#63 Building UX design educational program
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When I was designing an online course that is digital and that has some competition on the market, there is already all sorts of information on the internet. There are a few things that I definitely had to consider and understand what's the difference that you're offering on the market that other products do not offer. For me, I needed to make it not like I'm a robot telling you what to do, but really explaining my practice and mapping how you can use it in your real life.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the next episode of Honest UX Talks. My name is Anfisa, and I'm joined today by Ioana to talk about instructional design and actually building educational programs in design. Very interesting and unexpected topic, but I'm pretty sure you'll find it also entertaining because even though

though it's not necessarily adding value to your everyday life. I think we all at some point are asking, is it a time for us to start mentoring, helping others, sharing our knowledge? And I think maybe our experience could help you understand how we did it. And maybe you can also get inspiration from it. And we do it ourselves as well. By the way, this question is coming from one of our listeners, Matthew, I hope I spell his surname right, Doherty.

I believe he's Australian. And he left us a very, very lovely message in the Anchor. Thank you so much for doing this. This really made my day. And he is an instructional designer. And he asked us how exactly we developed our programs. So if you know...

If you're listening for us long enough, I have designed a course called Into UX.Design. And it's all about just like this classic design thinking, we can say, when we talk about research and then product strategy and validation. And then recently, Ioana also published her first course with Domestika, all about planning your transition to UX design. But Ioana will talk more about it.

We have some experience that we would really, really love to share. But before going into the topic, we would also like to say thank you to our sponsor of today's episode, which is Figura.Digital. We have talked about it a little bit already. We have also recorded an episode with the founder of the Figura.Digital. But for those of you who is new, Figura.Digital is the most UX-friendly network for freelancers designers.

that could help finding their dream jobs. Basically, the whole idea behind it is that the application is really much more focused on your design skills and you only have to apply once and then the platform does the matchmaking magic to find the perfect client for your needs. So you kind of have to come prepared knowing who exactly you're looking for.

And the problem itself is that you don't have to go through multiple rounds of interviews with different companies, get rejected, go through the process over and over again, which is very daunting and very, very time consuming. They also have a pretty high minimum wages. So you can consider it as a pretty UX mature environment. And they also, on top of that,

offer a lot of mentoring help. They have a community. There are some educational programs, I believe, they're working on. So it's probably a great space for you, not just to find a great client, but also to grow. Definitely check it out at figura.digital. And thank you so much again, Figura, for helping our podcast to exist.

and continue growing. And also, by the way, before diving into the topic, Ioana, how have you been? How was your last week? Anything you want to mention? Hi, everyone. Thank you for tuning in. Yeah, I think my last week was pretty exciting because some of our listeners at least probably know I've just returned from my parental leave of two years to my current employer, UiPath. And in the beginning, it feels a bit awkward because it's like you're

absolutely on a new job, but nobody's treating you like you're on a new job. So you don't get the onboarding and getting introduced to everyone because you're already an employee, right? But it's strange because the company has changed a lot in the past two years. And so I've been spending these past three weeks just re-getting introduced myself. And it's really exciting that now I have clarity on the project I'll be working on. And it's a product that I'm very, very excited about. It's super cool. It's actually going to hopefully

hopefully revolutionize the way we automate our work on a day-to-day basis. It's super accessible. Hopefully, if I do my job right, it will be very easy to use by anyone. And so it's just like a very cool design challenge in the field of semantic automation, which is the next stage in automating day-to-day processes.

I forgot how it was to work in a big company with potential big impact and like have that feeling that you could change the world for the better. So now I'm very excited and I love the people I'll be working with. It's a challenging project, but it's also one that will hopefully do great things. So I'm very excited about that. Yeah.

That sounds really cool. I'm already excited for you even just to listen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't wait to be able to share more details once I get into the weeds with the product and semantic automation in general. So that's one thing. And then also I'm very happy because I'm working on some really cool partnerships for UX goodies, but I'm not able to announce any of them yet. I'm just here to tease them. Let's just say that some of my...

