Mobile App Design in Sketch From Scratch: Design 3 Top Apps

it was an amazing Course

Easy to understand teaching, can be practically applied. Thank you~

The course started really well and was engaging. However, some kits and templates were missing which resulted in searching the web for replacements. Also a few of the lectures where hard to understand with the english being hard to hear properly, with a different instructor.

This is not only the worst course I've taken on Udemy, it might be the worst course I've ever taken. I'm really sorry, it pains me to leave this review but I'm hoping that the instructor will take it as an opportunity to learn about teaching and improve his skills. In fact, at the end I issue recommendations about how he could improve. Before I explain, here is a summary: *If you're looking for a course that will explain how Sketch works, you won't find that here. This is just narration of some projects. *If you're looking to understand how the different tools in Sketch work together in a project, you won't find that here. The instructor never explains why he uses a certain tool or how it works, he just tells you to do it. *If you're looking to pick up Sketch quickly, you won't find that here. Even at maximum speed there are long gaps between phrases and the process is slow. And because of the other issues with the course, you won't really feel comfortable with Sketch just by finishing this course. *If you've never used Photoshop or similar tools, STAY AWAY from this course!! The instructor assumes you know Photoshop (thankfully I do), because this wan't meant to be a stand-alone course, it's apparently a followup to a Photoshop course (more on this later), so if you don't already know PS, you'll be confused and overwhelmed from the very first module and it'll be hard to understand how all of these things tie in together. More details: -This course doesn't teach. It narrates. In the first section he goes through every single tool in the software without giving context about why you would use it, how it works, or how you can use it in the context of a project. This is a common mistake teachers make, but it gives beginner students a very hard time because you're learning a bunch of things that you don't quite understand yet and there's no framework or model to help you understand what they're for. Then in subsequent sections we see the instructor creating some project on Sketch as he narrates. He doesn't explain anything, he just says "do X, now do Y, now do Z". This isn't my preferred style of learning, but it would be totally acceptable if it wasn't for the fact that the narrator is currently a teeeeeerrible narrator. I really don't want to be mean, I honestly believe this is a skill that can be developed, but as it stands, it's terrible: Slow, inaccurate, unspecific and full of errors that could have been corrected if they had at least double-checked the videos before posting. Let me elaborate on a couple of these: -it's un-specific: The most common phrase in this course by far is "this one" - examples: Instead of "click the red button" he would say "click this one". Instead of "select the fourth layer, the one named Rectangle 4", he would say "select this one" Instead of "Click on Menu, then Save as, and then Save", he would say "Click on this one. Now click this one. And click this one." This makes it very hard to follow the course in general, and near impossible to follow on a smartphone where his cursor looks very small, because if you can't follow his cursor very closely, then you'll have absolutely no idea of what he's doing, cause he really isn't specifying it in his narration. -I have the video running at maximum speed and it's still waaaaay too slow. There are long gaps between thoughts, it's very odd. I get the feeling that he's reading an outline off-screen and it takes him a long time to go from one thought to the next. -It feels like the instructor is just checking topics off a syllabus instead of thinking about the natural progression to teach these topics, or even reflecting on whether or not his explanation was clear. On top of all that, this course isn't self-contained. After a few lessons it becomes clear that this is supposed to be a followup to some Photoshop course, which of course makes this a terrible experience for those of us who haven't gone through that course. It's no wonder that this is such a bad course, it wasn't even designed to be taken from scratch. Fortunately I personally know Photoshop very well and Sketch is very intuitive for someone who does, but this still doesn't fix the fact that I'm left out of the loop when the course references previous lessons from the other course that I didn't take. Overall: Terrible course. I believe the instructor has a great attitude and can become a good instructor if he works on it and puts in a decent effort into ensuring the quality of the lessons and making this a good course. My recommendations to the instructor: -Always double or triple check lessons for errors. Then you can add overlay text to clarify things. -You're already teaching by creating projects, why not start with that and explain the tools along the way? It'll be MUCH easier to understand for beginners because then you can explain why a certain design challenge requires a certain tool for the job. Ditch the first section or make it project based as well so that we all get the context of why we're using certain tools where. -Always be specific - eliminate the phrase "This one" from your vocabulary. You're teaching people who don't know what you know, and in many cases these people will be watching on a small screen on a phone, don't assume that we can all closely follow your cursor at all times to make sense of what's going on. Be specific. (I gave examples above) -Reduce the gaps between phrases. You can speak slowly, that's no problem cause Udemy allows us to speed up. But definitely reduce those gaps. Ideally reduce them by simply being more clear on exactly what you're doing on each video before shooting it, but if not then at least by cutting those gaps during video editing. -Always explain why you're doing things. I think this is the biggest flaw with this course. I'll give you a clear example: On the first lesson of the Tinder section, you copied a symbol from a different file, then at some point just told us to "detach from symbol", and then kept going. Explain WHY you chose to do that. What would have happened if you didn't, what was the thinking behind it, would you still do that if you had copied the symbol from the same file, are symbols synchronized across files as well? That's just one example, but you'll find that students are much more grateful for those short explanations than for a step-by-step narration that leaves them with no true understanding of how to apply these things to their own projects. -Definitely DON'T upload a course to Udemy that isn't self-contained. I'm unclear on whether or not you even offer the Photoshop course on here, but if you're going to post a course on Udemy where anyone can sign up to it without having ever heard of you or your other courses, then make sure the course is self contained. Referencing lessons and context from a previous course just creates a bad experience.