The All-New UX Academy Foundations

We’ve recently made some exciting updates to the curriculum for our beginner-friendly course, UX Academy Foundations.

What are these changes? Recently, we sat down with Orla Williams, the head of our Learning Experience Design team, to chat through what’s new—and how it can help you start your UX/UI design journey.

Can you tell us a bit more about the changes that were recently made to the course curriculum?

Absolutely! The full curriculum, that's lessons, projects, tutorials (known as How-to Guides), quizzes, etc, has been touched by this project, whether that's improving existing copy, restructuring, or writing brand-new content. The flow and structure of the course have been optimized for a better experience holistically.

We now have a more tangible journey through the project work from the start of the course to the finish. The ultimate goal here is to mirror the real-world iterative design process more clearly by having students work on one larger project throughout the course, instead of multiple unconnected ones.

The course is also structured a bit differently now, both in the presentation of the materials and the pacing. These changes will make it easier for students to plan how to tackle their coursework each week, and hopefully help them stay on track!

Tell me more about the new projects!

The overall goal of the UX Academy Foundations course is to teach students fundamental visual and UI design skills, and that hasn’t changed. There's theory-based learning to help folks understand the “why” behind design choices and lots of practical work to actively build their skills.

But we wanted to ensure that the project work was both necessary and clear in terms of presentation and value. There’s always going to be a bit of friction when you’re learning something new, and part of thinking like a designer lies in the ability to problem-solve.

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The overall goal of the UX Academy Foundations course is to teach students fundamental visual and UI design

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While the course overall has been very well reviewed and received, there were still some sections we deemed not quite as effective, or perhaps just better presented in a different way or place. We receive a lot of feedback from students and mentors around what’s working, what’s not, and how we can make things better, and we took that into consideration as well.

Students still have a wealth of opportunity to practice new skills in a hands-on sense as always. However, we now also have a more tangible line through the project work from the start of the course to the finish. This will drive home the importance of the iterative design process throughout the entire course, and also familiarize students with the concept of responsive design.

In each unit, learners will also find new exercises related to skills they’ll need to build to complete that larger project. These are practical activities conducted in a more flexible way than the larger projects in each section of learning. The goal is to allow students to refine their abilities in an experimental environment. It’s a great resource around adapting a new skill!

We feel these changes make the learning more gradual, intuitive, and holistic in nature.

You also mentioned “How-To Guides.” Can you talk a little more about what these are?

The goal of the How-to Guides is to provide step-by-step instructions to walk students through specific tasks or skills. In this iteration of the course, we've updated our tool tutorials, which demonstrate how to execute different procedures in the design tool Figma.

We've always had visual tutorials in the Foundations course, but we wanted to streamline the experience for students and provide more snackable clips and videos to support their journey. We also identified pain points experienced by prior cohorts and adjusted the experience accordingly.

Learning something like a design tool comes with a learning curve, as does anything! But our goal was to make that curve feel less steep. We’ve identified areas that students tend to have questions or confusion around, and focused on making those concepts more accessible through immersive instruction.

We’re also giving students full demonstrations on how to create UI features, such as navigation bars, buttons, hero sections, etc. These build into making entire responsive homepages. Every section lines up with how a student will work in a tool such as Figma, to give a detailed understanding of tool usage as well.

The lessons build in complexity throughout each unit, to ensure we’re not overwhelming students and are really setting folks up for success.

Can you share a little more about the projects that students will now be working on throughout the course?

Yes! Students will now work on one large project from start to finish. We’ve always had this project, called Wayfarer, as their final Design Challenge. Previously however, students didn’t see this project until the last section of learning in the course. In the previous version, we taught all the UI skills, but now we’re trying to make the workflow mimic that of a real designer.

Students will start building the Wayfarer website project right at the start of the course, slowly adding and iterating as they work their way through each unit. This mirrors the way someone might encounter a project at an actual company, to put them in the role and mindset of a designer straight away.

The idea of this change is also to give a more holistic approach to the iterative design process. By working on the same project all the way through, students will see how each component of their work shifts, changes, and adds value to the whole.

This will be a responsive project, so students can get a feel for responsive designing right at the start of their educational journey with us.

What can new students expect in terms of the restructured pacing?

Foundations has always been a flexible course. However, we want students to feel empowered to tackle the work in the best way that works for them.

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve changed around some project work, identifying what’s most important and successful, and what was perhaps less so. In the previous curriculum version, students had pretty much constant content to move through in order to stay on pace. This gave very little room for polish or review. Students will now have some extra room to dedicate to meeting with their mentor, asking questions, and finalizing their work.  

We’ve also shifted the way that lessons and projects are grouped. This should give students a more intuitive look into what they’ll be doing each week. The sections are clearer in terms of what is expected, and more manageable on a week-to-week basis.

We feel these changes overall will give students all the information they need while also getting their work to a place where they can feel really positive and proud about it. The course is also presented in a clearer and more optimized fashion, to really start them off towards becoming the best designer they can be.

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