UX Census Hungary 2022

Introduction

We used an online survey to run the study from 12 April to 11 May, 2022. The survey was available in Hungarian as well as in English and we have collected 360 individual responses in total.

The goal of the study is to understand the state of the Hungarian UX community and professionals, including disciplines closely related to UX (such as service design, DesignOps, and the likes). We excluded respondents who live and work outside of Hungary but included those living in Hungary but working for companies or clients abroad. This latter category is definitely part of the local UX community and from an employer perspective, their employers compete directly with local companies.

All in all, we took 345 responses into consideration in this research. As most questions were optional, the number of respondens vary for each topic and is displayed for each question throughout the study.

Demography and education

Residence

We used a dual approach to residence: we asked where each respondent lives and also where their employer is located. This allowed us to have an understanding of how many work for local companies vs international ones and also how many live in Budapest vs outside of Budapest.

We don’t know how much direct impact remote work has had on this area but it’s worth noting that one out of every nine local UX professionals work for an employer outside of Hungary.

This insight has important macro-econimic implications: 11% of local talents are employed by non-local companies, and they earn (and spend) a presumably higher salary locally. (Salaries will be discussed in a dedicated chapter later in the study.)

Looking at those working for Hungarian employers shows a strong overrepresentation of Budapest as residence. Compared to our earlier studies, the number and proportion of respondents living outside of Budapest have grown, but this may also indicate that some former Budapest-based professionals have started to work for foreign employers and some have moved to the countryside to work remotely since 2017.

All in all, Hungarian employers looking for new hires shouldn’t only focus on Budapest and professionals living in the countryside now have a better chance to find jobs.

Age

Most of our community is between 25 and 40, and we might consider an “average” UX professional to be 32 years old. Compared to our earlier studies, the community has matured and the proportion of professionals under 35 has decreased.

When looking at the absolute numbers though, the younger population has almost doubled so there’s a great supply of new talents. That said, still very few are under 25 years, potentially because one needs longer education and onboarding to get started in the industry, or because this profession is not generally attractive for early career professionals.

It’d be great to see a growing proportion of people under 30 (or even under 25) in the future which would be a good indication that UX has become an appealing career choice for fresh graduates.

Gender

This was the first study where we asked the gender of our participants, partially to learn about gender representation within the community, and also to analyze if and how gender correlates with salary and career.

There’s an almost balanced male to female ratio with men being slightly overrepresented. The Hungarian population’s 53% are women (according to the 2011 Hungary Population Census), however, when we look at the age group 25-40 (which is the majority of our respondents), 51% of the Hungarian population is male. All that to say that women are moderately underrepresented in our community.

Education

We can consider UX professionals a highly educated community: 85% of them have at least a Bachelor’s Degree. This is more than in our 2017 study although the reason behind this growth is not obvious: it could be due to the extended number of respondents or to the higher education design programs launched in recent years.

It should come as no surprise that the most popular faculty is design, more than one quarter of the respondents studied design in higher education. Design is followed by economics, IT, and psychology.

The similar section in our 2017 study did not have the exact same question so we cannot directly compare the results here, but it stands out that the formerly common economist and IT background is no longer typical. This change can again be explained by the university design programs launched since 2017.

On top of being an educated population, 5% have more than one university or college degree which emphasizes how much this community values and desires education.

Career

Experience and seniority

We have scrutinized the profile of our respondents: their focus and role within UX, work experience, title, responsibilities, and the relationship between these. The distribution of seniority shows a bell curve, with most respondents being on a mid-career or senior level.

Although the categories in 2017 were slightly different, comparing the data shows that the weight of the junior and mid-career level respondents has decreased while senior and leader categories have grown. It’s worth noting how the junior level decreased from 23.18% to 14.49% even though a lot of respondents only started their UX career in the last few years. (According to the professional experience, 40% of our respondents have worked 4 years or less in UX.) This might indicate that not all early professionals use the prefix junior or they move on from this category very quickly.

