Designlab

Pros: work on your own time, get feedback from a professional, have a structure 
Cons: Limited meeting times with mentor.                                                                                                                                           

I was impressed with the platform they use cos it made everything so easy and smooth to locate and find. You do your lessons there, checkout other students submissions and see how they're doing and also schedule your mentor sessions there. 

The course is broken up onto 7 units, each with subunits and the content is broken up into bite size which is easy to digest, they also provide a cheatsheet at the end of the unit for you to refer to. After the lessons, you get to do some copy work followed by designing a page based on what you have learnt. Do note that this course focus mostly on UI than UX and the content shared is concise in terms of what you need to know but if you really want to learn more you need to do some exploring and reading up on your own. 

You'll also have a weekly session with your mentor, or however often you decide it to be. I did it weekly and finished the course in 8 weeks. The mentor sessions were really helpful for me to gain insights about the industry and clarify any information I'm unsure about. He's really patient, knowledge and is happy to share everything he knows. 

Overall, I would really recommend this course to anyone who has no experience and is interested in learning UI design. 

This course is a great way for visual learners to learn the world of US and UI design. It is interactive as well as being very informative!

UX academy foundations was, in my experience, a very fun and useful introduction to UI design.  It's meant to serve as a way to get people with no experience comfortable with creating responsive design layouts for mobile and desktop web and it does that up in a very effective way.

The best part, in my opinion, is that the structure of each unit is thorough and represents a learning arc that takes you from reading to doing; by the end of each week, you're given an opportunity to essentially do a peer-reviewed project associated with a particular skill set that is part of the design process, and this happens once a week for the length of the course.  I think it's an effective structure, and it has been fun (there are several boring bits when you're essentially rote memorizing through repetition, but if you have to learn a software tool inside out to be effective, like figma or adobe xd, you have to be tolerant of a certain degree of boredom). 

The mentorship experience was unequivocally what made the course excellent.  Working alongside or getting regular feedback from a peer with experience is pretty much invaluable for reinforcing skill acquisition, and it worked for me.  My mentor was fun to talk to and easy to work with, and that was great too. 

Overall, I'm quite positive about the experience, and it rates quite well compared to the many other uni courses I've taken.

I am very happy with my decision to take Designlab's Foundations course. As someone with no design background or experience, this was a great prerequisite course for learning basic design principles. Taking the Foundations course also helped me to decide if UX design was a track I wanted to take.  What I love most about the Foundations course were the projects and mentor sessions. The projects really helped me to apply my learning and get a feel for UX design, while the mentor sessions were great for refining my work and answering my questions. I also love that the course is spread out into units with projects and a reflection/quiz at the end of each unit. If you are considering a career change into UX Design and have no previous background, I highly recommend taking the Foundations course.

Laura was a fantastic mentor, i worked well with her grading style and she was very quick with uploading feedback as well as being very thorough with feedback as well. the course was easy to navigate. the workload was as expected. i wish rubrics for each deliverable had examples of what good and bad work looks like rather than a few sentences. i also wish there was more info on auto-layout as i had to learn that on my own with the help of youtube videos. maybe make it an optional but highly encouraged section of a unit.

I initially picked Designlab's Foundations course as my first UX bootcamp to solidify that this was the career change for me. Designlab has been AMAZING - they matched me with an experienced mentor who met with me weekly and gave great feedback as well as helped me learn more difficult concepts. Designlab's foundations is exactly what it sounds like - a foundational course for those who have zero experience in the UX design industry. You have access to their whole community and collaborate often with peers. It is a great introductory course that gives learners foundations in UI design so that they can successfully navigate into studying UX design. The curriculum is detailed and you get out of this course what you put in. You can coast through this course but the more you collaborate with peers, seek feedback, and work with your mentor the more you will get out of this course. There is a lot of peer and mentor support, as well as encouragement from Designlab. 

 I loved the level of engagement this course had. They keep you motivated and take it at a nice pace. Having the discord community and a mentor is extremely helpful and encouraging! 

When seeking out a UX course, I did A LOT of research. Designlab stood out to me for a couple of reasons: 1. They offer an introductory course called UX Foundations that would allow me to confirm that I was for sure interested before committing to a full bootcamp 2. They host Group Critique sessions that you're required to attend to share work and provide feedback which I knew would create the community I needed in order to be successful. 

Overall, my experience was really great. I loved that the curriculum was self-guided as I am pretty good with time management and keeping myself on track. I also needed something flexible (I was still working full-time and raising two young children) that allowed me the ability to complete the work on my own time. In addition, there are tons of offered Group Critique session times so I never had trouble attending. The mentors that I had were truly wonderful outside of a bump in the road early on. I had a mentor step down but I received a new mentor pretty quickly and Designlab was supportive in the process. 

