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People may think that managing enterprise businesses is easy — just keep growing something that is already big — but professionals who climbed their way up the corporate ladder know the truth. The bigger the company, the bigger the challenges, and with fierce competition constantly breathing down one’s neck, everyone has to work hard to stay ahead.
The essential part of success is having highly skilled professionals in your team. However, things move quickly in the digital world, and even highly educated and experienced individuals are required to learn about new technologies and tools that are affecting the industry monthly.
If you have a team of designers in your company, there is a good chance that many of them are attending courses and still learning regardless of their position and experience. Still, it would be better if a team leader or another executive could systematically assign tasks to the whole team and track their progress.
You already figured that out, but you are struggling to find the right partner that will provide learning materials to the team?
Don’t worry, we got you! In this Uxcel vs Nielsen Norman Group review, we will compare these two companies thoroughly, and leave you to decide which option is better for your design team.
Uxcel Teams vs Nielsen Norman Group Overview
At first glance, Nielsen Norman is an obvious choice for anyone who seeks to improve the skills of their designers. After all, Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman are the OGs in the field, and the term UX design didn’t even exist before them.
However, it is common that design team managers don’t have extensive knowledge about UX design. It might be very hard to hand-pick the courses your designers need to attend. You would also need to organize their already busy schedule to find time for all the activities before taking the test and finally acquiring the certificate.
Even if you are a former designer who advanced to an executive position in the company, going through all this is a tiresome task.
On the other hand, Uxcel is a platform also made by designers for designers, that acknowledges these obstacles. There are no boring conferences, the courses are brief but to the point, and after onboarding, you will be able to test individual designers in your company, to see their strengths and weaknesses. After they finish the test, you will be able to assign courses and other training material from Uxcel, based on test results. With Uxcel Teams, you will get a straightforward process and a clear path towards your goals.
Uxcel Teams Main Benefits
From testing your design team to assigning tasks to the right people, Uxcel Teams' benefits are numerous. Depending on your needs, Uxcel can provide you with tools to tackle all sorts of problems. These are the main benefits you might be interested in:
- Map the skills of your design team automatically
- Assign fully custom design learning content
- Easily see the ROI of learning
- Improve design literacy within your company
- Assign the right designers to the right projects promptly
- Active learning implementation
Map the Skills of Your Design Team Automatically
One of the core use cases of Uxcel Teams, and therefore one of the biggest benefits for you, is mapping the skillset of your whole team in less than 30 minutes.
Uxcel has a unique Skill Graph, which maps the skills of individual designers, presenting their score in these fields:
- Visual Design
- Interaction Design
- Research
- Content Strategy
- Leadership
- Product Thinking
Here is how that looks:
As we can see here, Gene has the highest score in this team, and he is particularly strong in visual and interaction design, which is excellent for a design lead role.
You may also notice red exclamation marks next to some team members instead of their score. If you click on one of those members, you will see this:
These team members haven’t completed their Uxcel Pulse assessment, and you can send them a reminder to do that from here.
Uxcel Pulse assessment is an initial test, designed by Uxcel, which will give each of your team members the initial skill graph. The assessment is very precise and less than 30 minutes long. After your designers finish it, you will have a total score, a skill graph, and individual fields score for each of your designers, which will immediately tell you what the strengths and weaknesses of your team are.
After you have the skills of your team mapped out, you are entering the second stage — assigning learning content from the fields you think they should improve.
Assign Fully Custom Design Learning Content
As a design team manager, your goal is to improve the skills of your team and find a way to get the most out of them while they are working for your company. With Uxcel teams, that process is straightforward.
There are two ways of assigning learning materials to your team. The first is by choosing the “Reporting” option from the main menu.
If you scroll down, you will see all team member profiles (12 in this example). You will see all the content that was previously assigned to each member, and if they finished it on time.
You can add a new assignment to the member by clicking on the “Add Assignment” button below.
Now, choose from three categories, Courses, Assessments, and Design Briefs. Seek specific content in the search bar and assign learning content for individual team members based on their skill graph. After that, assign several content pieces at once, and select the due date for each of them.
