3 UX Degrees to Advance Your UX Skills & Career

No, once you have a seat on the UX training platform, you have unlimited access to all courses, degree, UX certification at all level levels, and external inspirational courses. Check here if a seat is already available for you.

No. You can also take just a single course within a single key area of e-commerce UX, for example, a course just on “product pages”, “cart & checkout” etc. These courses are also available at the same 3 levels of difficulty as the degrees.

Any progress you make within a single course will automatically count as progress toward the degree and UX certification. (Certification requires completing all courses within a degree)

See the complete course list on the catalog page.

Yes. We’ve built the training platform, so any progress you make within a course or degree is synchronized across all UX training levels — and also across Baymard Premium (where guidelines you’ve covered during training will be marked as read). So if you first take Professional and then later want to take Master, all the training materials that overlap will be pre-completed on Master. If you are in doubt about which level to take we recommend starting with an easier one.

Yes, the Practitioner degree (and courses) is built for people new in the UX field or those who don't work in a direct UX role (e.g., product managers, content managers, developers, etc). It ensures you get a solid UX foundation – but without spending time on the ‘endless UX details’.

You can earn UX certification within the 3 degrees: UX Practitioner, UX Professional, or UX Master. To become UX certified you will have pass an online multiple-choice case-study exam for each of the 6 courses in the degree. The 6 exams are taken separately (approx. 20 minutes each) as you progress through each of the 6 courses in the degree. This ensures that the exam topic and your current training progress are closely aligned. Once the 6th exam is passed, you are certified and can get a public profile at baymard.com/certified (optional). You can learn more about the exam format and requirements under each degree page.

(If you take the courses separately, and not through a degree, your exams will also count towards certification)

The UX training courses are based on the same 130,000+ hours of UX research findings as the guidelines are — and those guidelines covered during training are the same as what you’ll find in the Guideline tool.

If there’s value in having a different employee occupy one of your training seats, then you can rotate the seat at any time on the Seat Management page.

However, below are 6 benefits of keeping the UX training seat for an employee after they have become UX certified:

• Video guideline summaries for a large part of the courses (Practitioner relies the most on video, Professional uses a mix of article texts and video, and Master relies mostly on article texts with optional videos).
• Quizzes to test your knowledge as you train.
• A guided training flow through the most important Baymard UX research. Curated by Byamard’s research at 3 different levels of difficulty.
• UX certification to document your UX skill, along with a public profile at baymard.com/certified (optional).

The UX training & certification is currently built to cover 40-80% of Baymard’s core e-commerce UX research & guidelines. So it’s directly applicable to traditional industries such as Apparel, Home & Hardware, Mass Merchants, Direct-to-Consumer, Electronics, Furniture & Home Decor, and Health & Beauty.

The majority of the training will also be relevant for B2B e-commerce, and specialty industries such as Food & Groceries, Travel, Telco & ISPs, Digital Subscriptions & SaaS, etc. However for this latter group of specialty industries, we recommend that you first read the guidelines in the “Essential” collection within your industry before taking training (it is the first guideline group after choosing your industry).

We’ve built the UX training platform to be fully in sync with your guideline “marked as read” progress. If you’ve previously read a guideline in Premium and marked it as ‘read’, we’ll pre-check that part of the training course as already being completed. This saves you from wasting time on redundant training. (If you want a refresher, you can still open these pre-completed training materials as you progress through a course)

A unique aspect of the UX training platform is that for each UX research finding taught, you’ll assess your site (or a client’s) through the embedded ‘Review Tool’, providing you with a continuous stream of UX insights.

All these individual site assessments get added to a single scorecard deliverable with high-level UX insights that you can circulate with your colleagues or client.

Baymard's training content covers both desktop and mobile guidelines for all themes in Baymard's research catalog – Homepage & Category Navigation, On-Site Search, Product Lists & Filtering, Product Pages, Cart & Checkout, and Accounts & Self-Service. Users can choose to train in all topics, or in individual topics of their choosing. Visit the Content Catalog page for additional information.

For users pursing a degree – which covers all of the major themes found in Baymard's research catalog – training can take anywhere from 37 to 122 hours, depending on the tier at which they choose to train.

Individual courses (e.g., just the "Homepage & Category course), which are more narrow in focus, take less time to complete. On average, Practitioner courses take an average of 6 hours to complete, Professional courses take an average of 12 hours to complete, and Master courses take an average of 20 hours to complete.

More specific time estimates for all available degrees and courses can be found on the Content Catalog page.

Yes. Certification exams are entirely optional. Users interested in training without pursuing certification can simply skip the certification exams at the end of the training courses.

Once seats have been purchased, you can visit the Seat Management page and assign a seat to yourself.

If you are assigned a seat by a manager or account administrator, you will be notified via email.

Yes. Once you have become certified, you can visit the Your Dashboard page to view your certification details and save a copy of your certification badge.

Additionally, you can choose to create a public Baymard.com profile page that can customize and link to from your resume, Linkedin profile, etc.

Yes. If you fail a certification exam, there is a 7-day lockout period, after which you can reattempt the exam.

You can at most attempt the same exam 4 times in a single calendar year.

Passed exams never expire, so you can, for example, take one exam now and wait 2 years to take the remaining exams, and still become certified once the final exam is passed.

If there’s value in having a different employee occupy one of your training seats, then you can rotate the seat at any time on the Seat Management page.

However, below are 6 benefits of keeping the UX training seat for an employee after they have become UX certified:

• There are 3 levels of UX certification, so until they reach the highest UX Master level, then there are more UX training courses and UX certification levels available.
• Prevent UX knowledge rot by keeping up to date on the newest research published. As guidelines in your (e.g., Professional degree) get deprecated and updated, and new research is added, your training course progress will drop below 100%. You will then be seamlessly guided toward the newest material in your course, ensuring your knowledge is always current.
• For those with a UX training seat, the 200+ video summaries of guidelines and the 400+ knowledge quizzes (that exist in the UX training platform) will also be embedded into the normal guideline view. This makes it much easier for employees with a seat to refresh their knowledge of past-read UX guidelines.
• We have a number of guest lectures by external speakers that are being added throughout the year (Google, Brad Frost, Luke Wrobleski, Michael Aagaard, etc) - each hosting either a 1h lecture or a full 3-4h online workshop. Over a year, this largely corresponds to sending the employee to a UX conference, just without all of the travel overhead.
• We’ve introduced recertifications. So if you are e.g. certified UX Professional in 2019, you can recertify and get your certificate updated to 2023 (this also jumps you to the top of the public list).
• The Team Skill Matrix only shows the UX skill and progress for employees with a training seat. So if you or any team manager want to get the complete picture of your team’s current UX skill level, or identify either individual and team-wide knowledge gaps - then it makes sense to have most of the team on a training seat.

For most UX designers and UX researchers and those who work directly with UX decisions on a weekly basis, then item #2, #3, and #6 would typically be enough to get a positive ROI. For whom this is worthwhile is up to you.