Dream partnerships are coming true. And so that's very exciting for me. And I can't wait to start sharing the content that I keep producing with these partners. A lot of exciting things going on. Not everything is pink, we all know. But most of all, the past week was a pretty good week for me. This is really cool. And I'm already also teased about who your partner in law is. I'm definitely going to ask behind the recording. Anyways, my week was also pretty good. We actually had a long vacation because we had an independence day in Czech Republic.

public. And then we had like a wellness Wednesday, which at my company, once a month, we have like one day off on Wednesday when we literally just go ahead and do whatever we want. Some people go for a spa and yoga. Some people just go outside and hike and do whatever they need to do. So it's really cool. I had some time off this week and I feel pretty refreshed. I'm also finishing to work on the workshop I mentioned last week, which is called Design Thinking Tokens. And I'm going to run it today in only like five hours. So I'm a little bit sort of worried or anxious

but actually more exciting than that because right now I'm working on the slides and it's like I can't wait to test it and see how people react and see if it's useful or valuable or if not and if there is a feedback. So it's very interesting. It's an experiment. I'm going to try to see if I can help people with design thinking on a daily life basis and I will probably report back how it went in the next episode.

But with that being said, I think we can actually jump into the content of this episode and back again to the topic, instructional design and how we designed our courses. First of all, Ioana, quick question for you. Did you actually know what is instructional design? Did you ever heard about this term? I actually have because in UiPath, we have a very robust structure.

organization for instructional design. Since it's a very complicated technical solution, you really need a lot of education and support materials around that. So the company has built what we call UiPath Academy. I think it has like just an impressive number of users. So everybody who's trying to automate and using the UiPath solution goes through the academy. And so we have a lot of instructional designers working on that. So I've seen it in my company. I was pretty accustomed to this role. Yeah.

Nice, nice. Because I think I only heard about this term in the beginning of this year, also because of my company. I think in a period of companies I worked, there was never an instructional designer. Because usually when we talk about instructional design, we're talking about the courses. So more like engaging learning way. But in the past, only worked with just knowledge bases, right? More static and information-based, sort of Wikipedia.

BDS rather than courses. And it's pretty, pretty interesting. I was really excited. I think some of my colleagues were even confused, like, are we looking for another designer in our team? No, it's actually a different team. And only the word designer coincide with what we do. There are still a lot of similarities, I believe, in how we design courses, right? Because once designer, you probably apply design thinking and just designing, planning everything around

user thinking as well as final outcome that would meet some objectives. So I think, yeah, it's pretty critical to see more roles like this evolve and that companies start investing in a better education within their companies, within their partners and the customers. Talking back about the topic of today's episode, Ioana, can you tell us a little story about how you were designing your course that you recently published on Domestika?

I would love to do that. I'm happy I get to talk about the process behind the scenes because people just saw the output and everybody reached out to me. The course is so pretty. It looks so great. You talk so nicely. I don't know why the content is great. And so there was a lot of enthusiasm around it, but nobody knows what went into that and that it was pretty stressful. And whenever you put

something so in a way personal out there. At least for me, I've experienced pretty high level of anxiety and just hoping that I managed to put my ideas in a clear system, in a clear structure, and that they're getting the value that I was planning for out of the course. So it was a stressful process.

But what really helped me, and I don't think that everybody has that, let's say, privilege or that in a way luxury, was that when Domestika reached out to me, they also reached out with a course building system. So they didn't help me at all when it comes to the content that's in the course, but they did provide a document that was very well structured, like with all the parts that should be in the course, how the introduction should be formulated, like what kind of

questions I might be asking at every stage of the learning process of the course design. And that's one thing. I had a lot of help when it comes to structures from Domestika, but then also because I'm a designer, I kind of applied the UX methodology and the UX process to building my course.

