Product Design Foundations

6 months duration

6 modules

Updated Jul 30, 2026

Design

Course Overview

Get to know what this course is all about and what you'll learn

Course Description

Product Design Foundations is a seven-week, hands-on introduction to designing digital products people actually want to use. You'll learn the full process — from understanding users to shipping polished, prototyped screens — and finish with a case study that anchors your portfolio.

What you'll learn

Apply the design-thinking process to frame and solve a real user problem
Conduct user and competitive research and turn it into personas and insights
Structure information architecture and map user flows
Create wireframes and low-fidelity mockups in Figma
Design high-fidelity, responsive screens using a design system
Build an interactive prototype from your designs
Produce a portfolio-ready case study that documents your process

How it's delivered

Weekday lessons are on-demand (Monday–Thursday); live weekend sessions apply each week's topic with a mentor. The course ends with a capstone project. Submit every exercise and your capstone through your workspace.

What You'll Learn

Design real products in seven weeks. Product Design Foundations takes you through UX research, design thinking, wireframing, and high-fidelity UI in Figma — ending with a portfolio-ready case study you can show employers.

Course Curriculum

6 modules • Instructor-led • Hands-on projects

Course Curriculum

Prerequisites

None. No design experience required. A laptop, an internet connection, and a free Figma account.

Learning Objectives

Apply the design-thinking process to frame and solve a real user problem
Conduct user and competitive research and turn it into personas and insights
Structure information architecture and map user flows
Create wireframes and low-fidelity mockups in Figma
Design high-fidelity, responsive screens using a design system
Build an interactive prototype from your designs
Produce a portfolio-ready case study that documents your process

Course Modules

Establishes what product design is and how it differs from (and includes) UI and UX. Covers the design process, the principles that guide good design, and the workspace setup — Adobe Figma, Adobe XD, and the plugins you will use across the rest of the program.

What you'll learn

Define product design and articulate how it relates to UX and UI design.
Walk through the design process from discovery to launch at a high level.
Identify the kind of app you will design across the program and who it is for.
Set up Adobe Figma and Adobe XD with the recommended plugins.

The systematic study of target users and competing products. Introduces qualitative methods for uncovering motivations and needs, plus competitive/market research for sizing the opportunity and finding positioning gaps.

What you'll learn

Describe what UX research is and where in the design process to apply it.
Pick between qualitative and quantitative methods based on the question being asked.
Plan and run user interviews that produce usable insights.
Run a competitive research pass to find feature gaps and positioning opportunities.
Synthesize raw research notes into design-ready findings.

The structural design of shared information environments. Covers how to organize content so users can find what they need, build navigation that lets them move between screens without effort, and map user flows that connect goals to screens.

What you'll learn

Define information architecture and its role in product design.
Organize content so people can find what they came for fast.
Build a navigation structure for both web and mobile.
Map user flows that connect a goal to the screens that achieve it.
Spot the symptoms of bad IA — abandonment, support tickets, lost conversions.

From flows to screens. Low-fidelity wireframing in Figma + Adobe XD, building reusable components, getting sizing and spacing right, and running early user testing on the wireframes before any pixels get polished.

What you'll learn

Translate user flows into low-fidelity wireframes.
Build reusable components and apply consistent sizing and spacing.
Pick between paper, low-fi, and mid-fi based on what you need to learn.
Run a usability test on wireframes and act on the findings.

Build a design system that scales — colors, type, spacing, buttons, cards, inputs — and learn how components, variants, and states work in Figma and Adobe XD. Closes with Adobe Fonts setup and the most useful plugins for design-system work.

What you'll learn

Explain what a design system is and why it matters beyond a style sheet.
Create components in Figma and Adobe XD: buttons, cards, typography, inputs.
Use variants and component states for hover, active, disabled, error.
Set up Adobe Fonts and the plugins designers actually use day-to-day.
Document a design system so engineers can implement it without follow-up.

The last mile: turn high-fidelity screens into interactive prototypes in Figma, Adobe XD, and Protopie. Mock the work up for presentation in Photoshop, run a show-and-tell, and publish a credible online portfolio across Dribbble, Behance, and Medium.

What you'll learn

Build an interactive prototype in Figma and Adobe XD.
Use Protopie for richer micro-interactions and conditional flows.
Produce design mockups for presentation with Photoshop, XD, and Figma.
Run a "show and tell" that pitches the design, not just the screens.
Publish work on Dribbble, Behance, and Medium so recruiters can find it.