For the past 7 years, UX Academy has opened the door for thousands of students to start new careers in UX/UI design. Our graduates have gone on to land spectacular jobs with companies of all shapes and sizes.
However, UX design is a fast-growing field that’s constantly changing and shifting as brilliant minds innovate. To ensure we’re keeping up to date with this constant evolution, our in-house Learning Experience Design team works continuously to make in-the-moment updates to our curriculum.
This year, they've also been hard at work on a substantial update to the program and we’re excited to announce: we're launching an all-new UX Academy learning experience starting in May 2022.
The new version builds on all of the things that make UX Academy an industry-leading UX design bootcamp—1:1 mentorship, 4 portfolio projects, and a supportive design community—and also delivers a new, updated, and improved course experience for students.
A Breakdown of UX Academy’s Latest Updates
Onboarding Enhancements
From the moment students sign up, they receive a full onboarding experience with the information, resources, and materials they need to succeed in their design journey. This includes videos and captioning for folks who need or prefer a hybrid way of absorbing information.
Once onboarded, students can dive straight into the coursework of UX Academy.
Content & Course Structure
Through copious amounts of feedback from our students, mentors, and our wider community (thanks so much!), we’ve updated numerous aspects of the program. The curriculum and structure has been approved by dozens of professional designers who’ve said it is…
“True to industry standards and practices”
“Engaging from the very beginning and will keep students stimulated throughout”
“A logical progression of course materials that creates for a frictionless experience”
Some of the curricular updates include:
- 30+ new video tutorials to help students visualize and immerse themselves in UX techniques
- 60+ new lessons that reflect the latest industry trends and practices
- 50+ reimagined projects to help students put theory into practice and build a unique, diversified portfolio that contains 4 stellar case-study projects
Group Crits
Every week, UX Academy students have the opportunity to participate in regular events and meetups within our dynamic design community.
In the all-new UX Academy, we’ve created an improved experience that allows students to book, attend, and manage their weekly Group Crit sessions with ease.
Each session is designed to allow you to present your latest coursework to a group of colleagues, and practice giving and receiving constructive feedback. Group Crits are meant to facilitate organic conversations between peers and challenge you as a designer.
Pacing
One of the most common pieces of feedback we receive about UX Academy is about how intense it is. While we pride ourselves on the program’s rigor, we also want to make it accessible to folks making a career transition at different stages in their lives.
We’ve restructured the most time-intensive parts of the program to make it applicable to a wider range of situations and schedules — empowering more creators to start doing the work they love, and succeed in a remote and flexible world.
Previously, we required students to complete 40 or 20 hours of coursework per week, in addition to mentor sessions, Group Crits, project iterations, and community engagement.
Moving forward, we’ve factored these other areas of the program more concretely into the required weekly commitment — so the tracks are more accommodating to allow students to fully experience the various elements of UX Academy.
Community
Our community is making the move to Discord in an effort to provide a space that is focused on fostering even more meaningful relationships through interaction, networking, and collaboration. As we make this move, we’ll be able to enhance our community engagement in a few different ways:
- More student empowerment, with the ability for students to host their own discussions and ideation sessions
- Live voice / video study rooms
- Even more resources and opportunities shared with our community, in a more organized fashion
- More alumni engagement
- Dedicated channels and experiences that can be unlocked based on your progress and involvement in the course
While UX Academy is an entirely online program, we’re excited about the real relationships that students have been able to build.
Student Life & Community-Led Workshops
One of our newer focuses inside UX Academy is to empower students to host their own events, workshops, and discussions. Key to this is our Student Life Committee, a group of active students who suggest and implement improvements to the Designlab student experience. As the all-new UX Academy experience rolls out with the May 2022 cohort, we will continue actively recruiting folks from regions all around the world to ensure that as many community members as possible have an opportunity to participate in Designlab student events.
Take a Deeper Look at What the All-New UX Academy Offers
Watch the video below to hear from members of the Designlab Product, Community, and Admissions teams, and learn more about:
⭐️ How we used community feedback to make improvements to the UX Academy experience
⭐️ What’s staying the same and what’s getting enhanced or added
⭐️ How Community aspects of the program are evolving
⭐️ Mentor involvement and contributions to the program update
⭐️ How you can get involved in the all-new UX Academy experience
Your New Career Awaits
If you’ve been waiting for a sign that it’s time to make the shift into the field of UX/UI design, this is it. We’ve done our absolute best to create an immersive, intensive online bootcamp experience like no other—and we can’t wait to see how the all-new UX Academy experience will help you achieve your career goals.
Schedule a call with Admissions or hop on one of our live webinars to learn more about how UX Academy can be the first step in your new career.
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