The 10 Best Free UX Design Courses in 2024

Author headshot of Rachel Meltzer.

Are you ready to learn more about user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design but don’t want to dive into paying for a formal degree or bootcamp yet?

Free UI/UX design courses are the answer. You can learn the fundamentals of UX design, the tools designers use, and the UX design career path—all at no cost.

From micro-tutorials to free UI/UX design courses, this guide on the best free UX design courses available online will help you broaden your horizons. All are free, 100% online, and created by trusted sources in the field.

(If you’re curious about the difference between UI and UX, check out our guide.)

Ready? Let’s dive right in.

The 10 best free UI/UX design courses

1. CareerFoundry’s Free UX Design Course

Duration: Self-paced, 1 week of 90 minutes total study

CareerFoundry provides a range of certificate programs with a job guarantee that you can pay for, including for UX design and UI design. However, this short course is free!

The free UX design short course offers an introduction so that you can find out if it’s the right career path for you. This course is self-paced and takes about 90 minutes total, over a week. 

This free and completely online UX course includes an intro to UX and changing your career, as well as hands-on UX exercises. It’s made up of six daily lessons that take around 15 minutes each, covering topics such as:

This is an excellent way to see if UX design is the right career change for you. Watch the video below to find out more:

2. The Gymnasium’s UX Fundamentals

Duration: 6 lessons, each lesson has 3-6 videos up to about 15 minutes each

Gymnasium offers free online courses that are all taught by industry experts. Gymnasium’s free UX design course teaches new UX designers how to apply user-centered design principles to websites and mobile apps. 

In this course, you’ll learn: 

  • Basic user research techniques
  • How to create user personas
  • Approaches to information design
  • Wireframing and prototyping
  • User-optimized content organization
  • Common UX design patterns
  • How to conduct user testing 

This course aims to provide a solid framework for applying UX principles during website design and development. 

3. Accenture’s Digital Skills: User Experience on Future Learn

Duration: 3 weeks at 2 hours of study each week

Future Learn is an online learning platform that offers courses from universities and industry experts. Accenture Digital Skills is a course series created by Accenture, a Fortune 500 company known for strategy, management, digital, technology, and operations consulting. 

This three-week, self-paced free UX design course is designed to help complete beginners discover the basics of user experience. You’ll learn about why user experience (UX) is important, research and design basics, and the tools and testing techniques used in UX.

This course covers: 

  • Why is user experience important?
  • User experience basics
  • Tools and testing 

This free UX design course is for anyone who is seeking to develop their entrepreneurial skills, preparing to enter the workplace, or looking to change careers. 

A screenshot of Accenture's free UX design course website, one of the best free UX design courses

4. Become a User Experience Designer through LinkedIn Learning

Duration: 9 hours total content

LinkedIn Learning offers a free 30-day trial that you can use to complete this entire 9-hour, self-paced free UX design course. LinkedIn Learning is a subsidiary of the social media giant that provides thousands of subscription-based skills courses to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. 

This course helps you become a modern user experience designer who knows how to design effective, compelling digital experiences with research and analysis skills. You’ll comprehensively learn how to create user experiences across mobile platforms, the web, and the internet of things.

It’s taught by industry experts and training professionals who’ve worked for companies like Amazon, LinkedIn, Intuit, Salesforce, Paypal, Intel, Lynda, and more. This course has 13 chapters that teach: 

  • The principles of user-centered design
  • Creating wireframes and graphics with industry standards tools like Illustrator and Sketch
  • Building a UX portfolio that includes interactive prototypes, user personas, and more

This course will help you start creating the foundation for a solid career in UX design.

5. UI/UX Design Specialization by CalArts on Coursera

Duration: 2 months at 10 hours per week

Coursera is a learning platform that partners with big companies and universities to provide courses, degrees, and certifications at no cost. This free UX design course, created by the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), is a thorough massive open online course (MOOC) that takes about five hours per week for four months to complete. 

You’ll work through a hands-on project and earn a shareable certificate at the end of the program. The free version of this course offers access only to the course content that you can work through at your own pace. The paid version comes with graded assignments, quizzes, and programming challenges with peer feedback. There is financial aid available for the paid version.  

This course teaches:

  • Visual elements of UI design
  • UX design fundamentals
  • Web design strategy and information architecture
  • Wireframes and prototypes 

This free UX design course is taught from a graphic design perspective and is perfect for someone who already has some graphic design experience. There is also a free Fundamentals of Graphic Design course offered by CalArts on Coursera that you can take as a prerequisite if you’d like a more comprehensive experience. 

A screenshot of Calarts free UX design course website, one of the best free UX design courses

6. Introduction to User Experience Design by Georgia Tech on Coursera

Duration: 3 weeks at 2 hours per week

Another MOOC on Coursera offered by Georgia Tech, this course is more of an introduction to UX design. Intro to UX Design offers a shareable certificate and hands-on project and requires about six hours total to complete. 

