Mini-Courses & Short Specialist Courses

Level up your UX design skills with courses in UX Design, CX, Design Thinking & Service design.

Mini Online Courses

Designed to teach you about a topic quickly
Total time: 20-45min

Single lesson online courses on a single topic

+ Delivered via PeakXD’s online UX Training platform

+ 100% online, self-paced remote

+ Single licence (enquire about licences for teams)

+ 3 months access

Order Now

A$35

Specialised Courses

Designed to give you more in-depth knowledge
Total time: 90-130 min

Speciality online courses around a particular theme

+ 100% online, self-paced remote. 6 to 8 lessons

+ Includes templates you can use to hit the ground running

+ Single licence (enquire about licences for teams)

+ 3 months access

Order Now

A$215

Design Thinking and Service Design

Mini-courses

Has your organisation ever spent a fortune on a technical solution only to find it didn't solve the problem? Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovatively solve business challenges by discovering and defining people's problems and creating, ideating, prototyping and testing solutions. This course will give you an overview of the process and will help you convince stakeholders as to why they should adopt this approach.
So you have done all your research, but what now? We will walk you through the process of making sense of your customer insights, defining the key problems you want to solve and prioritising these to deliver the most significant impact on your customers and organisation.
Have you been asked to create a customer journey map but not sure where to start? Did you know that the process is more important than the pretty artefact at the end? In this course, we will give you an overview of what customer journey mapping is, how they can be used, what the process looks like to create and build empathy within your organisation and some tools you can use to create a customer journey map.
So your business stakeholders or IT team want to jump straight into solution mode but have you defined the right problem to solve? You've probably heard Einstein's famous quote "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions." We will teach you the process of how to define your problem though 'HMWs' and how to ensure your stakeholders' ideate solutions to the right problem. You will learn both face-to-face methods and remote methods to engage stakeholders in ideating solutions that will make a difference.
Have you ever been in a workshop or brainstorming session when loud and dominant stakeholders want to push their own ideas or agenda? Let us show you a better way to engage stakeholders through creative workshop techniques and gamestorming methods. If you are running a workshop, you will not only keep everyone involved but also gain valuable input and ideas from all participants.
You probably know how to prototype a website, but how do you prototype a new service? We will explain and demonstrate some of the different ways of prototyping, using methods such as role-playing and modelling. You will learn how to test your prototypes to understand likely issues, which will pave the way for further iteration.
So you have your current state customer journey mapped out? How do you come up with the future state? Just like customer journey mapping, service blueprinting is more about the process than the pretty blueprint artefact you create. You will learn what a service blueprint is, how it is different to journey mapping and how to engage stakeholders and get their buy-in. We will also share examples of how we have done this in our consulting practice.

Specialist Courses

This 6 lesson course will explore in-depth everything you need to help you facilitate and run a collaborative workshop. It includes templates useful for running workshops such as workshop plans and a value matrix.
  1. When to run workshops.
  2. Creative workshop techniques and gamestorming methods. 
  3. Problem framing through ‘How Might We’s?’ and idea generation. 
  4. Ideas prioritisation using a value matrix.
  5. Planning and preparing for your workshop.
  6. Workshop facilitation tips and how to manage difficult participants.
This 6 lesson course will explore in-depth the whole end-to-end process of customer journey mapping from how to ask customers the right questions through to working with stakeholders to design new customer journeys that will improve your customer experience and solve business problems for your organisation. You will get access to research and journey mapping templates to help you hit the ground running.
  1. Researching your customers' journeys - Jobs To Be Done and interview task analysis.
  2. Running a journey mapping workshop with customers or users.
  3. Synthesising your research data and making sense of it all.
  4. Running a customer journey mapping workshop with business stakeholders.
  5. How to document your customer journey and build empathy and what tools to use.
  6. What next? How to plan the ideal future state customer journey.
This 6 lesson course will teach you all about the human-centred design approach to designing services, including exploring and defining the problem and ideating, prototyping and testing solutions. You will learn through a series of online training videos and demonstrations. You will get access to templates such as customer journey maps, value matrix, test plans and service blueprints.
  1. Conducting research to understand your customers. 
  2. Customer journey mapping 101.
  3. Problem framing through ‘How Might We’s?’ & idea generation.
  4. Idea prioritisation - customer value matrix. 
  5. Prototyping and testing your ideas. 
  6. Service blueprinting - the process and how to create the service blueprint.

