Udacity Nanodegree Trial

So I’ve signed up for a trial with Udacity - I am giving the Full Stack Web Developer degree a go to strengthen my skills and learn something new.

I’ve heard really good feedback about the platform so far, so I might end up taking the whole degree. Here are some impressions so far:

Inclusive and friendly

I was pleasantly surprised. The initial vibe I got off the platform before I signed up was pretty sleek and a bit.. cold perhaps. On the other hand, I had no doubts that it was legit and I’d learn a lot.

The pace is actually really manageable, even slow. I think that’s pretty awesome because if I were a beginner, I’d find the pace really good, I think.

Udacity have also put a lot of emphasis on having good working habits like working a bit every day, taking the degree seriously and planning your time well. I know from experience I sign up to MOOCS and never finish them so I appreciate their interest in me taking the degree seriously.

As an example - the first section is a ‘readiness assessment’.

What they mean by that is checking whether starting this degree now is a good idea. They ask you about your study habits, how much free time you have to study, what previous knowledge you have. I think that’s quite cool. It made me think seriously about whether I’m in a good place to commit to the degree.

One of the questions was whether I’ve done Python before and I hadn’t (I’ve done Ruby and Javascript). And I really liked the response actually. I expected a blatant - “we recommend you don’t do this course until you know some Python” which would be really vague and unhelpful. Instead Udacity suggested a link to one of their courses (which is free) and recommended me the first 3 lessons. See what I meant by the course being inclusive?

I was a bit hesitant to answer that I had no previous Python experience, but the way they handled the response gave me a clear way forward and didn’t leave me discouraged. I took a look at the videos they recommended, saw I didn’t need to go through them after all and continued on with confidence.

UX can be improved

There are a few small things that keep bothering me. They really are small and are unlikely to bother you, but I think I should mention them.

Confirmation Pop-ups

I find their pop ups messages a bit verbose and distracting. Remember the message I was talking about earlier - the ‘no Python’ experience one? Well, I almost missed it entirely. In fact I closed it, then realised it said something important and resubmitted my response to read it again:

As you can see it looks really similar to the ‘succesful one’:

I assume it’s on purpose to not differentiate between them to be more inclusive, but I think messages should be easy to read, especially if they are important!

This might sound like nitpicking but there’s a lot of these pop ups. You get one every time you a answer a question for example. And in that particular section there was a number of questions and pop ups in a roll.

I think the illustration is pretty and friendly, but it’s very large and distracting. There’s a lot going on in that one pop up and I can’t tell if I answered a question successfully or not. The font is small and difficult to read. With messages like these I’d prefer less text, easier readability, and really unobtrusive design. This way the user can just let their eyes glance over the text and only have to pay attention when its necessary.

I’d even prefer a simple checkmark - green if you’ve passed minimum requirements, red if not with the same nice reassuring message, but in a more readable font.

Video flow

Another thing that bothers me about UX is how short the videos are - many are less than a minute long!

The instructor will start introducing a topic, let’s say: launching Python. Then once he launches everything the video ends before he actually does anything. Then I have to either wait for autoplay to start the next video or manually select it. Then in the next video he will write one or two lines of code, run them and end the video.

Again this feels nitpicky. But the experience of waiting a few seconds in between videos over and over again makes the platform feel slow and clunky. I assume there’s reasons for it - perhaps bight sized content keeps people more engaged. Or in some cases the video ends with a task. But I would honestly prefer to pause the video myself.

My user experience is probably worse as well because I also speed the videos up - so for me a lot of the videos are therefore only 20 - 30 seconds long. You can see why it can get a annoying quickly.

Interesting Projects

On the other hand, the projects and curriculum so far look pretty interesting. I’ve already completed a couple of the smaller projects, and what I liked about them was the interactivity. They are pretty simple projects but you get to do cool visible things like opening up youtube in your browser or renaming a batch of files.

Less than an hour in the degree you get to make real tangible changes on your computer. Firing up Chrome just by running a small line of code is definitely a lot more fun than the way I learned coding in school - looping through an array to find the smallest even number or what have you.

So my overall impression so far is pretty positive. Apart from a couple of small frustrations with the UX the curriculum looks quite interesting and I’m excited to keep going through it.