Online Graduate Certificate in Digital Product Design

Equip yourself with the skills to think like a designer, understand users’ pain points, and craft exceptional solutions that delight.

Why study the Online Graduate Certificate in Digital Product Design?

• Learn from industry leaders: This program was developed with industry leaders in the digital design space, giving you an opportunity to experience industry design challenges and receive relevant hands-on experience.
• Get hands-on with the tools: Learn how to use industry tools, such as Figma and know that you can apply these skills in your next digital design role.
• Build leadership capabilities: Understand how product design contributes to organisation decision making and prepare yourself to step into leadership roles.

This certificate has been designed in partnership with leading industry experts including Fjord, Canva, and REA Group.

6 months full time, 12 months part time

Students undertaking this certificate can expect to study 10-12 hours per week, per subject, with each term comprising of 10 weeks.

The Graduate Certificate in Digital Product Design will equip you with the tools, skills, methods and processes needed to work as a versatile and capable digital product designer.

Digital Product Design Strategy and Contexts

This subject introduces you to digital products. You will gain an understanding of how they are conceived and designed for local and international markets. Using design thinking frameworks, you will experience the process of new product development (NPD), problem definition, opportunity scoping, and ethical design research.

You will be introduced to the various team and stakeholder roles and capabilities that are required to successfully bring new digital products to market, including the importance of persuasive storytelling and a sound business case.

Design Practice and Leadership

In this subject, you will explore the fundamentals of leadership within a design context. You will determine your leadership capabilities as a designer, not only as an individual, but as a crucial part of a team, an organisation, and society.

This is the designated Work Integrated Learning (WIL) course for the Graduate Certificate of Digital Product Design.

In the role of course facilitator, industry partners will support and review your work, as well as providing industryrelevant case studies and real-world scenarios. This ensures ongoing industry best-practice in both accessing and gaining feedback from the course content.

By developing a deeper understanding of the ways in which design shapes the world, you will be aware of the prevailing conversations, trends and future directions of the roles and impact of design for the economy, society, culture and the planet. You will examine how ethics, skills of team members and culture all contribute to, and constrain current and emerging design practice. You will also critically define your viewpoints, rationales and biases as you grow as a design leader.

Digital Product Design Process and Methods

In this subject, you will design a new digital product using an existing client’s brief. Using industry standard tools and ethical best practice, you will gain hands-on experience of framing a client’s problem.

You will then apply design research to explore the client’s brief and the possibilities for the digital product and move into conceptualising, prototyping and designing a product solution. You will gain a working understanding of digital product lifecycles and explore how products grow and change through industry and user feedback.

By understanding and enacting the roles of various team members, you will have a broad understanding of the responsibilities and expertise required to build a successful digital product, including different interface modalities, user contexts, business constraints, accessibility considerations, and market forces.

User Experience Research

In this subject, you will be introduced to the role research plays within the user experience domain. You will learn how to evaluate and implement research tools and activities to effectively articulate and interpret the ‘problem space’ and shape findings and insights for your client.

You will develop an understanding of how research is used in competitor analysis, user interviews, observations, surveys, testing, and analytics in order to deliver a suitable user experience. Project scoping protocols (including privacy, ethics, and data management) are reviewed to look at how to support your organisation to deliver evaluative and generative modes of research to enhance the user experience.