User Experience and Web Design
Certificate Program

User Experience and Web Design

Intuitive design

Enroll in Certificate View Individual Courses

Certificate Description

Designing for your users

UCSC Silicon Valley Extension's newly revised User Experience and Web Design certificate program teaches you to anticipate user needs and design the look and feel of new products that are intuitive and easy to use. Learn customer analytics and behavior by working with a design team of peers. Explore different areas of focus to integrate your creativity with the most effective, best practices in the industry.

Areas of focus

  • User experience design
  • Visual design
  • Design implementation

User Experience and Web Design certificate program objectives

  • Understand the iterative and user-centered design process with the spiral model.
  • Use the user-centered design strategies and methods to create highly effective, pleasurable, and usable products while meeting business goals and objectives.
  • Understand and apply the design principles to create effective user interfaces for mobile devices and products that incorporate wearable technology.
  • Be able to implement a design prototype using various prototyping tools.
  • Be able to evaluate the user interface through user research and heuristic evaluation.
  • Learn and apply the visual design principles to create engaging user interfaces.
  • Be able to use HTML/CSS/JavaScript to prototype websites or single page web applications.
Cost: $6,000 | International Tuition Cost
Required Credits: Total Required: 7–10 courses/17 units: Take all three core courses from Part A (7.5 units); choose one from Part B (3 units), two to four elective courses (4.5 units); and the Capstone course (2 units). End with certificate of completion review.
Duration: A full-time student can complete the certificate in 9–12 months.

Courses

Course Units Fall Winter Spring Summer
1. Core Courses A (all required)
Designing with Cascading Style Sheets: Advanced 2.0
HTML5 Advanced and Javascript APIs 3.0
Visual Design for Digital Media 2.5
2. Core Courses B (One required or take both & other Core B course will count as an elective)
Mobile Interface Design 3.0
User Experience Design Fundamentals 3.0
3. Elective Courses
Adobe Creative Suite 3.0
Adobe Illustrator, Introduction 1.5
Adobe Photoshop 3.0
Designing User Experience for Smart Things, Virtual Reality and Wearable Technology 3.0
Designing with Cascading Style Sheets: Fundamentals 2.0
HTML5 Fundamentals 2.0
Introduction to Web Programming: JavaScript and PHP 2.0 Spring TBD Summer TBD
Mobile Interface Design 3.0
Responsive Web Design and Implementation 2.0
User Experience Design, Advanced 3.0
User Experience Design Fundamentals 3.0
4. Capstone (required)
Capstone User Experience Project 2.0
5. Required Certificate Review
User Experience and Web Design Certificate Completion Fee None

Certificate Inquiry Form

Contact Us
Speak to a student services representative.

Call (408) 861-3860

Envelope extension@ucsc.edu

Requisite Knowledge

Please review the course descriptions to ensure that you have taken necessary prerequisites or meet the requirements through job experience or previous education. Before you begin the program, it’s recommended that you take Adobe Illustrator, Introduction and Adobe Photoshop or have the equivalent knowledge and experience.

Advisory Board

Min Wu, chair

Certificate Program Chair

MIN WU, PhD, is the technical lead in front-end design and development at Cloud Lending Solutions. He is founding owner of Skill Trellis, LLC and worked eight years as principal interaction designer at Oracle. He has a master’s degree in Information Security and a doctorate in Security and Usability from MIT.

Certificate Program Advisory Committee

ARIN BHOWMICK, MA-Human-Computer Interaction
Vice President & Chief Design Officer
IBM Cloud

REJ SIDHARTHAN, MA-DES, Interaction
CEO & UX Strategist
Freshdesign

WILLY LAI, BA
Vice President of User Experience
Macy's

Declaring Candidacy

You can enroll in a certificate program any time during your studies.

Once you create your student account, you can enroll in a certificate program. Although you can enroll in a program at any time, the benefit of enrolling early is that it locks in your certificate requirements. This means that even if program requirements change, the requirements to complete your certificate will remain the same for you.

  • You must enroll in the certificate program before enrolling in the Certificate Completion Review.

You have a total of five years to complete all necessary courses in a certificate program.

All the necessary units in a certificate must be completed within a five-year window. The clock begins on the first day of your first course in the certificate program. For example, if you started a course on Sept. 5, 2017, you would have to complete all of the required units in this certificate by Sept. 4, 2022.

  • Enrolling in a certificate program does not trigger the beginning of the five-year window. It begins the first day of the first course that applies to a certificate program.
  • The Certificate Completion Review process does not have to occur within the five-year timeframe.

Grade Requirements

Please note that only letter grades of C- or higher may be applied to a certificate, and in some programs, students may have more stringent requirements. Students in most employer- and government-sponsored payment programs, such as workforce development, as well as international students on F-1 visas, need to maintain a B average to meet their requirements. Personal Financial Planning students have additional grade requirements for individual courses to attain a certificate.

See Grading and Credits Policy for further information.