You’ll learn: 

  • An overview of UX design
  • Requirement gathering
  • How to design alternatives
  • Prototyping
  • Evaluation

This free UX design course is designed to introduce novice designers to a cycle of discovery and evaluation along with a set of techniques that help designers meet user’s needs.

7. LearnUX.io

Duration: Varies by course

LearnUX.io is a video learning platform created by Greg Rog, a designer with 15 years of experience at Fortune 500 companies. LearnUX.io aims to help aspiring and professional UI and UX Designers develop their skills through courses on the most relevant technologies and tools. This beautifully designed website offers both free and paid video courses. 

You can find free UI/UX design courses on: 

  • UX Careers
  • Usability
  • User Testing
  • Design for Screens
  • Tools like Sketch, Figma, InVision, Principle, Flinto, Zeplin, Abstract
  • HTML and CSS
  • Webflow

LearnUX.io offers courses for complete beginners and experienced UX designers alike. If you want to learn how to use specific industry tools for UX design, this site is for you. 

8. Springboard’s free UX Design Curriculum

Duration: 55 hours

Springboard offers a variety of tech professional career programs including UX design. They also provide free learning paths including UX design, data analysis, machine learning, digital marketing and more.

The Free UX Design Curriculum is a 55-hour course made up of videos and resources from across the internet organized into a logical pathway for beginners. This course covers best practices, but not specific tools. 

This course covers: 

  • Design research methods
  • User-centered design techniques
  • Interviewing users in real-world situations
  • Creating personas to define users
  • Deliverables a UX designer is expected to produce
  • Best practices

This curriculum is designed for aspiring designers, product managers, engineers, entrepreneurs—virtually anyone who wants to learn more about UX. If you want a roadmap to getting started in UX design, this is a great place to start. 

9. General Assembly’s Intro to UX Design 

Duration: 2 hour live workshop

General Assembly provides full-time, flexible, and part-time bootcamps for everything from software engineering to data science, design to digital marketing. Their free live online workshops provide an introduction to these topics in real-time.

The Intro to UX Design is a live online workshop that helps you explore the decision-making process that dictates how users interact with digital products to see why businesses need UX talent. 

You’ll learn: 

  • What UX design is and why it matters
  • How users interact with digital products
  • Fundamental tools and techniques used by professional designers
  • More UX resources

This free UX design course is for someone who knows nothing about UX design and wants to understand more about the UX design process.

A screenshot of General Assembly's free UX design course website, one of the best free UX design courses

10. Figma UI UX Design Essentials on Skillshare

Duration: Roughly 11.5 hours

Skillshare is a learning platform with hundreds of courses, with a 7-day free trial. The Figma UI UX Design Essentials course, taught by designer Daniel Scott, covers the basics of UX and UI, with a focus on using Figma, a very common design tool in the industry.

  • Figma basics
  • The difference between UX and UI in Figma
  • Creating a brief
  • Prototyping
  • Sharing with clients and stakeholders

This course is great for someone who wants to get the basics of a tool you may use every day as a UX designer. Figma has a free version, and a professional version that is about $12 per month.

Final thoughts

There you have it! 10 fantastic and free UX design courses. Most of these will take you just a few days to complete and provide you with a peek into the career, tools, and best practices of UX design.

If you’re ready to dive into learning more about UX design, why not get your hands dirty with a few of these free courses? You might find out that UX design could be the best career path for you after all.

If you’re curious about how to make a career change to UX design, read Anjali’s story of transitioning from HR to UX design.

If you want more advice, then book a chat with one of our program advisors and they’ll be happy to help with your UX journey.

FAQ: Free UI/UX design courses

1. How can I learn UX design for free?

There is an abundance of free UX design courses to get you started. Online platforms like CareerFoundry, Linkedin Learning, and Gymnasium all offer free UX courses online or free versions of their longer programs. 

2. Can UX design be self-taught?

While formal education and certification courses are important for the skills taught and to showcase proficiency to potential employers, the basics of UX design can be self-taught. There are a number of free online resources, including online courses and books that help develop online skills.  

3. Can I learn UX design in three months?

It is possible to learn the fundamentals of UX design in three months, but it depends on your dedication, learning pace, and the amount of time you can devote to learning each day. 

While it’s possible to learn the fundamentals of UX design in three months, UX design requires a combination of theoretical knowledge and practical skills, and this will likely take some time and practice to master.

 

What You Should Do Now

  1. Get a hands-on introduction to UX design with our free, self-paced UX design short course.

  2. Take part in one of our FREE live online UX design events with industry experts, and read up on UX graduate Alice’s career change from corporate banking.

  3. Become a qualified UX designer in just 5-10 months—complete with a job guarantee.

  4. This month, we’re offering Women in Tech Partial Scholarships—worth up to $1,500 off our career-change programs—to the first 80 women who apply 🚀 Book your application call today!

What is CareerFoundry?

CareerFoundry is an online school for people looking to switch to a rewarding career in tech. Select a program, get paired with an expert mentor and tutor, and become a job-ready designer, developer, or analyst from scratch, or your money back.

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