Are the interaction design foundation courses worth it for product managers?

A few months ago, I got a membership that cost $16/month at the interaction design foundation and took two courses:

• User research- methods and best practices: This course is about the different types of user research (usability, contextual enquiry, ethnography…etc.)
• Get your product used- Adoption and appropriation: This one is about consumer behaviour and ways to maximise product usage, for example by designing products that are flexible enough to be appropriated (More on this topic here)

There are many courses on the website; I chose those two as they were suggested for product managers. Here’s my review of the courses

The pros:

• Well structured, the course follows a good sequencing logic; it starts from general concepts and deep dives into those. I was rarely bored or overwhelmed and found the format beginner-friendly and accessible.
• High calibre lecturers, IDF has many content creators worldwide; most of them are professors from reputable universities, making for high-quality content.
• Comprehensive, The courses are quite long, so don’t expect to finish them in a week or two, the usability course has 8 lessons, each lesson has 5 to 10 lesson items on average. Needless to say that this covers all the key concepts of a given topic.
• Course certificate, At the end of each lesson item, there are a couple or three graded questions either automatically if the question is multi-choice, or by a contributor, if the question is open-ended. The points earned go towards earning a course certificate.

The cons:

• Too much text, For those who prefer learning by watching videos, you might find the lessons a bit tedious as there’s a lot to read.
• The questions are too easy; The questions are designed to test if you actually read the material and not if you absorbed it or understood it. Some questions are somewhat ridiculous, for example, “what topic is this lesson about”, the answer is literally in the lesson’s title. This diminishes the certificate’s credibility since one can superficially read the content, learn nothing, and still earn a certificate.

So are those courses worth it? The answer is, it depends.
If you’re looking to expand your knowledge, then, of course, they’re worth it! However, if you want to apply the learnings to your day-to-day job, those courses might not be appropriate: They’re very design orientated, and chances are, you have designers and user researchers in your team that know more about usability and user research than you (assuming that you don’t do any design work or usability testing yourself)

Nevertheless, I highly recommend those courses if you’re unfamiliar with the design and research process. You will get a great sense of achievement after finishing them and a certificate to put on your LinkedIn profile!