General UX Design

Mini-courses

What is UX and user-centred design? Why is it important and what are the benefits of user-centred design? Understand the return on investment and how to convince stakeholders of the value of this approach.
So you understand the general user-centred design approach to redesigning your website, app or system. But what does it look like in practice? As UX consultants who have worked on over 500 UX projects, we will share how we worked through the redesign of a project with one of our clients. We will uncover our UX processes and how we overcame some of the challenges UX designers often experience. 
Do you ever worry that someone is going to call you out and feel that you aren’t qualified to do your job in UX? Learn a range of tactics to help you overcome this feeling and build your confidence as a UXer. Progress your career and gain courage to stand up for your customers.
So you know you should conduct user research but have no budget and limited time. Let us teach you some low cost and free methods to help you understand your customers and users on a minimal budget in a short time. Learn how to quickly gain some valuable insights to either frame your research plan or input into your design process.

Specialist courses

We are working in a whole new world where for many it is just not feasible to meet with participants or stakeholders in person. Well, the team at PeakXD have been doing remote UX for years for a whole range of reasons that can limit access to users. We will share and teach you many of the remote research, design and testing methods we utilise so you can continue doing UX even if you can’t meet with your users.

  • Overview - conduct UX when you can’t access your users or stakeholders in person
  • How to conduct remote qualitative user research
  • How to use Miro to run virtual workshops involving affinity diagramming, ideation and prioritisation. 
  • Running a remote card-sorting session to understand users’ mental models
  • How to run remote collaborative design sketching session with stakeholders or users
  • How to remotely test your IA and concepts using tools like TreeJack, Chalkmark and Loop11.
  • How to run remote moderated usability test sessions using online meeting tools
  • How to remotely recruit and incentivise participants.

Research

Mini-courses

If you have ever been asked to design a research approach but were not sure where to start then this course is for you. Understand different research methods and what methods to use when there are time and budget limitations as well as varying levels of access to your users. Understand how to specify your target audience, remote vs face-to-face methods, how you will find research participants, what the scope of your research should be and ethical considerations. 
Have you been doing research wrong all these years without knowing it? There are many common traps that new researchers fall into and common mistakes that we have seen even experienced researchers make. Understanding psychology can help minimise our own cognitive biases and understand users’ biased cognition and behaviour to ensure you get accurate insights.
You want me to research what? Occasionally as researchers, we have to research delicate or sensitive topics that may be difficult for both participants and researchers. Understand how to design your research approach to be both ethical and sensitive to your users’ emotive state and learn research techniques to help you get to the truth without leaving your participant feeling terrible. Also, learn about the importance of addressing the mental health of researchers on difficult projects. 
Have you been asked to create a customer journey map but not sure where to start? Did you know that the process is more important than the pretty artefact? In this course, we will give you an overview of what customer journey mapping is, how they can be used, what the process looks like to create and build empathy within your organisation and tools you might use to create your customer journey map.
So you have done all of this wonderful qualitative research but now your head is exploding and you are feeling overwhelmed. How do you make sense of it all? We can show you a few techniques that our team uses to theme-up your data and prioritise key insights using a variety of offline and online tools. 
There is a range of ethical guidelines and principles that all UX researchers should follow. In this course we will outline fundamental principles and considerations for both designing, conducting and communicating research to ensure you protect the well-being and privacy of your participants as well as the broader community. 

Specialist Courses

This 6 lesson course will explore the end-to-end process of customer journey mapping from 'how to ask customers the right questions' through to 'working with stakeholders to design new customer journeys that will improve your customer experience and solve business problems for your organisation'. You will get access to research and journey mapping templates to help you hit the ground running.

  • Researching your customers’ journeys - Jobs To Be Done and interview task analysis.
  • Running a journey mapping workshop with customers or users.
  • Synthesising your research data and making sense of it all.
  • Running a customer journey mapping workshop with business stakeholders.
  • How to document your customer journey and build empathy and what tools to use.
  • What next? How to plan the ideal future state customer journey.

Design

Mini-courses

Card sorting is a useful tool to understand user mental models and design intuitive information architectures and menu structures for your site, system or app. Learn how to write cards, run a card sorting workshop (both in-person and remotely) and synthesise the data to design an Information Architecture that is based on your users’ mental models. 

