayton Christensen, a renowned Harvard professor.
With these lecturers, the Interaction Design Foundation drew interest from the early years, and they still do it today. Their courses are updated, optimized for all skill levels, and UX designers are signing up for them in order to start or elevate their career.
Interaction Design Foundation dedicated a segment of their website to companies, in which they offer the clients to train their UX team with IxDF. However, that segment is not different from the regular, traditional way of presenting study material via long video courses.
On the other hand, Uxcel Teams specializes in giving companies the best insight into the skillset of their designers and offering a straightforward way to improve it, without spending months on traditional education methods.
The people behind Uxcel are also designers with huge corporate experience, and they created this platform precisely to cater to the needs of companies with in-house design teams. Uxcel Teams takes into account the time available for learning, prepares modern and segmented learning material, and above all, offers all this for an affordable price.
Uxcel Teams Main Benefits
Uxcel Teams was created to tackle every single pain point regarding design teams in companies, big and small. With that level of attention to detail, Uxcel provides numerous benefits to the customers, but here we will primarily focus on the biggest game-changers:
- Skill Graph that describes the level of individual designers
- Custom suggestions and assignment of learning content
- Ability to follow skill development and learning tempo
- Codified design-related vocabulary
- Gamified system of learning
- Assignment of individual designers to the right projects
Skill Graph that describes the level of individual designer
As a person in charge of a design team, your primary concern is to make sure designers are delivering great results to your clients. To do that, designers need to work on their skills constantly, to keep up with changes within the industry. Knowing which skills an individual designer needs to develop or further polish would save a ton of time and make this task easier.
One of the Uxcel Teams’ greatest benefits is the Skill Graph feature you can use to map the entire skillset of your design team in less than 30 minutes!
Skill Graph presents the score in these fields:
- Research
- Content Strategy
- Leadership
- Product Thinking
- Visual Design
- Interaction Design
Here is the graphic representation of the feature:
As we can see, Gene has well-rounded skills, with Visual Design being slightly above the rest.
You can see the skills of each member of the team, compare them, see which of them has the highest score for the required skill, etc.
If you noticed red exclamation marks next to the names of some team members, click it. You will see this message:
Every member is required to complete a Uxcel Pulse assessment in order to get a measurement of their skills. From here, you can set a reminder for all team members to complete the test.
This test is straightforward and takes less than 30 minutes to complete. It will save your company a ton of time and money, and show you which skills your designers need to further develop.
After all of your designers complete the Uxcel Pulse assessment, you will be able to move to the second phase, custom suggestions, and assignment of learning content to your design team.
Custom Suggestions and Assignment of Learning Content
Uxcel is a company founded by UX designers with rich corporate experience. They created it as a resource they didn’t have but badly needed while working for big corporations.
As a design/product manager, your goal is to polish the skills of your team and do that in the most cost-efficient way possible. Uxcel Teams is a match made in heaven for this task.
Uxcel Teams not only provides plenty of learning material that is constantly updated, it also helps you find exact pieces of content you should assign to individual designers, in a straightforward way.
There are two methods you can use. The first is by choosing the “Reporting” option, located on the main menu on the left-hand side of the screen.
On this page, you will be able to see all members of your team, the learning content you already assigned to them, and if they finished it on time.
By clicking the big “Add Assignment” button, you will be able to assign new learning material to that particular designer.
All learning material is divided into three categories: Courses, Assessments, and Design Briefs. You can assign material from each of these segments. If you are searching for specific content, use the search bar.
Assigning content is easy. Just click on the name of the lesson, and then click the “Assign” button. You can assign multiple pieces of content, and select the due date for each of them.
There is one more way of assigning learning content to your design team. This method is recommended, because it allows you to assign content that will improve the score in the specific skill you are targeting.
First, choose the designer and the skill you want to develop. For example, Visual Design skill is something you want to work on with your designers. Click on it, and a popup will appear:
In this window, you will see all the courses, assessments and design briefs that are related to Visual Design only.
It will be easier for you to browse and decide which pieces of content you need to assign to designers.
This method of assigning tasks to designers is better for tracking their progress as well. We will talk more about it in the next section.
Follow Skill Development and Learning Tempo
Most of the other design learning platforms out there (including Interactive Design Foundation) are proving their worth by providing certificates and diplomas to their students. Surely, if a student completed the provided lectures, passed the exam, and everything else required for that certificate, there is no doubt they learned something.
But, how much is it? How can you quantify that knowledge, without testing them yourself? That simply isn’t the best way of gaining and polishing design skills, at least for designers already working in a company team.
Instead, Uxcel Teams shows you the improvements made after each completed task on the Skill Graph. You will be able to see if your designers are getting better, and by how much, all quantified, and presented on the graphic.
Uxcel Teams provides certificates as well, but it is not the main benefit, as it is on many other platforms, including Interactive Design Foundation.
To check the progress of your designers, click on any member of the team, and then “View Growth” above the Skill Graph:
Other learning platforms will show you which courses and assignments the student completed, but you would have to guess which course improved the targeted skill, and by how much. Uxcel Teams won’t leave you in the dark:
As the manager of the team, you will be able to see all the assignments, courses, and briefs that each member of your team completed. These reports also quantify the effect of these assessments on the score and knowledge of each designer.
This feature will help you decide on the pace and the type of learning content assigned to designers while following their progression on the Skill Graph.
Codified Design-Related Vocabulary
We already mentioned that Uxcel was founded by UX designers with rich corporate experience before launching this project.
One of the most annoying problems they experienced in the past was the loss of time and nerves while going back and forth with other departments until they got all the details about the task they needed to finish.
