Designlab Blog

When you’re new to design, it’s a challenge to know what to learn first, and how much reading up to do on each topic. In this article, we explain the thinking behind our short course curriculum, and also give specific tips on how to make the most of the 1-on-1 mentoring and project work that, each of which is a crucial part of our learning model. Read on to find out 5 ways you can maximize your learning and personal growth on a Designlab short course! ... Read more

Back in May, we launched our revamped UX Academy program. It included a major update to the course curriculum, as well as the addition of Group Crits and Career Services. But there were also more granular improvements to the Designlab platform, including the introduction of two new assessment features: a course rubric, and project approvals.... Read more

Revamped curriculum, Career Services, Group Crits: today, we’re pushing the button on a *huge* update of UX Academy. UX Academy first launched in late 2015 as an experiment — to see if the Designlab online platform, which we’d pioneered for short courses like Design 101, could be extended to train full-time designers. Just 18 months later, the experiment has been a resounding success — with huge value delivered to students, and 95% of graduates landing a UX design job within six months of completing the course.... Read more

“But will I get a job at the end of it?” — that’s often the priority question from prospective students when they’re weighing whether to enroll in a program like Designlab’s UX Academy. Over the past few months, we’ve been piloting Career Services in UX Academy — a new feature we're incredibly excited about. Students are assigned to a Career Coach at the end of the course, and they then work together for up to 3 months to improve their portfolio, job applications, and interview techniques. In this article, we explain the thinking behind Career Services, outline how it works, and explore some of the ways that it’s already benefiting students.... Read more

Harish Venkatesan co-founded Designlab in 2012. In the past year, the company has begun to scale up – expanding its core staff from 3 to 12, growing its mentor base to 400 designers, and serving over a thousand students around the world in 2016. I talked to Harish about what motivated him to start Designlab, the mission and values that drive the company’s work today, and where he sees the future of design education... Read more

As an online education platform devoted to teaching design skills through hands-on practice and 1-on-1 mentorship, we think a lot at Designlab about what it means to be a good teacher. Faced with increasing demand for our courses, we recently realized that we needed to answer an important question: how can we provide quality mentorship experiences at scale? We took this design problem and, applying our UX design thinking process, undertook a product sprint to find the right solution.... Read more

Paige Saez here, Creative Director of Designlab, with an update about recent developments in the UX Academy community. In amongst many larger developments, we’ve also begun to focus on the smaller, more experientially significant process changes too. One of these small but significant changes is the names we give to our UX Academy cohorts.... Read more

In this post, we’ll outline how we applied the design thinking process to Hangouts in UX Academy — how we analyzed the strengths and weaknesses, our findings, and the resulting updates that will be coming soon.... Read more

Since Christmas we’ve been working hard on creating a clearer workflow process for students projects.... Read more