If you know me or have been following my videos or articles you know by now that I believe it is crucial to always be learning, studying and growing your mind and abilities constantly. I aim to start my own tech media conglomerate starting with a software company and always felt a strong inclination towards product creation but found that I fare better on the design than engineering side. This took experimentation and realistic observation of my results over time, something I highly encourage you to do regularly if you want to maintain an edge in your career. Know your mission, know your strengths, know what to outsource and build a foundation of skill. Having a clearer vision and better idea of my strengths and weaknesses allowed me to find specific skills to focus on understanding as they are a crucial part of my entrepreneurial launchpad. I decided to really explore a core skill of product design that seemed like it may align more with my experience and talents, UX Design.
Earlier this month I completed the Part Time Intensive User Experience Design course at General Assembly. For those of you not familiar with User Experience Design perhaps it can best be compared to the role of an architect. An architect designs the schematics for a building based on the ideal goals and requirements a company or individual has laid out for them. A UX Designer uses research, affinity mapping, user flows, mockups and prototyping tools to gather information and design a solution around that in the form of design deliverables for a product. To learn more of what this jargon even means, this blog post written by Laura Klein, an experienced VP of Product may be useful. The easiest way to explain it that I’ve come up with is that UX Design is about communicating your intended message to give the ideal experience to your end user, whoever that may be. My understanding of UX Design wasn’t so clear before entering the course but by the time I completed the 10 Week Program I felt I had a core understanding of UX Design and like I can continue doing it proficiently with my future projects. Below is my review of the course.
First Impression
I first heard of General Assembly when I was volunteering at the 2015 Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco. I was just starting to really get serious about a career in tech and it was a great learning experience. During one of the days I volunteered I had to take a bunch of conference attendees to different tech hubs throughout the city. I had an absolute blast, many attendees were experienced and aspiring entrepreneurs alike seeking to soak in these new business philosophies. We stopped by General Assembly’s SF campus and that’s where I first really learned what the school is, I thought it was cool but I was broke at the time and relied on being self taught via books, videos, online courses etc. so it wasn’t until late last year that I decided to make the investment. We started class on February 22nd, my impression after the first day was that I was going to be challenged and have a LOT of fun. Turns out both of those assumptions were true.
The Meat and Bones
The course was 10-weeks and consisted of 17 lessons leading to the final presentation where we showed how all the skills we learned translated into tangible User Experience case studies presented during the last week. I really loved this class because the instructor, Ryan, was very animated, simplified the concepts and made us practice them to actually build the tacit skill as we built the foundational knowledge. Also, the co-instructor Courtney made sure that our questions were always answered, they both are full time User Experience experts which made the value of the lessons much more than traditional college or school could ever offer. In the beginning, you get to pick a topic you’re interested in doing research in. Once your topic is approved, you get to make that the focus of your project which I thought was really cool since it let’s you customize what you focus on. During each new lesson early on we learned a new concept like research, user interviews, task flows, affinity mapping etc. then practiced those new skills as part of what we would compile together for our case study. Moving closer the middle we began using our research from these tools to start creating wireframes which are essentially sketches used to iterate your design thinking into the beginnings of an actual product. Think of these as the early drafts of an architect’s blueprints, these findings become artifacts that you can use to create real design deliverables that become an actual product.
What I Learned
UX Design taught me how to turn ideas into deliverables. As someone who always dreamed of inventing things and solving big problems as a child I saw there were different outlets I could use. I was originally drawn to artistic outlets like music and poetry but my mind always had a knack for spotting patterns, conceptualizing systems and visualizing ideas so when I first discovered the world of software I thought it would be best for me to focus on becoming a front end web designer. Over time I discovered there are other ways I can express my creativity and invent in tech that aligned more with my people and enterprising skills such as UX Design. I’ve been working in tech for over 3 years now and knew UX Designers existed but didn’t truly understand what they do and how awesome it is until after this course. I learned a skill that allows me to understand how to gather information from the marketplace and turn that into a clickable prototype for a product along with design deliverables that I can pass off to an engineering team to create a real prototype or even pre-sell to customers before any code is even written. This is truly a lean skill that allows for rapid experimentation and validation of business ideas, especially software products. This course also taught me how to think like a UX Designer and record my iterations and thoughts to make a case vs just sell an idea or concept as I may naturally have done as a professional with a base in sales.
Who Should and Shouldn’t Take This Course
If you don’t currently work in tech and feel sure you want to make a jump into this industry as a UX Designer than I’d highly recommend you take the full time version of this course as you will get a lot more practice and learn much more from what I’ve heard from full time student’s and the instructors. This part time course is great if you are a professional who can use UX Design to help with what you do or are looking to better understand how it works as it may be a critical part of the projects you work on or company you will build. From what I observed and the statistics I read, only a small percentage of General Assembly students were motivated to take this course to become a founder. Most have intentions of doing it as a job or freelancer after the class but if you’re intent is to start a software company and you know you want to be involved in product then you should seek to understand UX Design especially if your base skills are non-technical.
You shouldn’t take this course if you just want to become a UX Designer to make money, it’s better if you enjoy it because it takes practice, repetition and study just like any other craft. To become great at it will take time, depending on your pace likely years so only take this course if you see this as something that can be useful to you long term. This class costs $3,950 and isn’t a magic bullet, the more you put in, the more you get out of it. If you are serious about learning product design and more specifically UX Design then this class is worth it and I’d highly recommend it because solid organized educational programs for this skill is hard to find which is part of why General Assembly was formed, proficient tech professionals are more in demand than the supply we have now can handle. Another valuable product related skill is computer programming. I recently did a review on NYCDA’s Web Dev 100 course which I did in conjunction with this course that breaks down programming more.
Fun Fact: General Assembly was acquired by the the Swiss staffing firm Adecco during my last few weeks of class for $412.5 Million in cash, 7 years after it’s founding.
Question of The Week: Have you ever thought about learning more about UX Design? If so why?