03 Nov I Completed Google’s UX Design Foundations. Here’s What It Changed in My Work.
Part 10 of UX Foundations for Small Business Websites — a series on the UX principles I use in client work, and this one is about Google UX design foundations.
A fair question, from a client or anybody else: you’ve been designing and building websites since 2009 — why go take a foundations course?
Because foundations are where the quiet bad habits live.
On September 2, 2025, I completed Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design, the first course in Google’s UX Design Certificate on Coursera. This post — the last in this series — is my own account of why I did it and what it actually changed in the work I hand to clients. Not a course review, and definitely not the course retold: you have the previous nine posts for my take on the principles themselves, all in my own words.
Why a veteran goes back to basics
Two honest reasons.
First, my field moved while I was busy working in it. When I started, “mobile design” meant checking whether a site survived being squinted at. Accessibility was a specialty. Research was something agencies with six-figure budgets did. Today those are the job. I wanted my fundamentals re-examined against how the discipline teaches them now, not just how I absorbed them project by project.
Second, clients deserve a designer who can explain decisions, not just make them. Experience gives you instincts. Structured learning gives those instincts names, checks them against evidence, and — occasionally — tells you one of them is wrong. I’d rather find that out in a classroom than on your dime.
Four things Google UX design foundations sharpened
1. I name the problem out loud now, in writing, before designing. I always gathered information at the start of a project. What changed is the discipline of compressing it into one sentence: a specific person, their goal, the obstacle. Then I get the client to agree to that sentence before a single page gets designed. Half the revisions I used to do mid-build have quietly disappeared. We stopped solving two different problems while calling them one project. (Post 7 in this series is this habit, explained.)
2. I test earlier, with uglier drafts, on purpose. Waiting until a design looks finished before showing it to users is a great way to protect the design and waste the feedback. Now I’ll put a rough, clickable draft in front of real users from the client’s world sooner: a first-time church guest, a festival-goer, a volunteer coordinator. That’s because it’s cheap to change. Watching someone get stuck on a draft is mildly embarrassing and incredibly valuable. Watching them get stuck on the launched site is just expensive.
3. Accessibility and equity stopped being a checklist and became opening questions. I checked contrast and alt text before. Now the first conversations on a project include who might be excluded. It could be a form’s assumptions, a video without captions, or a process that only works on a new phone with fast internet. It’s much cheaper to design the door wide at the start than to widen it after the building’s up. Post 4 in this series is the long version of this one.
4. I audit my own bias before I audit the client’s website. The section on bias in research rewired how I run discovery. I write down what I expect to find before I interview users. That way I can catch myself collecting only the answers that agree with me. I work harder to hear from the frustrated and the first-time visitors. I don’t settle for the happy regulars a client understandably wants to introduce me to. Post 6 covers those traps in detail — I wrote it because I recognized myself in most of them.
What it changed on this very website
If you’ve read this series on the redesigned signaturewebdesigner.com, you’ve been looking at the results. The redesign was built mobile-first around one clear message instead of a heavy slideshow, with accessibility, page speed, and plain-language service pages treated as design requirements rather than chores — and with this blog series itself built the same way I now build client work: audience named (Eastern NC business owners, non-profits, and churches), problems stated, drafts reviewed before anything goes live.
The certificate is one course of a longer program, and I’m continuing through it — the same way I’ll keep writing up what changes in my process here, in my own words, as I go. Going back to Google UX design foundations didn’t make me a beginner again. It made the experience I’ve been selling since 2009 easier to check, easier to explain, and harder to fake — including to myself.
That’s the whole point of a foundation. It’s not where a house starts and stops mattering. It’s the part everything else is standing on.
Want that kind of foundation under your website? I design and build sites for small businesses, non-profits, and churches across Eastern NC — starting at $40/hour, packages from $699, with 15% off for non-profits and churches. Get a free quote or browse the full UX series and my recent work.
Previous in this series: What Does a UX Designer Actually Do? · Start the series: What Is UX Design?
This article is my own account, in my own words, of completing Google’s Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design course on Coursera in September 2025 and applying its principles in my client work. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google or Coursera.