Besides having a lot of early professionals, the Hungarian UX community is getting more mature: the number of people with 7+ years of experience has doubled since 2017 and the average experience has grown from 4 years to 5.5 years.

We have checked how much experience respondents have on different seniority levels:

• Junior level respondents claim to have 1.17 years of professional experience that enforces that the junior title mostly refers to the very beginners.
• The average experience for the mid-career level is 3.42 years and there’s a significant variation here - we have mid-level respondents with 1 year of experience as well as with 9 years.
• Seniors have 6.87 years of professional experience on average and responses vary from 2 years to 20 years.

Job roles and titles

The majority of our respondents work as full-time employees in a dedicated UX role and that is a significant change since 2017 when there were almost the same amount of people who had other responsibilities besides UX. There aren’t many freelancers among our respondents, their proportion is essentially the same as five years ago.

The majority work as (UX, UI, or product) designers, and the second and third most popular roles (researcher and strategist) are far less common.

There’s a vast variety when it comes to actual job titles. Even after consolidating similar expressions (e.g. UX Designer and User Experience Designer), there are more than 100 different titles mentioned in the responses. That being said, half of the respondents are represented by the 10 most popular titles:

1. Product Designer
2. UX Designer
3. UX Researcher
4. UX/UI Designer
5. Senior UX Designer
6. Senior Product Designer
7. Design Lead
8. Product Strategist
9. Senior Experience Designer
10. Lead UX Designer

Removing terms referring to seniority (junior, senior) and specific responsibilities (lead, manager, etc.) provides us the most frequent “core” roles:

The list of job titles is clearly dominated by UX and Product Design. Product Designer has become a really popular title since 2017 thus we decided to scrutinize the differences between the Product Designer vs UX Designer role (to be discussed in the upcoming chapters). One thing we should really embrace is the growth in the representation of researchers in our community. While we only had 5 researcher respondents in 2017, this year the number was 41.

And while we are at researchers, it’s worth mentioning that researchers seem to be the most junior discipline (26% of researchers are on junior level, as opposed to the 14.5% of all respondents) so it’s fair to assume that this is where a lot of early career professionals started to work in recent years.

Gender and career

To gain an understanding of the correlations between gender and career, we first looked at the gender distribution by roles. It is to be noted that when it comes to gender, we only analyzed the responses of female and male respondents, due to the low number of non-binary respondents.

Regarding core disciplines, men are somewhat overrepresented (55%) in designer roles while there are significantly more women (70%) working as researchers than men. From a gender’s perspective the strategist and consultant role is the most balanced where we had 50% female and 50% male respondents.

Seniority, on the other hand, is more unbalanced as there are far more juniors among women, and far more senior and leaders among men. That said, the tenure of experience across genders relates to this (that is, women respondents reported an average of 3.9 years of professional experience in UX compared to men’s 6.7 years) which might explain some of these differences.

When it comes to the professional experience in UX, there’s a vast difference between genders, especially over 7 years, that is typically required for senior roles.

Although such imbalances might seem concerning, it’s worth noting that significantly more women have got started in UX in recent years than men (two third of early UX professionals are women, if we look at the last two years). This might mean that UX as a profession is explicitly attractive for women to start or change their career which should hopefully improve equality in the long term.

Roles and responsibilities

Types of responsibilities

Since the majority of respondents are designers, the most common responsibilities are related to design. User interface and conceptual design is almost equally common which means UX professionals are typically involved in visionary work, not just in UI design. Teaching and mentoring engagement has doubled since our last study and this also reinforces the maturity of our craft. Research has also become a responsibility that two thirds do regularly, regardless of their actual job title.

At this point of the study, it’s worth taking a look at the differences between the responsibilities of UX designers and product designers. Although there’s a significant overlap between the two roles, UX designers reported slightly broader responsibilities and seem to be more commonly involved in the following activities:

Design responsibilities

When it comes to design, the typical outcome of the activity is some sort of user interface: wireframes, graphical user interfaces, and prototypes lead the list by far.

