Don’t you feel that everybody is a UX designer these days?

It’s one of those things that everyone has an opinion on, but not everyone is good at it. These days a lot of online schools have come to fill some specific gaps like learning to be a front-end developer.

Design is a bit of another story, it’s much harder to learn to be a good designer online & results may vary greatly.

Recently I was contacted by Designlab to try their online course. For 2 years now I have moved into product management, which changed a bit how I usually works with UX & UI designers, I thought it was the right time to deepen my knowledge into user experience design.

The Premise

For me the really interesting thing about Designplab is their mentor list. They have designers coming from Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, Yahoo, Lyft & etc.

Needless to say if you are building a startup just having these kinds of external opinions about your app is worth the price of admission.

While in the course

The designlab courses are built in a way where each week one course unit is unlocked, I would say that I spent about 6 hours per week on the course. This is followed by a session with your mentor where you review your work. This is one of those things where the more work you put into it, the more you will get out, especially with your mentor.

On my side, I was looking to gain a better knowledge of all the “steps” a user experience designer walks through when building an application. On that side I was not disappointed, You start from an Empathy map & Design-lab walk you through every steps so that the last week you are able to a/b test your prototype.

The courses are made up of a series of lectures & projects.These projects can be directly commented on by your mentor & other students. Unfortunately I did not have much interaction with the other students, it felt weird to me to add comments to someone else’s submission, even seeing them, sometimes you see horrible things & you think oh my..

However I also saw much stronger submissions than mine, which pushed me to rework my projects.

Would I recommend?

At $300 a piece I really liked the course, obviously if you are already a designer this make no sense, but if you are a developer or a product manager looking to better understand the process these guys go through it is a very good course.

In the end what really sells it up is the 4 sessions you will get with your mentor. You can also request a mentor on their profile page, if you signup I would do that.

Design-lab is running a free course on responsive design written by Patrick Wong a product designer at Lyft. Check it out!

Source: Position Absolute