So I've been spending the past, I think we're close to five years now, talking to people in the community through UX goodies, learning about their pain points, running into the same patterns again and again and again. So I had a lot of industry knowledge, if you want, when it comes to the problem space. I really started out with a lot of clarity around what are the hardest parts of transitioning into UXs.

what are the most common questions what are the most common fears what are the things that I keep bumping into again and again so I had that understanding as a foundation but I also sort of refreshed it and re-researched it while building the course so I kept exploring and in a way validating all the

points that went into the course with my community. So an example would be, I know that people were very stressed out that if they don't come from a design background, they will have no chance of landing a job in design because they don't have the background. And even if they invest like six months into learning, it's not going to be enough. And so I was able to kind of unpack that fear, do UX research around it with my audience, have some interviews even, and then unpack it into the kind of messages that went into the

course to speak to that fear, right? And I did that for a couple of other elements in the course. Like most of the things that went into the course were explored and unpacked and essentially validated with the people in the UX Goodies community. So that was great. I mean, I had a lot of instruments available when building this course. So on one hand, the structure from Domestika and then my own domain knowledge, which

was built in the past five years, but then also access to users to be able to kind of confirm that I'm on the right path. So it was pretty much, let's say, everything led up to this point. Everything I've been doing for the past five years led up to being able to articulate learning strategy for anybody who wants to move into UX design from a different background or a different industry. I think for me, even if it was stressful, it was pretty simple in a way because of having all these elements. So I think that's an overview of what

happened. If you want me to go into detail on any of those parts, or if you want to share the overarching principles and strategy around building into UX, I'd be super excited to learn about that. Let's maybe first, indeed, like talk about like general structure, and then we can dive into practical steps. Maybe we took in the guiding principles, like you mentioned, I think that's a great point that we kind of probably have to always remember what and why and the principles around that. For me, the story was a little different, but

also similar in a way, actually, because I think I was lucky enough to be sort of thrown into the educational journey very early on in my career. For those of you who didn't hear my story, I basically, when I was working in design for first like two, three years, and I was still pretty junior, I would say, basically, I had a master's degree, I was working a lot as a

freelancer and I had my own startup. And I also had an internship in one of the service design agencies that was really, really UX mature. Also, like I was in the context when UX was a big thing and it was very, I guess, embedded in the mindset of the people. It was in Estonia. If you know, Estonia is a very IT-driven country.

from the 90s, basically. And so I was lucky that I was surrounded by very smart people and I was embedded in it. But still, after two, three years, I felt myself like a junior because I was never a part of the big organization, never been sort of escalating my career as I was, you know, working primarily on my own.

But suddenly somebody offered me an opportunity to go to Georgia in Caucasia and kind of teach design there. I think I was mainly because, you know, there was the stereotype that if I live in Estonia, I should be a pretty good UX mature designer. And I didn't feel myself like that. I felt a complete imposter. Like, what do I even know? Who am I even to teach all those people? But

I thought about it and it was a great, great challenge. So I couldn't say no to it because you don't always get this chance when you're so early in your career. So I decided to just go for it. That was the first time when I had to design the curriculum for the program. And it was like offline courses after work, usually. So they put together a group of 20 people. It was like an educational governmental program program.

in IT direction. And so it was organized. All I had to do, like you said, also provide the content and it was offline. I had to do it for like three and a half months and it had to kind of have practical and theoretical parts plus the group project at the end. So it was very full on and very interesting. Not only you have to design the curriculum, but you have to design all the practical exercises, group projects,

and the homeworks even, the typical, typical teacher structure. I think I was really blessed to do that because in Georgia, people are very, very kind and supporting. So even though I was very young in my career, they were really helpful in giving me the feedback and they were really kind in how they provided the feedback. And I had this great

playground to test whatever. And I don't understand what works, what doesn't work. It also helped me a lot to work with my imposter syndrome simply because when you start talking out loud, maybe in the beginning, it's still very new rocking. But then as you kind of progress in the program and every other day you present a lot of materials to people, you can see the reaction. You can understand what's working, what's not. So you can reflect on what you know, what you don't know very well. And they give you the feedback.