Looking for differences between UX and product designers shows again a significant overlap between the two roles. That being said, product designers design more graphical user interfaces and information architecture while UX designers spend more time with wireframing, service design, and DesignOps.

There are more prominent differences across workplace types, that is, companies developing their own products vs companies working on client projects (agencies). Agencies design more wireframes, prototypes, and information architecture but have less copywriting responsibilities compared to designers who work on their companies’ own products.

Design tools

Figma has no doubt become the number one design tool in 2022 in all categories, that is, this tool is used for design, prototyping, and handover by the most UX professionals. Fun fact: Figma was not even mentioned once in our previous study (that was done in 2017, just after the product was officially launched) but only five years later it’s used by more than 90% of our respondents.

Comparing the results to 2017, Sketch, Photoshop, Illustrator, Axure, and Balsamiq have all lost popularity as UX design tools. The only prospering Adobe product is Adobe XD that shows an impressive growth from 5.9% to 15.7% since 2017.

Virtual whiteboard solutions have become immensely popular. Miro being used by 65% and FigJam by 38% seem to be the perfect companion tools to Figma (besides pen and paper).

When it comes to combining tools, Figma and Miro is the most popular combo, used by 60%. Figma is also often used together with other design tools like Sketch (16% use the two tools together), InVision (13%), and Adobe XD (13%).

Besides Figma, Axure and InVision are still used for prototyping by some, however, both of these tools were used by around 45% in our last study (compared to their current 9-11% performance) so they clearly have lost their significance in the design workflow.

There isn’t really a long tail of prototyping tools any more. A couple products have been mentioned by one or two respondents but the list is quite limited: Marvel, Principle, Balsamiq, After Effects, Whimsical, Webstorm, Codepen, Keynote, Salesforce Designer, Anima, UXPin, Origami.

The most popular tool for developer handover is Figma again, however, Zeplin, InVision, Adobe Cloud, and Sketch Cloud have also been often mentioned, and this might indicate that Figma probably isn’t yet the best fit for everyone in this area.

There’s a variety of tools mentioned by one or two respondents here again as a reminder that developer handover often requires some custom tool or special workaround: Abstract, Uxpin, Jira, Google Slides, Simply, Photoshop, Illustrator, Powerpoint, Azure Devops, Storybook, Notion, Word, Google Drive, Github, Loom.

Research responsibilities

Almost half of our respondents do research activities at least monthly, but less than a third of them deal with ResearchOps on a regular basis.

A breakdown of results by researchers and designers sheds light on the reason for this: while designers often conduct actual research, ResearchOps (when not outsourced) is typically a researcher's task–in fact, out of the three areas, this is the most likely to be a weekly task for researchers.

Sorting research methods by (at least) monthly application, it can be seen (perhaps unsurprisingly, due to the predominance of designers among respondents) that the top three methods are competitor or best practice research, stakeholder interviews, and user data analysis.

Focusing on research methods that require active interaction with users, in-depth interviews and moderated testing are the most frequently used by Hungarian UX professionals: nearly half of them collect feedback from users at least monthly this way. Diary studies are the most exotic (almost three-quarters of respondents never use this method), and after two years of a pandemic, the proportion of those who do not conduct field research is also high.

Looking at researchers and designers separately again–and narrowing the focus to at least monthly application–, shows that while almost a half of designers moderate in-depth interviews and user tests on a regular basis, the same is true to a significant majority of researchers. The two groups carry out unmoderated user tests in a similar proportion, while competitor or best practice research is where the balance is tipped to the designers' side.

Research tools

The tool palette has been rearranged since 2017 and, if possible, has become even more colorful. Google Analytics is still the most popular research tool, but its user base among respondents decreased from 46.67% to 28.38%. InVision fell from the top list (it was third with 14.14% in 2017), but Figma and FigJam appeared, and with the spread of remote work, three video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams) also made the list.

Hungarian UX professionals use an average of 3 tools for data collection (median: 2, maximum: 12), and 81% of them mentioned a tool that did not make the top list (i.e. was used by less than ten respondents).