If the person in charge doesn’t have a background in design, or even worse, doesn’t know even basic design principles, it is likely that the input given to designers will be flawed, which will lead to unsatisfying results for the design team.
Uxcel Teams addresses this issue with “Squads”:
Squads will let you put members in certain groups. You don’t have to call only designers to Uxcel - all the teams can benefit from this app.
After you learn about the communication issues between different departments, you can assign specially designed courses or briefs to the team members who have difficulties communicating with designers.
That doesn’t mean your marketing team will have to learn about UX design extensively. There are many short courses, such as the Design Terminology course, that will vastly improve the understanding between departments.
Gamified System of Learning
Almost every learning platform out there still represents the traditional way of learning. You will likely get a course, maybe attend a few conferences, and get coaching from the mentor, and that process will last for at least a month if not several months.
While this way of learning has its own advantages, it fails miserably when it comes to developing the skillset of designers working in a corporate environment. Uxcel had that in mind when they created a gamified system of learning.
Uxcel Teams also offers courses and traditional learning material to their users, but the courses are much shorter and on point. You won’t need weeks or months to complete it, you will be able to go through dissected learning material daily.
Taking tests and assessments is possible via mobile as well, so designers could even complete it during commute, or while doing house chores. For example, this is the typical question that you’ll find in Uxcel learning material:
Uxcel founders know that the lack of time stops designers from putting the effort into further development of their skills. With this system, your designers will allocate less than one hour daily to their personal development and achieve significant results, which will ultimately benefit your company.
Assignment of Individual Designers to Right Projects
One of the most important tasks for design team managers is allocating the work to their colleagues. You want maximum efficiency, and to staff the right people on the right projects. Uxcel Teams has a handy feature that will help you do this without making an error.
To make the most out of the Top Skills feature, you can scroll through your team, and see which of your members has a top skill you require for the specific task:
You can speed up the process even more, by using the search bar and providing a keyword, for example, Figma:
All members of your team who have Figma as a top skill will be listed. After that, you can assign the task you have to them, without thinking if they are the best person for the task.
Interaction Design Foundation Main Benefits
Interaction Design Foundation is one of the oldest subscription-based platforms when it comes to learning design. They were founded in 2002 in Denmark, and its motto is: “To improve your career”. With over 130 thousand graduates, they are certainly a popular choice for designers, and these are their greatest benefits:
- Courses from Industry-Leading Figures
- Courses are Self-Paced
- Masterclasses and Bootcamps for a Fraction of the Price
- Easily Navigated Learning Material
Courses from Industry-Leading Figures
Most of the traditional online learning platforms, which Interaction Design Foundation certainly is, are trying to get recognizable faces as instructors, or at least promoters of their platform. UX design was a new field when IxDF was founded, and getting Dan Norman onboard, the father of UX design, was a huge feat for the platform.
Apart from Dan Norman, high-profile university professors, and lead designers at multinational companies are among IxDF tutors.
Courses are Self-Paced
One of the problems with many online learning platforms is the length of the courses, especially if they are available for a limited time only. It means that the designer is pressured to go through it, even if they are busy at work, or not feeling prepared to study.
Interaction Design Foundation also has courses that are available for a limited time, but they also release lessons with a time gap. That means you will learn at a reasonable pace, dedicating only a few hours weekly to IxDF. Also, some of the lessons are longer than others, so the estimated time left mark on lessons comes in handy.
Masterclasses and Bootcamps for the Fraction of the Price
If you want to send your whole team on a bootcamp, it lasts for 12 weeks and costs around $3000, although they might give a discount for a full team. Masterclasses cost only $5 instead of $50 for members, which is a nice discount.
Masterclasses are in the form of webinars that are available only for a limited time, and you can watch live and recorded ones. These options are not the most suitable for designers working full-time in a company, but IxDF has great reviews for these programs. After all, bootcamps cost over $10000 in some other online schools, so they can be a great deal for a person available to attend them.
Easily Navigated Learning Material
All lessons within a course are divided into groups you can see in IxDF Lessons Navigator. Within it, you can rearrange them into sub-lessons or group them into chunks, to make it even easier for you.
The lessons are a combination of text and video, and they are transcribed well. After the lesson, you will get questions with multiple possible answers. If you get over 90% of the answers correct, you will get a “Best in class” badge.
There are other badges and perks for completing parts of the learning material. IxDF tried to modernize and gamify their learning experience, but they are not matched to Uxcel in that regard.
Uxcel Teams vs Interaction Design Foundation Comparison Table
Uxcel Teams vs Interaction Design Foundation Verdict
Although Interaction Design Foundation has a designated “For Companies” part of the website, with discounts per seat, they do not adjust their learning material for designers who are already working full-time, and don’t have enough time for extensive traditional courses.
There are different difficulty levels of courses at IxDF, from beginner to advanced, but user feedback reveals that most of the courses are for beginners, even if they state otherwise. That renders them borderline unusable for an experienced design team that needs only up-to-date and advanced learning material. Most of the courses at IxDF are organized properly, but we can’t say that for their site. It is really hard to decide which course to pick and know which effect it will have on designers’ skills. It wouldn’t be surprising if you sat through half of the course and realized it is not relevant or helpful.
On the other hand, Uxcel Teams is created specifically for experienced design teams working for a big company. It tackles management and staffing problems while giving real insight into designers’ skills and offering easily digestible material for improvement.
Uxcel Teams provides seats for managers, HRs, marketers, and everyone else who is dealing with the design team, and is interested only in monitoring or managing them, not learning UX design themselves. Not only that, Uxcel Teams gives those seats free of charge!
IxDF is a good choice for an individual who is starting their UX design career, but for a corporate design team, working full-time, Uxcel Teams is the way to go.