but you also structure your knowledge. And after that program, I believe I felt myself like a genius or something because I felt I know it all, even though I didn't. But yeah, back then it just helped me a lot to work with my imposter syndrome and realize how much I know. Back to the planning and structure and my knowledge, it was sort of easy because I was just freshly out of my master's degree. I think it was only like one year after it. My master's degree was very well structured about design thinking. So I knew very well how to

use some of the same principles, mainly also around design thinking, workshop. The only nuance is that we were working with like design thinking, very broad scale, including like industrial design as well. But I had to go very deep on the UX. So IT and digital design and mobile design and stuff like that, which I still had to catch up on and fill some gaps in my education. So long story short, I was using a lot of principle from my master degree

as well as I was reading like a crazy. I don't think I've ever read so much as I was reading back then. At that point, I think I took all the possible courses I could find on Udemy, obviously, by Joan Atalian, instructors like that. Then I was reading all the possible books I still haven't read. And of course, media was a big thing. So I think I remember how for like two months I did nothing else but reading. And that also helped me to kind of understand the structure I have to get into. I didn't have like

the following back then. So I couldn't do the proper research. But I think, you know, generally my own experience with the master degree helped me to guide it.

The only thing that I knew I wanted to change and make a guiding principle for that program was that in Estonia, people are a little bit more reserved and kind of cold in terms of communication. And I kind of felt a lot of problems or sort of issues was like confidence around that because I never got the proper feedback. I never got a proper support. And I felt like that was a big miss in terms of education that I got. And I really, really wanted to make sure I can be approachable the

people can talk to me, that people can trust me, that people can ask me anything. Basically, for me, that was a key guiding principle that really changed. And yeah, in Georgia, it was the right thing to do, I would say, when people are really more warm to Southern country, basically. So this was an experience when I had to do offline courses. Later on, I was also

training in China for a couple of months in the like one-on-one mentoring school, which we don't have enough time to talk about. It's definitely a big, big topic, but I was doing like more mentoring and I had a couple of Chinese girls, students who I helped build in the portfolio with. So it's much easier to be more personal and approachable because you do it one-on-one. But

then when I returned and I started working you know on my startup I started working on my career and become hands down and very very practical in terms of just my career in the parallel I had this kind of missing chain that I still want to create content and share what I know so that's naturally how the whole you know Instagram account was born and when I started doing this and I

think in one or two years there was this wave right of Instagram people asking you questions on how do you design how do you do this what are the personas how to build customer journeys and stuff like this so every single day in the first or two years of my Instagram journey I wake up and I have like

10, 15, 20, sometimes even 50 messages of people asking me all the same questions. And I felt like it's a stupid monkey job for me to always copy-paste the same answers. So at some point, I just woke up and realized there's a big need for an educational course. Luckily, I had this experience with curriculum. So all I had to do was just to restructure it to more of a digital online format with the nuances that I will not be able to answer the questions right there. So obviously, the guiding principle when I was designing the online course for me was that you have to...

have sort of frequently asked questions very close to you. So what I designed was more of a Wikipedia. If you have the course, right, there has a structure, then you have parts, then you break it down into specific videos that cover each part. And after each of those parts and sections, there will be always a link to this sort of little Wikipedia. The notion of Wikipedia was all the resources I've mentioned, all the references to the books and education materials and the templates and whatever printouts that I could find.

there was a very big other sort of sub project

that not only you have the course, but you have a place where you can have a lot of answers to your questions. Plus, of course, in the video format, there are questions under each video. Let's stop here. I don't want to take too much time, but I also want to ask, how about your principles when you were designing the course? What are some of the things that you wanted to make sure you're doing right? And what are the things you wanted to focus on a lot? So I started by mapping out all the pain points and the things that I was very confident about that were problematic for people.