This year, we were curious about the tools that support knowledge management. Here, too, the picture is colorful: an average of 2.45 tools were mentioned (median: 2, maximum: 8), and 41.78% of respondents use something that did not make the top list.

ResearchOps tools are used by far fewer UX professionals, but the range is wide: 84% mentioned a tool that less than ten others turn to.

It already took long to list all research tools mentioned in 2017, and this inspirational paragraph only grew longer in 2022:

AB Testy, Adobe Analytics, Adobe XD, Airite, Airtable, Alchemer, Amazon Cognito, Amplitude, Anaconda, Apple Notes, AppTweak, Asana, AskNicely, Atlassian, Awesome Screenshot, Axure, Axure DevOps, Azure, Azure DevOps, Bear Notes, Box Notes, Calendly, Camtasia, Chartio, Citrix Sharefile, Clarabridge, ClickUp, Concept Board, Condens, Confluence, Contentsquare, Craft, Datadog, DaVinci Resolve, Decibel, Dendron, Descript, Discord, Doodle, Dovetail, Dropbox / Paper, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, EnjoyHQ, Evernote, Exponea, Facebook / Ads, Feedbackly, Figma / FigJam, Firebase, Flourish, FRequest, FullStory, Gean.ly, Gemius, GetFeedback, Gitbook, Github, Gong, Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, Google Forms, Google Meet, Google Optimize, Google Recorder, Google Scholar, Google Search Console, Google Workspace, Heap, HelloSign, Hotjar, Hubspot, Illustrator, InDesign, Indicative, Infinity, Intercom, InVision, Involve.me, Jira, Keynote, Kibana, LinkedIn, LiveSession, Localytics, LogRocket, Lookback, Looker, Loom, Loop11, Lucky Orange, Marvel, Matomo, Maze, Meta, Business, Metabase, Microsoft Forms, Microsoft Office / 365, Microsoft Teams, Miro, Mixpanel, Monday.org, Mural, Nimbus, Notepad, Notion, OBS, Optimal Workshop, Optimonk, Otter.ai, Paste, Pendo, PingPong, PlaybookUX, Pollfish, Power BI, Prezi Video, ProductBoard, Proven By Users, Qualtrics, Quicktime, Ramp, RawGraph, Reddit, Redmine, Respondent.io, Salesforce, Segmanta, Sharepoint, Shortcut, Sketch, Skype, Slack, Slite, Spendesk, SPSS, SurveyMonkey, SurveySparrow, Tableau, Taskade, Testbirds, Things, Trello, Tremendous, Typeform, UsabilityHub, Useberry, User Interviews, User Testing, Userlytics, UserZoom, UX Metrics, UXtweak, Validately, Vimeo, WebEx, Whimsical, XMind, Yammer, YouTube, Zapier, Zenhub, Zeroheight, Zoom, Zurvey.io

Workplace and work environment

Workplace types

The majority of our respondents work in in-house teams (that is, working at a company that develops and designs their own product), and their proportion hasn’t changed since 2017.

There have been some changes regarding company sizes though. The proportion of small and medium businesses have significantly decreased while the representation of large enterprises has grown. While 70% of our respondents in 2017 claimed to work at companies with less than 200 people, this number has dropped to 55%.

The sizes of UX teams have also significantly grown: compared to 2017, the proportion of UX teams with 10 people or more have almost tripled while 1-person UX teams are now rare.

Comparing UX team sizes across workplace types show a significant difference in the 11-20 people category (which is more common for in-house teams) and the 21-50 people category (which is more common in agencies). This isn’t to say that in-house teams provide more family-like work environments, but agencies are more typical homes for larger UX teams.

Products and industries

More than half of our respondents work on both B2B and B2C products and very few are engaged with B2C products only. This implies that UX professionals should be open to work on enterprise solutions.

Looking at the specific industries, technology (e.g. SaaS) proved to be the most common one, followed by finance and telecommunications. These three industries actually represent more than 70% of our respondents.

