Designlab

As someone who has no experience in any field related to design, this has been a great introduction to the UX field. The courses were designed to self learn, and the pace is great even if you are working a full time job. Projects were fun but can be challenging... Read More at first. The weekly sessions with mentors are great to utilize as they provided great feedback on your work. I do recommend to everyone who do sign up to look into those optional courses related to Figma/Sketch as those are very helpful. Overall, great course and recommend those who may be interested in UX to try it out. I plan to continue on with my UX journey through UX Academy.

I signed up for the course originally as a way to practice my UI/ UX skills and create more meaningful work for my portfolio. I'm currently a graduate student studying UI/UX so for me personally it was great to be able to get more projects and hands-on... Read More work to practice with. The most helpful parts of the course for me were actually the tips, advice, and resources from each unit, especially the detailed guides about working with Figma. The pacing of the course was pretty good, and included many solid topics. I was even surprised at the addition of a unit about giving critical feedback which is great. The fact that the site allows you to reupload iterations of your work is really helpful and made it easier to submit and review old submissions. Overall it was a really great course that helped me a lot!

What of my favorite things I liked about the foundations course is how well structured each week was. Not only that, but the progress bar was a good indicator on the work each student put in for the week. Lastly, I liked the fact that we had mentors to... Read More guide us through each section and provide very good feedback on the pros and cons with each homework assignment that we turned in for each project. There was mostly one thing that I feel could be improved or changed. That suggestion is that the readings were not very helpful to me at least. I can't retain information very well through just reading and I'm sure many others cannot do the same. I have always struggled with that and I feel that it could be changed to something such as videos or animations. My mentor and I spoke about this issue in one of our sessions. We expressed that it would be easier for me and many others to collect information on the readings if half the reading was in videos or there was a video that also followed the reading. The Google UX Design Certificate Program does an excellent job, I believe , at practicing this. Although, it was all videos on their program, there was still a reading portion that went with the video.

The foundation's course will give you a comprehensive understanding of the principles and concepts behind UX/UI design. The course offers abundant reading material, complemented by a limited number of videos primarily focusing on figma and sketch tutorials.... Read More It's like a window into what the academy offers and allows you to assess your commitment to the weekly mentor sessions and group critiques. The only downside is that the Figma tutorials provided in this course are slightly outdated and lack detail. Prior familiarity with the software will greatly enhance your learning experience.

This program really helped me learn the basics in a quick and efficient manner. The pro is that I could still work full time and complete the course. The cons were that it’s not 100% flexible as far as making your own schedule. You have a week by week... Read More guide and if you get behind it can be tough to get caught up.

My experience has been quite positive so far. The curriculum is pretty concise and covers a lot of foundational design concepts. The mentorship was very satisfying. I attended all my mentor sessions and she was very helpful and knowledgeable. She challenged... Read More me when I needed to be challenged and cheered me on I was having self-doubts about my designs. All in all, it has been a positive, and rewarding journey.

I was considering skipping the Foundations course by completing the 10 hour-design challenge, but I'm really glad that I took the intro now! I have seen real improvement from my first project to the design challenge. It's nice to have an intro and get... Read More some projects out of the way so that once you start building your portfolio your skills are farther along. Meeting weekly with my mentor was really useful, and I liked the option to create more than one iteration of a project. Love that you can browse other students' work and mentors' portfolios. The amount of work was totally manageable for working full-time. The only things that could improve the experience would be maybe some group projects or more critiques with other students.

I recently completed the foundations course and will hopefully be in UX Academy soon. I really enjoyed this course and felt it was paced well for the part-time track. I have a full time job so I wasn't able to do full-time and it was the right amount... Read More of time commitment. The lessons and projects have time suggestions to guide you and are completely self paced. Some days I had more time to go through them and other days I didn't so it was helpful to have the time stamps on them to help schedule myself. I found the lessons very interesting and well structured. My mentor, Kelly, was absolutely amazing! She gave great feedback and really helped me beyond just foundational learning. Once I understood the basics, she encouraged me to start thinking about higher level design thinking. She was extremely patient and very knowledgable! I had previous design experience (non-UX experience) so she was great at helping me incorporate it into my projects.

pros: - Even complete beginner can pursue -Easy to digest modules -Positive reinforcement by mentors and peers -Project assigments for variety of devices cons - Does require self initiation to network with peers -Might involve minor plagiarism of submitted... Read More projects of peers

UXF is a great intro to what UX and UI design ideas are. As someone with a design background, this was a fairly easy course to understandand and grasp. It's also a very flexible course and I was able to finish it ahead of schedule to jump into the next... Read More stage of my UX/UI journey.