One of the main problems that I spotted in the design industry was that all the information was already there on the internet. So everything is available for free if you know how to search it. But the problem and the big need for courses is to put some structure on top of all that information. So the biggest problem is that when you're just starting out, you don't know how to navigate information. You don't have any like critical thinking structures in place that are able to say,

I can trust this piece of information. This is a bit sketchy. I'm not sure I can rely on what's in this article and just be able to filter out from all the noise because there is immense noise in the UX community on the internet these days from all the Instagram accounts, like hundreds, probably thousands to all the articles on Medium. Everybody's writing, everybody's creating content. So on one hand, that's amazing.

There's never been an easier time to transition into UX design because all the information is there available for free. But on the other hand, it causes what we designers call option paralysis. So it's really hard to understand how to start and how to make the next step and then the second step.

What are the things I need to focus on? Should I learn the tools? Should I learn Figma first? Should I be good at graphic design and visual design? Or should I learn about research? Should I read about interviews? What's the first step I need to do? So I wanted to make sure that my course answers just that. So let's say the user scenario for my course is this. I am Iwana.

and I'm trying to transition into UX design. I don't have a background in design. I haven't studied design. I haven't worked as a designer or in anything related to design for that matter, but I wanna get started. And I sort of feel that all the information is out there, but I don't know what would be my first step. I wanna do this on my own and I have to learn what are the things that I need to succeed on my own. This is the problem that I'm responding to. How can you learn design on your own using all the information out there, all the resources available,

potential mentorship that you can find, potential community support that you can find. And so how do you put together all the ingredients of a successful journey of transitioning into UX design on your own? I also say it in my course, and I'm going to say it again now, it's much easier if you choose a course that's already been built to take you on that journey, right? So if people come to you and join into UX, then they will get the mentorship, they will get the community, they will get the

content already curated for them. So it's faster, but you can do that on your own as well. So they can take the self-learning path where they find their mentor in their company, in their network. Maybe they have a friend who's a designer and who's willing to meet with them twice per month. So you can also do it on your own. And this is what was my main, let's say, mission with this course was to teach people how to navigate everything that they need to put together in the

puzzle of a successful transition. That's more around the content. In principles, I think that one thing that I was very keen about or that felt very important to me was to be able to speak their language. So if I start talking about what you need to do to learn UI design, maybe they don't even know what UI design is. So I remember very clearly that in the beginning when I was starting out,

I kept hearing about this UI design thing and then UX design and what's the difference? I don't get it. Are these separate roles? Which one do I want? I don't even understand what I should be. Should I be the UX designer or am I like an interaction designer? What am I even pursuing here? So this was one of the

core principles for building my course, speaking the language of someone who doesn't understand the design industry yet. What are we even talking about here? Establishing some basic definitions. This was one thing. And then another thing was that I wanted to make sure that it's tangible, it's actionable. You can start immediately, like create a space where you can build your strategy. I give them a notion template that's already populated with some resources in there and they can

Start learning right now. It's not just preparing for learning, but actually have actionable points you can use. And then the last point, which was enable every student, support them in finding their own path and their own story and building that story that will eventually land them a job and get them noticed in the design industry. So it's very much focused around personal exercises, reflection exercises. There's something that I call the Who I Am Canvas.

that I teach you how to fill in. Let's look at your experience so far. It might not be related to design, but maybe there are some transferable skills in there. Let's look at what you naturally feel you're good at or you enjoy doing, what you've been praised for. Let's look at some hobbies you might have. Is there anything that could tie into UX design that you could use for storytelling purposes and for articulating who you are as a designer? So it's also very focused around this

personal component of defining why you want to get into UX design. What are your goals? What are your dreams? And who are you on this journey? So those are the three things that I build my course around. I'm not sure I answered your question. More than I think it was fantastic. Hearing those principles explains a lot your thinking and what to expect from it as well. So I think you already sold it to me.