Behind the top 10 industries there were a couple more categories mentioned such as manufacturing and automation, chemical informatics, public administration, automotive industry, gaming and gambling, cybersecurity, taxation and accounting, and translation and localization.

Working remotely vs in the office

Although we did not include this topic in 2017, it’s fair to assume that this area has changed fundamentally since. Working remotely has become very common, only a handful of UX professionals work from an office every day.

Salary and benefits

Monthly net salary

While in 2017 more than half of our respondents took home a monthly net of HUF 241-480,000, the largest proportion (32%) now earn between HUF 481-720,000. The average monthly net salary can be estimated (and this is just an illustrative estimate due to the wide salary bands used in the survey) at around HUF 678,000, which represents a 70% increase compared to 2017 (HUF 398,000). In addition to the economic changes of recent years, this increase can also be explained by the larger proportion of senior-level professionals and managers among respondents.

The majority of respondents (245 people) work in UX full-time, as employees; they take home an average of HUF 686,000 net per month. The average monthly net salary of employees who have some UX-related responsibilities but do not identify as full-time UXers (62 people) is HUF 590,000. This year, 23 freelancers answered the salary question: they earn more than employees (on average HUF 819,000 net per month), although, not surprisingly, there are no juniors among them, and their proportion of seniors is slightly higher, as well.

Compared to the 2017 survey, the estimated average salary of juniors increased the least, while the average salary of company-level managers increased the most.

The table below shows estimated average monthly net salaries by profession and level. Where there were less than 7 respondents in a category, we did not display an average (due to their low participation, Product Managers / Owners, Service Designers and UX Writers were also left out):

Although the relatively small number of researchers among our respondents makes a more precise comparison difficult, looking further into the distribution of salaries by profession and level seems to reveal that there is no great difference between the salaries of designers and researchers as a whole. At the same time, the salaries of designers vary on a wider scale: some earned less than HUF 240,000, and at the senior level, 8.97% of them had a salary exceeding HUF 1,200,000 (a number not reached by researchers at this level).

In general, the estimated average monthly net salary is higher for larger companies, but similar to 2017, companies employing 1-10 people break the pattern (again, the higher proportion of respondents in management positions may skew their average upwards). For companies employing more than 500 people, the increase in the average salary fell short.

We hear a lot about how companies that develop their own products have an advantage when it comes to salaries. The data seem to support this: only 57.89% of respondents working for such companies earn less than HUF 720,000, while 73.98% of employees at companies working on client projects belong to this category. (At companies that develop their own products, the proportion of seniors and team leaders is slightly higher, while there are fewer juniors and mid-level ones, but the difference is not significant enough to solely explain the differences in salaries).

Salary differences between the capital and the countryside decreased compared to 2017. A likely reason for this is that remote work has become widespread in the meantime (66% of respondents living in the countryside work mostly or completely remotely compared to 51.98% of those living in Budapest). This made it possible for Budapest-based UX professionals to move to the countryside, and vice versa, for those living outside of the capital can now be employed by Budapest-based companies. It is no surprise that the salaries of UX professionals working for foreign companies or clients are much higher than the domestic average.

Gender and salary

Looking at salaries according to gender identity, it can be seen that while the distribution is relatively equal at the junior level, women's salaries do not increase at the same rate as male respondents’ from mid-level up, and this difference is even more pronounced at the senior and team leader levels.

One of the reasons for the large difference visible at the senior level may be that while 73.77% of men at this level have 6+ years of experience, this is true for only 46.15% of female respondents–that is, the former had more time to "move up" the salary ladder. (At the team leader level, there is a much more subtle but similar trend, but at the mid-career level, there is no visible difference in experience that would justify the difference in salaries.)

If we look at the distribution of salaries by experience, we also see that men with the same years of experience earn more, and this difference increases with increasing years.