I felt like the curriculum laid a really strong foundation and pointed me in the right direction when I needed additional resources or materials. The online community has been better than I realized it'd be and I've found myself staying connected with peers which has been another positive to come out of all of this. 

Following my graduation, it took me between 2-3 months to land a job as a Product Designer. I really leaned on the community during this and my career services mentor. I highly recommend Designlab's UX Academy if you are serious about a career as a UX Designer.

I really enjoyed the UX Academy bootcamp program offered by DesignLab, and it helped me land my dream role. The course is well structured, and you are paired with an experienced mentor who helps guide you through the coursework and offers advice on career switches, design, and any other relevant topics. I took the part time track and even though I found it difficult to complete course work at times, the pauses were helpful in taking mental health breaks and having time to recharge. Overall, I definitely recommend this program to anyone interested in UX Design. 

UX Academy Foundations was great! I started the course with no formal design training and learned so much in a short period of time. The curriculum was easy to learn and I was able to set my own pace. Having a mentor was very helpful. He helped so much during the course and guided me with my understanding and design. 

This program is a great introduction to the concepts of UI design in websites and mobile apps.  It heavily focuses on training a user how to use Figma or Adobe Sketch (common tools for UX/UI design) and leveraging different techniques and shortcuts to accomplish common tasks.  While using this tool (you get to choose) you then have weekly sessions with a mentor to discuss the various assignments from the self-paced curriculum.  Assignments ranged from copywork of existing websites to designing your own website or app based on a certain set of guidelines.

Keep in mind that this is meant to be an introductory course that feeds into their UX Academy, which dives more into what an actual UX designer might do in their career.  In short, I would call UXAF a crash course on learning Figma and some basic principles of design to lay the groundwork to further study how to become an actual UX designer.  The tuition at the time of this writing was only $500 and you get to apply this to the cost of the academy should you choose to proceed.  In my opinion, the mentor sessions alone were worth it because the things that you don't necessarily learn in this course you can ask your mentor.  For instance, we went over a whole manner of different things a UX designer would do in their career, what he did, where you could possibly go after Designlab, etc.

I didn't give the Job Support category a ranking, might show up as zero, because it's not applicable.  There's no expectation that you should be able to get a UX job after this course as it's more of an introduction to some UI principles and how to use the tool.

Designlab's curriculum format was great, easy to read and access, and generally what you'd expect from a company that is teaching you how to format web pages to be aesthetically pleasing and easy to use.  As mentioned, it's self paced, but you also are warned that time management is a key element and considered when applying to the academy.  My only feedback regarding the curriculum (and hopefully they're already working on this) is that it would be great if there was an app that could be directly accessed by my phone or tablet.  You'll see that the content and menus are designed pretty much how an app would be, so I'd imagine it would be fairly easy to create it.

Overall, if you're interested in UX and don't have any design experience, this is a great course to dip your toes. It might not give you a full introduction to what a UX designer does, but you can supplement that by discussing with your assigned mentor what questions you might have and things you're more interested in.

Designlab foundations is an information packed 8 week course. I do think it teaches a wide variety of topics concerning ui design. Looking at the first week and my last week of the course I've grown and learned a lot. At times it was challenging but in the end quite rewarding. I think this course is a great start for anyone looking into a career in ui/ux design.

This course was a lot of fun and very informative. I came from zero experience and learned so much! When I struggled with some of the content, other students and my mentor were extremely helpful! I love that I could do the program around my own schedule and will continue to have access to all the information throughout the rest of my experience.

I loved this course so much, it was super informative and keeps your attention all the way through. I loved how interactive it was the whole way through, they made sure you knew what you were learning. 

I took Foundations as a precursor to the full UX Academy bootcamp. Overall I give the experience 4 out of 5 stars. After it ended, I actually backtracked on my decision to move forward with Design Lab and started looking at the more expensive bootcamps. However, cost is a major factor for me so I am going ahead with their UX Academy program.