even though it was not an intention. But no, it's really great because I think those guiding principles really help you to shape the content, not just like with the dry information that you can find on internet, right? And here's someone's opinion, but like you said, making it more practical, actionable, as well as based on who you are. It's really fantastic. I think it's also important to mention a few other things that when I was designing particularly an online course that is digital and that has some competition on the marketplace,

like you said, there is already all sorts of information on internet. There are a few things that I definitely had to consider as well and understand what's the difference that you're offering on a market that other products do not offer. And luckily, I was still more, let's say, privileged because it was still early on. It was 2018. And I believe that

The whole demand started during the COVID when people were locked down and started thinking whether they need to do this career switch because design looks to be a very cool thing, sexy thing right now. And so there was a huge wave of more courses and more educational content starting from the coronavirus. But I was a bit more privileged because there were educational programs, but not to that extent that we have it today on the market. Primarily, you could find two niches back then. One niche would be boot camps.

So it's like this full-on program with a couple of mentors, with curriculum, the theory, the practice, the group that you work with. Again, it's more similar to this offline context I was in the past before. And then there are those like cheap affordable courses on Udemy, usually costing like 10, nine bucks. And kind of did the research, obviously, as a designer to understand how these offerings fulfill in the market needs and a

quickly learned that the Udemy courses, a lot of people are buying them. There's a big, big pattern that people don't perceive these as value because it's so cheap and then people buy it and just tend not to finish it. They could start watching one, two, three, couple of videos and then they naturally drop out. It's something that was like a big of a problem for me. I definitely wanted to make sure people stick around a bit.

And then secondly, on the bootcamp case, the second very big educational choice, definitely it was a big investment, not just in terms of money, but also in terms of time. And from interviews with the people I did, obviously it was clear that not everybody has both time, energy to do this, as well as the resource, the money. And so what I needed to build was something in between. And after understanding the market a bit better,

I knew that there is not so many courses sort of in between that would be more approachable, I would say. Because when you think about Udemy, you see those very theoretical and very, very nicely put together online courses. But again, it's very like instructional and not in a bad way, but like we're talking about instructional design, but it's just theoretical and almost like you're talking to a robot who tells you what to do, gives you the theory and

but you can't relate to them. You can't connect to them. It's just a theory that not always maps nicely on your real life experience. Another very important thing or guiding principle for me was to make it not as cheap so people feel an investment and people could actually commit to it and make sure if they buy it, it's

conscious decision and they want to stick around and finish it. And then secondly, that it's still not the expensive bootcamp where people can do it on their own time, self-paced, complete it in different timelines, depending on your situation. Another important thing I had to make sure I cover is making it approachable. Again, back to the first guiding principle that I also had in the offline setting was that

For me, I needed to make it not like I'm a robot telling you what to do, but really explaining my practice and mapping how you can use it in your real life. For me, it was important that you listen to a friend, to your ex-friend who gives you sort of some ideas and direction and shows how they did it. And you can understand how you can map it out. So throughout the whole course, how it manifested,

that I kind of had a project back then. And I started from the beginning of the course. Obviously, there was theory and me talking about real life examples, but I would always talk about how I did it in my life. I was talking about the projects I had in an internship with the big clients, with the freelance clients. And then throughout the whole course, I actually took one of the freelance clients. And, you know, when you talk through the steps of the design thinking, like, let's say the user research and then some customer journey mapping and stuff like that.

I literally not just explained how I did it, but I also showed it. And I was recording how I'm like mapping down the persona, the empathy mapping and stuff like that. So people could see it in action. And I would explain my thinking as I was doing that part. So sort of, I guess, my guiding principle was that to make you feel like you sit next to me and that you talk to a friend, not to some sort of theoretical boring instructor, like from the school. Honestly, it was like

intrinsic motivation for me to do this, but I didn't know if I will succeed. I think luckily I succeeded at this because a lot of people are telling me that today, if you think in the market, they compare my courses to the IDF courses, Interaction Design Foundation, if I'm not mistaken. And they compare those two tracks because it's similar in terms of pricing a bit in an idea if you kind of break down your pricing by months, but here you kind of buy it as a bulk as the bundle course. They compare these. I think like this is my