So it seems that the gender pay gap also affects the domestic UX community. This is not surprising in light of the fact that, according to Eurostat's 2020 data, this gap in Hungary (17%) is wider than the EU average (13%). Our survey did not shed light on the reasons, but (since the difference seems to increase with career progression), it raises questions about the different career paths of female UXers (for example, due to having children), or the often cited phenomenon that men are more willing to ask for higher salaries.

Fringe benefits

We looked at what non-salary benefits UX professionals receive (unlike in 2017, however, we did not examine the importance attributed to these benefits). It is positive that, compared to previous years, a larger number of respondents receive at least one fringe benefit. Cafeteria as a benefit has ceased to exist, but stock options and work-from-home support have appeared, plus a larger proportion of employees benefit from all previously examined benefits. It is interesting that although 88% of respondents work remotely for at least half of the time, only 48% receive some kind of work-from-home support from their employer.

Satisfaction and motivations

Since COVID-19 and remote work has fundamentally changed how we work, we decided to separate workplace (meaning the company, culture, and team) and work environment when focusing on satisfaction and we explicitly asked about work-life balance as well.

Our respondents are typically satisfied with work related things. The most positive sentiment is around the workplace and work environment and the vast majority is happy with their current projects, too (although there were fewer very satisfied responses in this category).

Most complaints came up regarding salary and opportunities for improvement, however, around 70% are still satisfied within these categories. Work-life balance was a new category this year and proved to be one of the most positive ones, with 76% being satisfied with it.

When comparing the results with the previous study (note that not all categories can be compared), satisfaction with improvement opportunities has increased while the rest of the categories have remained about the same.

We have looked into how workplace type and work style (remote or in-office) affect satisfaction.

People working in in-house teams (that is, working at a company that develops and designs their own product) are more satisfied with their projects, their salaries, and their work-life balance than those working for agencies (that is, working at a company that works on client projects). People working at agencies, on the other hand, have a better opinion about the result of their work.

Comparing the satisfaction of people working remotely vs people working from the office gets a more complex overview. To analyze this area, we first organized respondents into three clusters:

1. People working mostly remotely
2. People working in a hybrid mode (that is, 50%-50% split between remote and in-office work)
3. People working mostly in the office

People working mostly remotely (which is the majority of our respondents) are more satisfied with their work environment and, understandably, work-life balance. At the same time, they tend to be less satisfied with their projects and the result of their work which might indicate that they have less impact on certain things due to their less close collaboration with colleagues.

There’s a more spectacular difference around salaries: remote workers are less satisfied with their salaries, hypothetically because the option to work for an international company (for a likely higher salary) is now available to them.

Fun fact: people working in the office are overwhelmingly satisfied with their workplace, 93% being happy with their company culture and team.

How do satisfaction and salary interplay? It should come as no surprise that salary satisfaction is determined by salary levels: all those earning less than HUF 240,000 are dissatisfied with their salary (and 73% of them are very dissatisfied). Above HUF 480,000 net, the majority of respondents are more satisfied with their salary than not, but the “very satisfied” only make up the majority in the top category: 75% of those earning more than HUF 1,680,000.

Low salaries seem to leave their mark on other categories, since respondents earning less than HUF 240,000 were more likely to be dissatisfied with everything else, except for their workplace (55% are rather satisfied) and their work-life balance (64% are rather satisfied); although they had the highest rate of dissatisfaction in these categories as well. In general, satisfaction increases in all categories as salary increases. An interesting exception is that 18-19% of those earning between HUF 721-960,000 and HUF 961-1,200,000 are rather dissatisfied with the projects they are working on, thereby breaking the declining proportion of dissatisfied people. Does the increase in managerial and leadership tasks justify the decrease in satisfaction in their case?

We asked about potential motivations behind changing jobs and the results have significantly changed since 2017. Five years ago the most important incentive to change jobs were learning and improvement opportunities (74%) followed by a better salary (55%), however, better salary has now become the single most important motivation to seek a new job by far. We should keep in mind though that the fewer mentions of opportunities to learn and improve might mean that companies are doing a much better job here than 5 years ago and UX professionals have these opportunities available already.