However, if you are unsure about which learning content you should assign for the specific skill, Uxcel provides another way of doing this task.
First, click on the team member you want to assign content to, then click on the skill on the skill graph you want to develop. Let’s say you want to develop Visual Design. Click on it, and a new window will appear:
Here you can see Courses, Assessments, and Design Briefs related to Visual Design skill only, from which you can assign learning material to the member that will ultimately increase their Visual Design skill.
Easily See the ROI of Learning
Most platforms that provide learning materials in design (and every other field as well) will award you with certificates upon successful course completion.
However, in this day and age, having a diploma or a certificate is not enough. You don’t actually see the skills of the person who shows the certificate, you only see the proof that the person studied something, and then passed an exam, which might not be even relevant for the job.
Uxcel also provides a certificate as proof of passing an exam, but the biggest asset is still the Skill Graph which tracks improvements over time.
If you click on any team member, and then on “View Growth”, you will see how their skills have improved over time:
Unlike the traditional educational system, where you would need to guess which lesson improved the specific knowledge you seek, Uxcel shows you which learning material improved the specific skill, and by how much:
You can see the assignments, courses, and design briefs that your team completed, and by viewing the reports, you will be able to see how that affected their score and knowledge.
This way, every designer can improve in the fields you need the most, and as the manager of the team, you will be able to easily see the proof of their improvement, which will ultimately be the proof of ROI for your company.
Improve Design Literacy Within Your Company
Uxcel was founded by UX designers with rich corporate experience. One of their biggest pain points while working for big companies in the past was the loss of time they experienced while going back and forth with the management and other departments until they all got on the same page.
When the person who needs to communicate with the design team doesn’t know the terminology or even basic design principles, the input presented to the design team is insufficient, which leads to an outcome that is not satisfying.
Uxcel tackles that with the feature called “Squads”:
The idea behind the Squads is to get every person who is somehow connected to your design team to Uxcel, test them, and see the areas you need to improve. That doesn’t mean your marketing or dev team should go through an extensive learning process about UX design. It means you can pick a few courses or design briefs and assign them to your team members, which will vastly improve the communication speed and understanding between the teams. For instance, the Uxcel Design Terminology course is a great piece of content you can assign to everyone:
As always, Uxcel will also suggest other great courses that are connected to it on the same page.
Assign The Right Designers to the Right Projects Promptly
As a design team manager, one of the most important things for you is to get the maximum efficiency from your design team. Uxcel knows that too, and provides the Top Skills feature, which you can use to swiftly and accurately assign the right designer to the right task at a required time:
If you scroll down, you will see the top skills of each of your design team members. However, if you want to speed up the process even more, you can use the search bar and enter the skill you require, for example, Wireframing, or Figma:
The members who have these top skills will be listed. Here we can see that Colin is the only team member with top skills in Wireframing and Maze, so if you have a task that requires these two skills, it makes sense to assign it to them.
Active Learning Implementation
Uxcel promotes active learning that sticks to a person using their learning material, which is the biggest difference between this platform and everyone else.
As a design team manager, you have an obligation to assign different learning materials to your designers, so they can improve over time and become a bigger asset to your company.
Most people would go to Nielsen Norman, Udemy, UX Institute, Coursera, or similar platforms to research, and then assign courses for the team to complete. This is, of course, a colossal waste of time, both for the manager and the team, for reasons previously discussed. Furthermore, completing courses traditionally will take weeks, even months.
The price tag involved is also significant. For instance, you would have to spend thousands of dollars, per designer, for attending Nielsen Norman conferences and courses, which usually take around three months to complete for each course.
Uxcel will, for only a fraction of the price, provide you with learning material that is gamified, easily digestible, and optimized for people who don’t have much time left for learning.