kind of direct competitor right now. But a key differentiator I can hear from other people, and that was my idea behind it, is that you talk to your friends rather than to the teacher. That's another thing I wanted to mention. But I guess, I don't know if we talked about process enough, but just a quick think about the process that it was also like design thinking, classic interviews, surveys to understand the problem needs, understand the clusters, talking to

people to dive deeper into them, then sort of map down the structure based on my experience, based on the industry needs, and then the questions I keep receiving on my DM back then. And so it's a lot of puzzles that came across together and manifested in the structure. And I think I was also lucky to be in good timing with some audience on Instagram. Plus, I had previous experience in the offline setting. So that's how it all went.

Is there something else you think we should cover today before we start talking about the takeaways? I can start. So I feel that now there's like this mania in the market with creating content and creating courses and creating educational stuff and everybody is doing it. And I think it's great for self-development and for your own growth and for exploring new facets of being a designer.

So I want to encourage everyone to do that mindfully, of course. But I feel that one of the takeaways that I have from this experience, which really helped me understand what goes into building a course in important structures. I went to Madrid. I shot the video for four days from morning till the evening with a team of like 20 people. It was an incredible experience. And I've learned how hard it is to produce something that's of good quality.

quality. There's a lot of work that goes into it to produce the content, to produce the video, the output, everything. So it's just like a factory effort, right? It's not easy because I feel that many people start off saying, oh, I'm going to just put some content in there and then I'm going to film it and then that's it. But you have to edit everything. You have to create a brand around it. You have to create a website that hosts it. You have to create like it's an entire process. It's really not easy. And plus have the audience that will buy it. That's also very important as well.

So looking back, I feel that it's a big effort and it's totally worth it. But I just want to encourage everyone that wants to do that. The takeaway to which I'm pointing towards is that you really have to have something to say. So if you don't bring that personality aspect, if you don't have a good connection with your audience, understanding who your audience is,

what they want, what's valuable to them, what is the problem you're solving, right? Like everything we do in UX design. If you don't have that unique value proposition, that unique selling point, if you don't have that definition of what's up with this course, if you just make a course to make money with it, I mean...

You can succeed, but chances are that you'll also invest a lot of time in something that flops. So start by understanding and really connecting to your audience and really connecting to the problem space like you would with every design effort. This is my takeaway. And then another takeaway, maybe it's not a takeaway, it's just a personal observation that I want to make, is that it's absolutely incredibly rewarding. And I think you've experienced that a lot with IntoUX.

It's just incredibly rewarding to create something on your own by yourself and then see that people get it, that they get it, not just that it's like intelligible, that they can make something out of it, but they really see the value and they really like it. So whenever I get a good review for my Domestika course, it's just like,

the best thing that I've heard. So a lot of people send me nice messages on UX goodies on LinkedIn. Thank you for your content. It's lovely. It helped me, whatever. So I'm happy for every message. But when you put so much effort into something and you have so much fear around, did I get everything right? Did I miss anything? Is this really helpful? Is this really valuable? And then you get that confirmation through a good review. It's just like one of the most powerful things I've experienced.

Just being able to help people, that's great. And then the last takeaway would be that it's a tedious process and you have to take it seriously. So if you want to create any kind of educational content, if you put flimsy efforts into it, you're going to have flimsy outputs. And I've done that.

myself on UXquity. Sometimes when I'm very tired or sometimes when I'm just burned out by creating so much content, I create content that's like, in a way, not necessarily lazy, but it doesn't require as much effort and research and validation and exploring, reaching out to people and everything. So sometimes I don't put in all that effort and people can feel it. And so that content typically

doesn't work very well or I'm not happy with it immediately after posting it and I feel like, why did I even post it? And so my point is be ready to put in a lot of effort because otherwise you're going to end up with something that's half-baked or just flimsy. And I know that I was also recently talking to Vitaly from Smashing Magazine and he also launched his course on patterns for