Have you ever wondered when to use a paper prototype vs. a fully functional, high fidelity prototype? In this course, we’ll take you through how to balance your effort and research to gain valuable insights in every stage of your research. 

So you’ve designed a menu structure but want to see if your users can find their way around it? Or do you want to test that "menu label" that a stakeholder insists on using that users probably won’t understand? We’ll take you through how to write test scenarios for IA testing then how to set up, run and distribute the test remotely to your users using TreeJack (a popular tool for IA testing). Oh, and we might even give you some tips on how to use evidence to convince that stakeholder that their menu label isn't understood by your customers. 

Specialist courses

This 7 lesson course will teach you all about how to design intuitive information architectures and navigation design that aligns with your users’ mental models. We will cover a range of methods and tools, including:

  • Introduction to IA and navigation design
  • Menu navigation design for different interfaces
  • Classifying and organising information and schemas 
  • The psychology of navigation - navigation behaviours, laws and principles.
  • Conducting card sorting to understand users’ mental models 
  • Analysing card sort results and facilitating an IA design workshop
  • Testing your IA - Treejack

Ever look at or test a website or system but not be able to explain what’s wrong with it or how to improve it? Maybe you are a developer, business analyst or junior UX designer that wants to learn fundamental design principles to make things easier for users. Take our intensive 8 lesson crash course in Interaction design and learn how to address usability issues and defend your design decisions.

  • Introduction: Interaction design vs UI design vs Visual design vs Information design
  • Interaction design patterns 1: Functionality vs Usability, banner blindness, issues with carousels, button design
  • Interaction design patterns 2: Fitts’ Law, wizards, launching new windows
  • Form design and choosing controls plus progressive disclosure
  • Simplifying data and reducing choice overload
  • Tables, faceted search, sorting, comparison tables etc
  • Human cognition and design
  • 10 Usability heuristics

Understand the basics in colour, balance, alignment, visual hierarchy and typography when it comes to converting your wireframe into a visual before handing it off to web developers. We’ll also be teaching you the basics in UX for mobile design such as what to watch out for when designing for Android vs. iOS, size recommendations for mobile etc. 

  • Colour theory
  • Repetition
  • Balance and alignment 
  • Visual hierarchy and contrast
  • Gestalt and visual flow
  • Typography in UI
  • Trust and user confidence

Evaluation and Testing

Mini-courses

Have you ever been asked to test something and do not know the best approach to use?  We will cover a range of different test and evaluation methods you can use to test the efficiency, effectiveness and user experience of your site or system. This course will take you through some useful methods such as semantic differentials, task efficiency, usability measures, 50-word product reaction test, five-second tests and how to measure changes in motivation levels after customers have used your site.

Ever felt you’ve conducted usability testing on a site but haven’t been able to uncover the core issues? This course will take you through the common usability issues test moderators should be looking out for when conducting usability testing, and common mistakes test moderators often make. Learn how to become a better test moderator without leading your users to gain accurate insights that are less likely to be challenged by stakeholders.

Explore different methods for testing and evaluating your site or system and understand the pros and cons of expert reviews vs. testing and which evaluation method is best to use and when. Learn about heuristic evaluations, cognitive walkthroughs, usability testing, UAT, accessibility testing, A/B and multivariate testing.

In this course, we’ll take you through the design of the ideal usability test environment: the equipment needed, how to set it up and how to use it for testing - all on a slim budget. We’ll also share some tips on how you can make the environment welcoming for your test participants so they can ease into the research without being uncomfortable in an unfamiliar setting. 

Specialist courses

There is nothing more powerful than usability testing your site or system with actual end-users and watching the lightbulb turn on for difficult stakeholders. If you are new to usability testing, there is a lot to get your head around, and if you have done a lot of testing, you may be surprised about what you don’t know. This 7 lesson course offers something for everyone.

  • Introduction and key steps for usability testing
  • Writing a usability test plan
  • Writing tasks for testing, recruiting participants and running a pilot
  • Moderating test sessions
  • Analysing and communicating results 
  • The what, when and how of usability testing: formative vs summative evaluation, remote, moderated, unmoderated and where to test. 
  • Usability testing technologies.

Order Now - How it works

Order and pay for all courses you want to complete. Once payment is received you will get 3 months access to the online course within 30-60 days as soon as they become available on our UX training portal.


    When you order, you will be sent an invoice to pay via EFT or Credit card for you or your accounts area to pay.