Has anyone taken the UX immersive 8 week program at General Assembly in NYC? Did it help you get a job as a UX professional? I’m thinking about taking the class and transitioning from marketing to UX.
Short answer for me is yes it did.
I’ve also taken the UXDi SF immersive class and am currently a User Experience Designer at CloudOn through the apprentice program.
I think the bigger question of whether you should attend is more mixed though.I personally had a good experience from GA’s UXDi program, but I think a lot of it had to do with expectations and effort. I’d figure I could best answer this with my personal experience.
Summary:
I quit my job at a non-profit to do the program, some freelance web-design experience, sales in startups experience, psychology background. Some front end skills. (HTML, CSS, JS)
Expectations:
My expectations for the UXDi program was to help me create a UX focused portfolio, learn the terminology of the UX field, and give me an opportunity to network with designers in the field.
Effort:
I worked my ass off. Day in day out. Occasional all nighters, frequent 12-14 hour days and regular work on the weekends. In this program everything will feel very rushed, and it is very tempting to finish portfolio pieces after the class is finished. I tried my best to finish the pieces throughout the course.
Note: I think Wesley Haines made a good point with ” The curriculum as it stands today is focused on giving you just enough skills to allow you to call yourself a UX Designer.” IMO UX Design is a methodology that helps inform decisions in various facets of the design process. Knowing the methodology alone will likely not get you hired somewhere. Seems pretty crucial to be able to rapid prototype, usability test, wireframe, photoshop, illustrator etc. (at least that’s what a lot of job postings ask for)
What are the best practices for mobile UX?
Fall in love with the pain — no one actually wants to use your app because it’s fun (unless you are a game obviously), so figure out what need you are solving and then relentlessly focus on eliminating that ONE pain. The only other exception to this is if you have a complex pain or series of pains that naturally fall into a workflow–it might be better to support them all in one app vs. several separate apps.
Take a closer look at apps you respect and use everyday. Integrate award-winning apps into your daily life. Study them and figure out what they are doing that makes them so awesome. Then apply that learning to your app.
Use pattern sites like Mobile User Interface Patterns, Mobile Patterns, Android Patterns for inspiration and so you are not reinventing the wheel.
What are some UX “sins” commonly made by beginner designers that should be avoided?
Here are 5 I have seen:
- Focusing too heavily on running with solutions without identifying the real problems to solve.
- Seeing the Designer’s role as one in which they “work for product managers,” instead of “with” them
- Debating minor visual design details when the big picture is wrong or off.
- Going for consistency for consistency’s sake.
- Giving users what they asked for instead of what they need (or letting a Stakeholder do the same) in the name of “research”
What is the correct way to reference GUI controls when writing content and copy
I’m writing documentation. It’s technical documentation and my audience should be tech-savvy.
However, I have reservations about referring to UI elements in an interface by the terminology that developers will know and use d…
Which companies have the best product management or UX design practices?
Here are some companies and posts that show product and product management thinking that is exemplary of various aspects of product development. I’m biased by what people have shared publicly about company culture and product development. I’ll add more as they come to mind.
- Facebook / Relationships Between Product Disciplines, e.g. How to Work with Engineers
- Spotify / Scaling Agile: Here’s How Spotify Scales Up And Stays Agile: It Runs ‘Squads’ Like Lean Startups
- Etsy / Product Experimentation and A/B Tests: Design for Continuous Experimentation: Talk and Slides, Why did infinite scroll fail at Etsy? – danwin.com
- Medium / Ensuring Non-Urgent, Important Goals Get Done – To Do to Done: Jank ‘n’ Drank
Certainly, there are other companies that excel in PM / design practices. I’ll add those as they come up.
Is using a sentence as a search filter better to engage the user compared to showing featured items?
In a marketplace, what do you think will be better: Making a sentence that the user completes by picking from several options that lead to results base on his request, or just showing featured items (most sold, most popular, etc.)?
For ex…
Has user testing found that the "three horizontal bars" for main menu on mobile is commonly understood?
“Three horizontal lines” aka “hamburger icon” seems to be becoming a convention for the “main menu” button, especially on mobile sites:
Has anyone done any user testing of this convention, or got any A/B testing results? (i.e. is there …
Should I disable google maps scroll wheel zoom?
In most applications of google maps the scroll wheel will zoom the map instead of scrolling it. Personally I find this confusing, and after years of using google maps, both on the google maps web site and embedded google map…
What font is best for full screen closed captions?
I’d like to upload some closed caption audiobooks to YouTube where the video is simply the subtitles for the text being read. [Here’s an example].
What design would best suit this purpose?
I’m pretty set on a simple design: single fo…
What factors to consider when picking a color theme for a short user survey?
I fairly frequently create short, google-doc surveys with 3-5 questions. Before today I always used the default template and never thought to change colors.
However, considering I also work at a concert venue running stage l…