Smart Patterns, I think it's called. And I'm also taking it because it's super, super useful. But he spent so much time and so much money producing it. He took it so seriously. And he had a community that already trusted him. And he could literally kind of give them anything because they would get some benefit out of it. But he was very,

very, very serious about making it like to every last detail, perfect and quality and invest in production and invest in everything. So what I'm trying to say is that you really have to put in a lot of work if you want to create your own course. And I'm going to end on that note and pass it over to you with your final insights and feedback.

I love this. I really like especially your last point, thinking long term, because like you said, like if you have audience, people who trust you, they will still buy from you. So it's going to work for a little while. But if you really want to make sustainable and self sort of growing and not put too much effort after you published it, you kind of really, really, really need to do your homework and prepare really good materials. And I like that you mentioned that you have to do a lot of design thinking, a lot of research you have

to read a lot. You have to think about it. You have to refine it before you publish it. And I think that also worked for me a lot because right now, look, it's been like three years as the course is live. People are still buying it like they bought it in the beginning and not because I promote it. In fact, the last year I didn't promote it at all. And I don't even post on Instagram. I don't have like visibility that I used to have in the past, but people are still buying it because there is a word of the mouth that works itself out.

So if you really want this thing to work long term, you kind of really have to do your homework and put effort into it in advance. It will work in the beginning, but then if it's not worth it and people don't recommend it and people don't talk about it and don't mention it anywhere, then it's just not going to work. You'll have to constantly push it and sell it. And you don't want to do that, especially if it doesn't provide the value that you originally claimed it would.

So that's definitely, I would kind of just back up to that takeaway that you have. Second takeaway would be also similar to what you said, but I kind of reframe it into start with why and understand what's your differentiator. For me, it manifested in reflecting in my past experiences and understanding

what problems I personally experienced. And again, like you, you still do your research, right? You still hear others and understand what they needed in their education that they didn't get. But also I think it has to come from you. You really have to know the pain very, very well. Like I said, for me, it was that I never got this approachable mentor or feedback that I badly needed because in the beginning you're so lost and you feel like you're not good

doing the right thing. And you just need somebody to give you the direction and sense of validation at least. Again, the takeaway is to reflect on your past experience. Think on how would you do it better? How would you else solve the problems that you or other people have designed thinking, right? And the last takeaway I would probably also have here is to...

consider the medium or the context in which you're doing it, because I can see differences in both online settings. So when you do the digital online course and when you do it in the offline setting, when you can actually talk to people and they could ask you a question and you can form the relationships, then it's a bit different because you have to navigate the internal dynamic and how people

People engage with each other and with your information. And there is this group dynamic. Some groups work better, some not. There is always the risks in terms of collaboration. But then the medium you're using, each of those mediums or contexts has its pros and cons, and you have to account for it and also think about the gaps each of those contexts have. So like I said, in digital, the gap is that you are not there to answer their question all the time. Whereas in the offline settings, you have other risks like collaboration and stuff like that.

What I encourage you to do is to think about how would you close those gaps, map it down, think about those gaps and just think, try to brainstorm a little bit how you can close the gaps and offer some solutions. Maybe they wouldn't be perfect, but at least there is a solution for that situation and you thought about it in advance. And that would be it on my side. I guess that's also it for this episode.

So thank you everyone for joining and listening it through. We definitely encourage you to check out our courses. If you have more questions, reach out to us on Instagram, or you can also send us a voice message on Anchor like our listener Matthew sent us. It's very, very, very nice and welcoming. And I personally felt very warm when I heard this message.

But definitely use any instance or any platform you prefer. We also have an anonymous link if you want to submit a review for this podcast or if you want to talk about your case anonymously and you want us to cover the topic that you're dealing with in the next episode. And that would be it on my side. Thank you so much for joining. We hope to see you on the next episode. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.