Designlab

This school is like no other.  It, as the name indicates, provides its students with a solid foundation in the UX UI field.  With guidance from experienced mentors, supportive peers, and phenomenal coursework, students fill well prepared for the step in their UX UI journey. Read less

Designlab's Foundations course gave me a great foundations in UI and some UX skills. The modules were challenging, yet very fun and rewarding to do. The larger projects I think really prepare you to apply and succeed in UX Academy. I really enjoyed having a mentor throughout the course to guide and help me; also getting to take the course at your own pace was great. Highly recommend the course - definitely worth it! Read less

This course was great in getting a test run of UX/UI without committing to a 6 month course, though the Foundations course focuses largely on UI. There is a final, optional, introductory course for UX that you can take to see if you want to commit to the Academy course. 
I fast-tracked the course in order to finish in time to apply for the Academy, but that is only a part-time commitment. If you don't fast-track, it's even less. Each assignment has a suggested time frame, so estimating how much time you're going to spend is really easy. They even encourage you to submit unfinished assignments for feedback if you've used up the recommended time, though your mentor may have you go back and iterate, which would increase how much time you spend. 
If you are trying to finish this course in a shorter time frame, having a mentor that gives quick feedback and responds quickly is extremely helpful. This is dependent on your mentor, so it's good best to communicate your goals and expectations early on, though you can switch mentors if you would like.

Some positives:
-The information wasn't overwhelming
-Easy to estimate time commitments
-Lots of projects to practice design skills
-Ability to receive feedback and improve your designs
-You can choose the pacing
-I think the course achieved its goal of providing a good foundation

Some negatives:
-If you have a mentor you don't mesh with, your experience may be worse
-The units felt a bit repetitive

Ultimately, I gained a lot from this course. I learned a lot, was able to practice important principles, and built up my confidence more. Read less

UX Academy made possible for me to boost my UX/UI skills up to today standards. This allowed me to promote in my company to Product Designer, which I am very happy to share.

I highly recommend the bootcamp, it's worth the money for the quality of the material, organization and the mentor I had the luck to work with. After graduation there's Career Services, where a seasoned couch helps you through the daunting task of job search.

There could be less reading material, but that's a minor downside. You'll learn a bunch with this bootcamp.

All in all, I can only recommend it! Read less

Designlab UX Foundations really helps to lay the groundwork for the academy. You will learn design basics, how to use the software, the purpose of UX as opposed to just graphic design, and how to iterate your own work and that of others. Each student has a mentor that basically acts as your one on one instructor which was great for me. My mentor had over 25 years in this business and was a well of information]\ Read less

Starting UX Academy Foundations was the best decision I made. They truly care about the students, answer all the questions you may have. The course is definitely not easy, which is good as you can learn so much in a short period of time. I like how most of the material is about creating your own projects. Designlab matches students with highly experienced mentors that help you during the course. I know that there are many other UX Design bootcamps but I believe that Designlab is the best one. Read less

I've been thinking about getting into UX design for years and I decided to get out of analysis paralysis mode and just learn more to see if this something I could consider doing as a job. I really enjoyed the format of the content and how it was a mixture of reading and real practice projects. It felt like it was broken up in a good way where no unit felt too overwhelming, and was a good balance of learning new concepts and gaining confidence using the tools. The most valuable aspect of the course to me were my mentor meetings. Getting to know their experience and get a feel for what it actually is like to be a ux designer. I would highly recommend this to anybody who's wanting to dip their toe in the water to see if this is a field they want to pursue.  Read less

The course is very well structured. The mentor experience is fantastic and the projects are the right level of challenging to build the necessary skills. Only drawback is timing. The reading is timed to read through but if you are taking notes or trying to really take time and absorb it takes a bit longer than planned.  Read less

I really enjoyed my foundations course through DesignLab. My mentor was great and really supported me well through the entire class. I completed it in 4 weeks while working full time. It required a lot of discipline but I got it done. I had no prior design experience either. I found the program fit for beginners and there was a lot of supplemental/optional activities to complete throughout the course. I would recommend doing them as they help you understand figma or sketch better.  Read less

I'm nearly done completing the Foundations course and it exceeded my expectations for a self-paced online program. The coursework was thorough, thoughtful, and they laid out the basic principles of UI design fantastically. My mentor was also fantastic! Highly recommend. Read less

I have a no design background. By the end of the course I gain the necessary  user interaction design skills which allowed me to design a website landing page and app screen layouts from scratch. The information are detailed enough but not in-depth enough. My favorite part is the mentorship and the support group from slack.   Read less

I had been toying with the idea of transitioning to tech from my creative media background for a while since the second half of 2020 but I didn't know exactly which way to turn on that until I remembered my deep appreciation for all things design. Being based in the Bay Area, I was knowledgable of the high demand for UI/UX design jobs, and after much research, I was dead set on learning more about this discipline. Then came the almost grueling task of selecting the right intro course...and that lead me to Designlab's UX Academy Foundations. 