Every Uxcel course is optimized for mobile, in case your designers opt to do them on the go or just prefer their smaller devices. This is a typical question that you will find in Uxcel learning material:
As you can see, this experience is more modern and suitable for learning in a more individualized way. Your designers will be able to complete several assignments weekly without breaking a sweat, while also improving their skills significantly.
Nielsen Norman Group Main Benefits
Nielsen Norman Group has been a synonym for UX design for a long time. That’s not strange if you know that their founders actually coined the term “UX design”! There are many reasons why a designer should attend their conferences and courses:
- Ability to Learn from Industry Leaders
- Live Conferences as an Excellent Chance for Networking
- Detailed Courses with University Level Learning Material
- Certificates with the Highest Recognition in the Industry
Ability to Learn from Industry Leaders
Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman founded NNG in 1998, intending to help designers and companies move towards more human-centered products and interactions. User experience design didn’t even exist before them, although they were using general design principles and implementing them to create a whole new field of design.
As pioneers, both Nielsen and Norman were giving UX lectures when the company was established as the leader in the field. That time has passed, but that doesn’t mean current instructors are not up to the level you expect from NNG.
Among others, current instructors are Head of UX at Bentley, UX Researcher at Google, and executives in other Fortune 1000 companies.
So, if you want your designers to learn from the best, and your company has the money to afford it, signing them up for NNG courses is a no-brainer decision. However, completing NNG courses can take months, which is not the best option for an employee working full-time.
Live Conferences as an Excellent Chance for Networking
Before the COVID pandemic, the Nielsen Norman group organized live conferences exclusively, but today you can choose to attend them virtually as well. Saving the cost of travel and accommodation was welcomed by many, but going to the conferences may still be beneficial in different ways.
Apart from meeting with highly skilled instructors in person, having the chance to introduce yourself to your peers and different leading figures within the industry can be an invaluable experience.
On the other hand, if you are sending your design team there, that might not be beneficial for your company, since an individual can find other business opportunities while connecting with different people at the conference.
Detailed Courses with University-Level Learning Material
The quality of NNG learning materials is exceptional. They are in-depth, straightforward, and presented by the best instructors in the field. However, the main question here is — do your designers have the time, and does your company have the money, to ultimately benefit from these courses?
Reviews from other attendees mostly say you don’t get the best bang for your buck. For individuals who are already established designers, NNG courses are a sound investment, but for designers who are working full-time, they aren’t that impactful, because significant financial resources are needed to complete NNG training. The time required to complete this is also an issue, so if you are a manager required to assign learning materials to your design team, think twice about this option.
Certificates with the Highest Recognition in the Industry
If you value certificates and diplomas as the peak of education, NNG is the right choice for you, because their certificates are well-known and respected in the industry.
However, as a manager in charge of a design team, you probably realize that another certificate in a designer’s CV doesn’t immediately translate to a benefit for your company. The link to Nielsen Norman Group is always respected and appreciated, but it won’t mean much unless the skill set is also there and in active use.
Uxcel Teams vs Nielsen Norman Group Comparison Table
Uxcel Teams vs Nielsen Norman Group Verdict
Uxcel Teams, starting at only $25 per seat monthly, is a way more affordable option than paying thousands of dollars for your designers to attend NNG courses and conferences.
Nielsen Norman Group is still the leading company when it comes to UX education, and your designers will be trained by the best in the industry. However, the price tag that goes with it is huge, even for enterprise companies.
With Uxcel Teams, you will get a precise scan of your design department’s existing skills, and you will be able to work on weak points immediately. Assigning the courses and other learning materials to your designers is straightforward and quick, and they won’t need months to complete the tasks — they can complete some learning materials — in less than 20 minutes!
Tracking their progress, combined with a gamified experience for your team, will create a dynamic learning environment that won’t take too much time from their regular duties at work, but it will still positively impact their skills. As the manager, you will see the first improvements within a month of signing up.
Nielsen Norman group is a traditional option, suitable for already established design professionals and individuals who want to invest in their career development.
Even if the company allocated a huge budget for training and education, you should go for Uxcel Teams, because it accounts for every pain point you are facing as the manager.