Breaking down results by salary levels again, it appears that mostly everyone would consider switching for a higher pay but this willingness generally decreases as the salary increases. It is interesting, however, that those earning between HUF 961-1,200,000 are the least motivated to change jobs for a higher salary.

In addition to higher pay, it is interesting to see what else motivates UX professionals at different salary levels to switch jobs:

• More than half of those earning less than HUF 240,000 would switch for development opportunities, career advancement, opportunities abroad or better professionalism.
• For those earning between HUF 241-480,000, development opportunities are the second biggest motivator, as well–we can assume that many of them are UX professionals at the beginning of their careers.
• For those earning between HUF 961-1,200,000, the importance of more flexible or shorter working hours is prominent, and the proportion of those who would change for other types of tasks increases (we may remember that they also showed a similar trend in their satisfaction with projects).

UX education and courses

We dedicated a whole section to the learning experiences regarding UX courses that are available in Hungary. UX education has grown and improved a lot since our last study, and that includes the evolution of online courses as well as the explosive growth in local UX education opportunities, available in Hungarian. As far as local education is concerned, while ten years ago the only available option to learn UX was via short courses, you can now attend UX Masters Programs in Hungary.

Please note that the education providers mentioned in the study cannot always be compared one to one as they can be different across many dimensions - in format, intensity, duration, prices, and even in specialization. Since some of the local education providers offer multiple, specialized courses (for UX design, UI design, or UX research), our study is eventually about education platforms, not about individual courses.

Market share

Based on the number of respondents who formally took part in UX education, MOME (the education platform for Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) is the most popular provider with 84 graduated students, followed by xLabs (73 graduates) and IxDF (32 graduates). This demonstrates the clear dominance of MOME and xLabs in the Hungarian UX education market.

There are almost 20% who completed courses (with typically positive feedback) that were not listed as options. Unfortunately we did not ask what these courses were so it’s worth following up on this topic to discover some less known but valuable alternatives.

The rest of the chapter will not analyze Other courses and those with fewer than 5 respondents.

Efficiency of the courses

We studied which courses had the most positive impact on the career of the participants. Since such education is not only a financial investment into one’s career but also requires a lot of effort and energy to complete, we wanted to identify the least impactful platforms as well.

The three most impactful platforms proved to be xLabs, MOME, and KREA since all of them had a positive impact on the participants’ careers in more than 80% of the cases. The results also show that the more participants a course has had, the harder it is to obtain overwhelmingly positive feedback. That being said, MOME and xLabs are the ones that seem to produce great outcomes in a scalable way and KREA could become a dominant platform if they manage to increase the amount of graduates.

Google UX courses stand out as the least impactful platform while IxDF only achieved a 50% satisfaction rate in this area.

Platforms and purposes

It’s important to know whether dissatisfaction with a course is due to the tutors or false expectations. For example, if you want to learn the foundations of UX but apply to a course that was designed for mid-career UX professionals, that won’t lead to a successful outcome, but not because the course was low quality. To address this issue, we studied how participants measured the success of the course that they attended.

We asked if courses helped participants find their first role in UX or advance in their career. The results below show the ratio of education platforms that were mentioned in these two categories. In other words, these are the best choices if someone wants to get started with UX vs they want to improve their existing skills to proceed in their career.

In summary, if you want to prepare for your first job in UX, xLabs seems the best option. If you already work in UX or a related field, MOME is the most promising platform to expand your knowledge.

Below you can also see the combination of the two dimensions per education platform which can be useful when considering learning opportunities.

This detailed view can reveal for example, that while only 50% of IxDF participants claimed that it was impactful for them, those with a positive experience were typically satisfied with expanding their knowledge. This might mean that some people took this course as beginners (and became dissatisfied with the results), however, it was designed for people with a solid understanding of UX basics. In contrast, every satisfied NN/g course participant found that it helped them advance in their careers so this platform seems to have a better definition and targeting.