What I first liked about this course was its very structure. You're not tied with a seemingly never ending, intensive course. In the 8 weeks, and through all the projects assigned, the criteria starts to form whether this is right for you or not. If it is, it gives you enough drive to embark on the fully-fleshed UX Academy bootcamp. If it isn't, at least you learned extremely valuable tools and perspective on making things pretty...with a purpose. You're also paired with talented UX designers who are, for the most part, eager to share their insights with the students. For the entirety of the course, I was mentored by a Google UX designer, and every single week, I'd be excited to show my progress with him, and discuss certain questions I had on that week's lessons. 

By the end of my 10-hour design challenge, I felt beyond accomplished and motivated to tackle the biggest challenge yet: applying for UX Academy. But quite honestly, if you had any curiosity about the world of UI/UX design, and you want to push yourself through the competitive landscape of tech, this intro course is worth every penny! Read less

I am just about to finish the UX Foundations course and plan to move on to their UX Academy.
The website is easy to navigate and use to turn in assignments/projects. There is consistency in the progression of units and the assignments to help students naturally develop the useful technical and creative skills. Many of the lesson materials were developed in-house in a way that was clear and digestible as opposed to some other programs that might only just directly refer you to videos and readings from other organizations which can be unfiltered and lengthy. I had an experienced mentor who pushed me to work hard while also being respectful and understanding. Read less

The foundations course has been very rewarding so far. I've been learning a lot and the content has been very interesting. One of my favorite parts is the weekly mentorship experience. It is a lot of content even doing part time and I hope that in UXA I get to learn more of the theory behind it. My curiosity and passion for design is growing and I feel confident that DL is helping set my feet on the right path. Overall DL is very well designed and well thought out. Every person I've talked to that works for DL has been so friendly and communicative. I'm thankful for this journey! Read less

Pros: 8 one hour long 1:1 video call sessions with a design mentor, many fun hands on projects, slack community
Cons: lessons are very reading heavy. I wish there were more video demonstrations/lectures/audio recordings/interactive elements in the lessons to engage the student more and also ensure retention of the material.

Overall, I definitely recommend UX Academy Foundations to anyone who is thinking about studying product/ux/ui design. Read less

Like many others I did a ton of research on various boot camps that would allow me to break into and begin studying UX. I looked into Springboard (had a friend in it), Google’s UX Professional certificate on Coursera, Udacity, Dribbble’s product development course, and more. I actually took the first course in Google’s certificate program before I transitioned to DesignLab. What stood out to me about DesignLab the most was their process for helping you develop your UX skills. It should be noted I’m a teacher and as a teacher I’m always looking at other teachers process, their why, for teaching something a certain way. This helps me get into their mindset and best apply what myself in my own learning. So how do they start? You can find their blog about how they start by teaching UI fundamentals—the principles of design, typography, and color and how to read a design brief and put together what amounts to a high-fidelity mock-up. This is the entire foundations course. DesignLab starts with this because they feel that as a designer, whether you end up building UI’s for a living or not, what the user ultimately touches is a UI. Having a base skill set is important therefore for any UX job. It also helps put the rest of UX in a more understandable context, making it easier for you to understand how your research, wire-framing, and user testing will eventually tie into your product. I felt like because of this explanation this was a great place to start. After getting into the foundations course I felt the program was well paced overall. The mentorship was really great, although the particular mentor I received was really busy with a masters degree and working for two companies and I felt couldn’t give me as much attention as I wanted. However, whatever feedback I did receive was helpful, clear, and to the point. She understood my questions clearly and was able to direct me on my learning journey, offering many helpful tools and pointers. What eventually really sold me on DesignLab was the group crit. This was an incredible experience. Having tried to teach high school students how to give meaningful feedback, I was really wondering how this would go. But the curriculum does an awesome job of helping you learning how to properly give and receive a critique on design work. My project for that unit improved a lot because of the critique and I also discovered I was able to give meaningful feedback myself. Overall this was a great experience. The only thing that would hold me back from going into the full Academy from Foundations is the minimum time requirement of 25 hours a week. I felt like Foundations part-time at 10 hours a week was really hard so I’m not sure I could do the full Academy and work full-time at the same time. I highly recommend this course for anyone looking to explore design as a possible career path! Read less

I just completed the Foundations course through DesignLab after leaving a job as a graphic designer. The course was very informative but the part I felt was most beneficial was working one-on-one with a mentor for each module. 
I chose to do the course full time so I met with my mentor twice a week and he provided invaluable feedback, tips and additional learning resources. It is a wonderful introductory course and great for those who like to work self-paced. Read less