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DESIGN RULES: Principles + Practices for Great UI Design (Udemy.com)

Learn to design powerful user interfaces for apps, sites and systems

Created by: Joe Natoli

Last updated April 2025

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What you will learn

  • Learn to create useful, usable and visually compelling UI design for any kind of app, site or system.
  • Learn how to properly balance form and function
  • Learn the critical rules for designing on small screens and mobile devices
  • Learn how to effectively organize and economize visual information
  • Learn how to apply the principle of Balance to create visual order
  • Learn how to apply the principle of Rhythm to establish and reinforce comprehension
  • Learn how to apply the principle of Harmony to shape disparate UI elements into a unified, consistent experience
  • Learn how to apply the principle of Dominance to direct user focus and enhance UX
  • Learn how to apply the principle of Alignment to lead the user's eye and speed task completion
  • Learn how to apply the principle of Proximity to signal relationships between screen elements and decrease users' cognitive effort

How it compares

Against the other 53 rated Udemy courses in UI Design on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.6 out of 5higher than 75% of them
  • Reviews16,991#1 of 54 by number of reviews
  • Length4.9 hourslonger than 50% of them
  • Last updatedApril 2025more recently than 71% of them

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Course Description

The principles, practices and real-world techniques I'm going to show you here are the same ones that have informed graphic design for hundreds of years. And while that may sound like blasphemy to some of you, I guarantee you'll see why and how they apply equally to the world of digital design — especially for mobile devices and their small screens. 

I'm going to give you 50 lessons across 5 hours, packed with timeless, ironclad, unchanging rules for good UI design that you can apply to anything and everything you ever work on. You’ll learn how to create and apply hierarchy, color, contrast, typography, and gestalt principles to design appropriate visual cues for your users — and that's just for starters.

You'll learn how to make it easier for people to interact with what they see on the screen – whether they know what to tap, swipe or click, and whether what happens meets their expectations and moves them closer to their goals. You'll learn how to create and apply hierarchy, color, contrast, typography and gestalt principles to design appropriate visual cues so people know where and how to take action.

I'll show you how to make good visual decisions for even the most challenging applications, from simplifying complex visual information to designing with data. My goal with this course is to give you everything you need to know to make great UI design decisions, no matter what the content, context or product may be. 

Trends will come and go, and it won't matter: your UI will still be useful, usable, appropriate and relevant for its users. From this point forward, you'll be equipped to make strategic, impactful User Interface designs that communicate, guide, encourage, motivate and educate. Anything else is decoration, and decoration has a very short shelf life.

When it comes to User Interface (UI) design, your job — whether you're a designer, developer, UXer or a mix of all those things — is to make sure that no aspect of someone’s onscreen interaction happens without explicit intent. The UI design choices we make have to reflect the user’s motivations, expectations, environment and possible actions.

All of those things manifest themselves in the User Interface — so what people see on the screen is usually the sum of their understanding about what this is and how it works.

So what we show them has to do a hell of a job communicating what’s there for them, how it’s organized, how they get to it and what they can do with it once they do.

By the time you finish Design Rules, you'll be able to do much more than create a more beautiful User Interface. Instead, you'll be able to design a UI that truly works for the people who use it. One that it allows them to easily figure out where to start and how to get what they need — quickly, efficiently and intuitively. 

Of course, it'll also just happen to be beautiful ;-)

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Instructor Details

Joe Natoli

For more than 30 years, I've helped organizations build better products and helped the people behind those products become more effective at what they do.

Over 400,000 students around the world have taken my courses across multiple learning platforms, but the number I'm proudest of isn't an enrollment statistic. It's the number of students who've told me they finally understand why things happen the way they do inside product teams, and how to navigate them with confidence.

My career has taken me from startups to Fortune 100 companies, healthcare organizations, financial institutions, and federal government agencies. I've worked with companies like Google, Meta, Broadridge, Kroll, Johns Hopkins and many others, as well as organizations including the U.S. Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Those experiences shaped how I teach.

Most courses focus on process: the steps, the deliverables, the frameworks, the tools.

Those things do matter — but they're rarely what determines whether a product succeeds.

The biggest challenges I've seen over three decades aren't usually technical. They're misunderstandings. Misaligned priorities. Poor communication. Unclear goals. Decisions made without evidence. Teams working hard... but not together.

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Reviews

4.6

16,991 ratings on Udemy

Select a bar to show only those reviews.Select the bar again to show every rating.

By Kieran Dempsey on 7/26/2026

Wish I had seen this years ago, universally breaks design down into progressive, digestible chunks and memorable mantras. The course is structured so you understand and can apply right away. The summarised rules and recap at the end saves breaking flow to take notes during the course. Fantastic!

By Jared Meyer on 7/21/2026

The course is great. The experience with Udemy is not (courses vary WILDLY in quality and even the professional, well-produced videos look low quality within Udemy for some reason, and autoplay doesn't seem to ever work)

By Troy Fox on 7/9/2026

Overall good course, discusses many helpful topics and is concise. Only thing I didn't like was at times it felt too philosophical. I don't think UI design is a deep as the course makes it out to be. Many of the examples given, the "bad example" was fine and the "fixed" example at times was only slightly nicer to look at. But from an end user perspective I wouldn't really notice any difference in functionality.

By Lisa BREGIER on 7/7/2026

Cours très complet, qui aborde divers points des icones, à la typographie, en passant par les couleurs. Je trouve qu'au sein de chaque cours, la structure aurait pu etre plus claire en suivant toujours une meme structure ? (theorie, example, exercice par exemple)

By hitesh parikh on 6/28/2026

Have taken so many courses in the past that will give you textbookish understanding of first principles in design but this course is the only one that makes me understand how to see it through critical designer's lens in ways that I've come to understand only after years in design. There are many new things I learned too.

By Ken B. on 5/7/2026

Even though I'm a beginner at web design and the theory in this course can go very deep, I've already been able to get a lot of practical value out of the topics covered. It feels like the kind of course that I'll be able to come back to again and again over the course of my career, because the principles discussed here are timeless.

By Kambaja Tarr on 4/30/2026

This was a great match for me. I am someone who needs everything explained in great detail with examples and that's what I am getting from this course. For someone who knows nothing about UX design, this is a fundemental course. I plan to refer back to this course often as I gain more experience in the field. It will be a great reminder of Do's and Don'ts.

By Karolina Anna Zukrowska on 3/10/2026

Great course, very well prepared with many examples. I already have a fairly good foundation in design and UX/UI, but I still learned a lot from it. One more important thing: the author speaks very clearly, doesn’t mumble, and has excellent diction, which is very important for me as a non-native English speaker. :-)

By Zachary Hicks on 2/15/2026

This course was great. The instructor did a wonderful job explaining the concepts in a way that was approachable and easy to comprehend. His use of examples really helped drive the point home. I am leaving this course with a ton of helpful information.

By Rana M D Issa on 1/23/2026

This course is wonderful, especially for people who have no background in UI design. I love how things are explained. I really recommend this course to every single IT related worker. A lot of websites are not intuitive and you get lost in them, even though you worked in developing them!

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Overall Score : 92 / 100