Pros
- Modules: The online modules are extremely motivating because you can see yourself complete each section in real time, as it you are checking something off a list. This style makes you want to keep going and it feels like you are accomplishing something even when you only have an hour to work on the class. The modules also have a time estimate of how long it might take you to complete each section which is helpful.
- Mentor: My mentor was very nice and helpful. I don't believe she held back any feedback and she gave me some great tips as I moved through the course. I felt fortunate to have been matched up with someone with so much experience to offer.
- Flexibility: The #1 benefit of this course, besides the price, is flexibility. Other bootcamps have you chained up to a zoom all day, M-F, whereas this course is at your own pace. This means you can walk your dogs, go to a doctor's appointment, etc., and not have to worry about missing class. This is the #1 reason I ended up sticking with Designlab for the upcoming full bootcamp.
- Cost: The $500 cost of Foundations can be rolled into the full UX bootcamp afterwards so it won't be a waste of money if you decide to keep going. I also feel that you should definitely take this course if you are on the fence about UX/UI in general because it gives you a great introduction, so that you have a taste for it and it will help you decide if this is something you want to do. The full bootcamp is also about half as much as some of the other bootcamps out there (BrainStation, General Assembly, Flatiron, Columbia) however it's about the same as a few others (Thinkful, Career Foundry).

Cons
- Discord: They communicate with the group via Discord and to be honest it's not easy to use. Discord is messy, with so many channels that you can't hide and replies that come into the main room when sent to a comment. I would 100% much rather they had used Slack. You have to add friends and be accepted before you can start group chats with them and it creates a headache. If you have "unread messages" clicking on the alert doesn't take you to the actual channel, you have to go hunt and find it. It was also a huge hassle getting it set up, as Discord said I already had an account but could not claim the account and we went in circles for days until I ended up just making a totally new gmail to use for it which was a pain.  For this reason I didn't spend much time communicating with my peers or trying to keep track of what was going on in there. I am not sure why they switched from Slack to Discord but it is a big downgrade.
- Downtime: There are a few points in the program where you have to wait on your mentor to progress. I had some issues with this and I don't think it was my mentor's fault, I think there was just a disconnect between the mentor's expectations about turnaround time and the expectation of someone who was going through the course very quickly (one month instead of two). But it did cause me to get stuck at a few points and that wasted some time for me during the downtime.
- Reading: I experience reading fatigue at quite a few points during the course. There weren't a lot of videos and it was a lot of written content to read through over the computer.
- Uploads: There were lots of issues with trying to upload projects. I believe the cap was 5 MB. A lot of my projects couldn't be uploaded and it was a big headache, having to split things out and take screenshots and upload multiple things as V2, V3, V4, even though they weren't different versions but just pieces of one project I was splitting into a smaller size. This needs to be increased. I spoke to another bootcamp and their upload cap was substantially larger.
- Silo: There is a bit of a silo effect in Foundations because you would look at what others have uploaded for a project and be like, wow, mine looks nothing like that. Am I on track? Are they off track? What is going on? Why are they so different? Did I missi something? Are they ahead of me? You get the idea. But this is inevitable when you are working alone in self paced course without a live cohort that you are working with.

I recently finished the foundation course and it was a refreshing experience. I came in with a some design background so it wasn’t difficult to pick up on the sessions. It was great learning Figma and Sketch before moving on to the academy. My mentor match up was alright but it took a couple sessions to warm up to them. I did end up switching mentors and the DesignLab admissions team was very quick to help me get another. The only con I can think of is the application deadline. It’s very tight for part timers to finish on time and most have to wait for the fallowing cohort to start the academy. Overall, foundations is worth it and it offers an extra flushed out project for your portfolio. 

I recently completed the foundations course from Designlab. It was one of the best things I’ve done for myself in a long time. I got to challenge myself and immerse myself into something new and something that links my creativity and passions together. I’m very excited to move forward with their academy and UX/UI design as a whole. Thanks to this course, I have no doubts now whether or not UX is right for me.

I have always wanted to pursue UX Design but was either too scared of starting over or always thought it was too late. Eventually, I finally built the courage to go for it and after doing lots of research on the different bootcamps, Designlab stood out based on the 1:1 mentoring and it surely did not disappoint. 

My mentor was the best I could have ever asked for.  He was extremely passionate about the field as he was always happy to share his knowledge and additional resources. He also took the time to answer all the questions I had and when he had feedback on my projects, he would ask me my thought process and ask me additional questions instead of giving me the straight answer to come up with a solution on my own.  What I appreciated the most was how much my mentor cared about my growth and I couldn't be more thankful!

Overall, the course was a great preview of UX Design. They broke it down into chewable units and within those units, they give you lessons to read along with optional resource links, hands-on practice to get better at the design tools of your choice and provide unit projects to apply what you learned. I completed the course within 4 weeks as I left my previous job to focus on becoming a UX Designer. I chose this route because I wanted to invest in myself :) 

As someone who has had self-taught graphic design experience in the past, this was a great course to see what skills transfer, as well as a primer for what the full UX Academy includes. My mentor was great. 

My only complaint was that some of the projects had unrealistic timeframes for skills that you are just learning. Other than that, I would recommend.