Designlab

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.

I really enjoyed this course to begin my design career journey. Each unit was a perfect combination of reading and then actual doing! I noticed with other courses there was way too much reading, and not enough of doing. Every unit had projects which ended... Read More up being amazing practice. If there was anything I was confused about, I was able to ask my mentor. One of the reasons I chose Designlab was the mentor aspect of it. I don't know anyone in my personal life who is in the UX Design field. So it was helpful to have someone to go to and have someone approve and critique my work. Overall, I think it was a great experience and I would recommend it to others interested in starting their design career journey!

I do not recommend Designlab. I ignored the comments that warned me about it but after wasting my money, I realized that it was a complete waste of money. Yes, you will learn some stuff. But most of the stuff you can learn for free...If you need a mentor... Read More to look at your design, look into ADPlist.

Before Designlab, I took a lot of free online courses, but none of them gave me practical teaching on how to use software and actually design. I appreciated that in conjunction with all the informational lessons, there were many projects that allowed... Read More me to get comfortable with the software and actually practice design principles and hierarchies. I liked how all the information in the course was developed by Designlab, meaning I was paying for unique material. I also really appreciated the mentor program. It really helps to have real feedback from a real professional. I will say, I don't necessarily feel like I got that much more connected with people in the UX/UI field in terms of making connections and networking, but that could be due to my own struggle with using the Discord networking community. Overall though, I do feel more equipped and prepared to develop my portfolio further.

For a foundations course, there's not any cons that I could think of when it comes to the overall course. The dashboard was very user friendly, which allowed me to easily follow along what lessons were next and when my next mentor meeting was. The course... Read More provided some amazing reads that really helped teach me a lot of key factors that prepared me for the unit projects.

I wish there was at least some focus on civic/gov't UX/UI or the idea of using UX/UI for social justice/good. It all felt very marketing, branding, capitalism driven which was a big source of demotivation for me. As a complete newbie to design and not... Read More what I would describe as tech-savvy, I would suggest not making any of the curriculum optional. I think everyone is busy and always looking for the thing they can cut from their to-do list, but I realized early on I NEEDED to do all the Figma tutorials and other optional practice lessons or I would have never gotten to where I was able to get by the end of Foundations. Also, there is content in the optional lessons that is then used in assignments and/or is on the quizzes! Every assignment took me twice as long as the time DesignLab said it would. I could not have stuck to those time limits in a rigid way - I wouldn't have been learning what I needed to learn if I didn't complete all the projects, no matter how long it took me. The Discord community was great. I was nervous about my mentor not being a good fit, but he was so knowledgable and really helped me, even when I would feel super frustrated. I kept telling myself it's like starting an immersive language program - it's just not going/supposed to make sense at first. It's hard to know what part of that is me just being a total newbie and what part of that is unclear curriculum. I found the videos extremely hard to follow, trying to watch what the mouse was doing at the same time I was trying to watch what is being created on the Artboard and whats happening in the left hand column of Figma was tricky, even when I watched the videos at slower speeds.