Everything in this tutorial is condensed from a real university module in human factors, the academic name for the discipline behind UX. Here is what the uncondensed version involved, so you can judge the day-to-day reality and not just the highlights.
Eight weeks. Each week: recorded lectures, textbook chapters, a discussion post where you argue a position and reply to classmates, an optional journal entry, and a practical design mission like the activities in this tutorial, only written up formally. The grade: a portfolio carrying one product from persona to prototype to research plan, with strict word counts, deadlines at noon sharp, and a rule that every factual claim carries a reference. Some of it is genuinely exciting. Some of it is discipline for its own sake. Both are the honest texture of university.
What a full degree adds
A dedicated UX or interaction design degree is this foundation plus the craft layers: visual design as a skill (typography, layout, colour used deliberately), accessibility in depth, the psychology of attention and memory, research methods with real participants and real ethics approval, studio modules where your work gets critiqued weekly by the room, and usually some coding. If this tutorial was the theory trailer, the degree is theory plus years of practice reps.
The map of jobs
UX designer: the whole loop, research through prototypes. UI designer: the visual and interactive surface, closest to visual craft. UX researcher: the interviews, tests and evidence, closest to psychology. Product designer: industry shorthand for all of the above plus business pragmatism. The boundaries are blurry everywhere and job adverts use the titles interchangeably, so choose by which chapters of this tutorial you enjoyed, not by title.
Signals worth trusting
You enjoyed interviewing someone more than you expected. You cannot stop noticing dark patterns now. The paper-prototype game was genuinely fun. Watching a person struggle with a website made you itch to fix it. Any two of those is a better reason to shortlist this degree than any brochure. The honest anti-signal matters too: if every activity here felt like a chore, believe that, three years of it will not feel different.
And if you are undecided between this and something more technical: the two combine unusually well. People who can both build things and reason about the humans using them are rare in every engineering team, and this entire tutorial exists because a software developer took the module and found it changed how he builds.
Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think (a joy, read first). Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (the classic, first two chapters minimum). Alan Cooper, About Face (the professional reference, skim chapter 3 on personas). All three sit in most public libraries.