UX Academy: Learn UI UX Design

Designlab welcomes both brand new designers and individuals with previous experience. Regardless of your background, we'll help you build the prerequisite design skills needed to be successful in UX Academy.

If you’re new to digital design, you’ll need to take our 4-8 week UX Academy Foundations course and showcase your skills in the final design challenge.

If you've worked as a designer before, you’ll need to show us recent design work that includes both wireframes and high resolution images of landing pages or digital applications you’ve designed. Please note that we can’t accept print, illustration, or architecture portfolios.

We’ll also assess your fluency of the English language⁠. UX Academy is a collaborative, community-orientated, and requires extensive communication between students, mentors, and our team.

You can find more detailed information about these requirements in our Help Center!

Get an application pack for more details on the UX Academy journey and how to apply! If you have previously worked as a digital designer, you’ll be able to go straight ahead and submit your application. If you’re new to digital design, your first step will be to enroll in UX Academy Foundations.

Yes we do! You can learn more about our scholarship program and how to apply in this article.

First and foremost, please don’t let a lack of design experience worry you. Around two-thirds of UX Academy applicants are new to the industry too, so you’re not alone!

There are, of course, various things you can do to prepare for the UX Academy program, and we’ll do our best to help you every step of the way:

1. Enroll in UX Academy Foundations: This is our flexible 4-8 week foundation course designed to help you learn the fundamentals of design. It’s a prerequisite for anyone new to the industry, and will help you get a good grounding in visual principles ahead of UX Academy.
2. Learn a design tool: We recommend you use either Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD. You can get an introduction to these tools in our free 7-day email courses Figma 101, Sketch 101, and Adobe XD.
3. Read around the topic: Check out the Best of the Designlab Blog for articles about design and changing careers. There are new articles released every week! We also recommend you subscribe to some design publications on Medium, such as UX Collective, UX Planet, Muzli, and InVision.

Those 3 things should help you feel much more prepared and ready to get started with UX Academy. You can always book an admissions call if you still have any concerns — our Admissions Reps would be happy to chat through them with you!

If you’ve worked as a designer before, and have some recent design work that includes both wireframes and high resolution images of landing pages or digital applications you’ve designed, then you can go ahead and submit an application linking to your work. If it meets the standards required, there will be no need to take our UX Academy Foundations course.

Please note that print, illustration, and architecture portfolios will not meet the standards required.

We don’t require you to have any specific equipment or software for either our short courses or UX Academy program. However, we do recommend that you use either Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD because they’re user-friendly and easy to learn. They are also cutting-edge, collaborative design tools used by today’s professional UX and UI designers so they’ll set you up well for a job in the industry!

• Figma is browser-based, works on any computer, and is free for individual users. You can learn the basics through our free Figma 101 course.
• Sketch requires a Mac, and you need to buy a license—but you can get 50% off via our Perks page. You can learn the basics through our free Sketch 101 course.

Here’s some other software you might be interested in exploring:

• Prototyping tools like InVision, Marvel, and UXPin
• Wireframing tools like Balsamiq
• Adobe Creative Cloud, which includes more advanced packages like Photoshop and Illustrator. (We also have a Photoshop 101 and Adobe XD 101 email courses!)

No, you can access the online coursework and complete the projects asynchronously within the suggested timeline. The suggested timeline is established to help guide you and keep you on track to complete the course by your target graduation date.

There are "scheduled" parts of the course that will need to be completed at specific times, however, you have some control over scheduling these based on your availability.

The parts of the course that require synchronous participation and scheduling are:

• Mentor Sessions: You arrange with your mentor based on mutual availability
• Group Crits: You choose what sessions work best with your schedule from a wide range of available dates and times

UX Academy is a career accelerator program that will help you turn your passion for creativity into a successful career in UX/UI design. The program goes into each topic under the UX/UI design umbrella in more depth than all of our short courses combined, contains around 480 hours of coursework, and will help you develop a professional design portfolio so you can apply for jobs in the industry.

UX Academy also includes extras like Career Services, which enables you to work with a Career Coach for up to 6 months after graduation to perfect your portfolio, shape high quality job applications, and improve your interview technique.

Our short courses are more suited towards professionals who want to upskill in a particular area of design. There are no portfolio or career guidance aspects in the short courses, but you will still complete lots of project work.

If you’ve previously taken a Designlab short course, you can get credit towards UX Academy. All students who take one of our short courses will receive $150 credit on their UX Academy tuition per enrollment.

At the start of the course, you’ll choose one of our timed “tracks”—either full-time or part-time. Which one is right for you will depend on your other commitments, how quickly you want to complete the course, and how intensively you prefer to work.

The full-time track might be the one for you if:

• You have no other major time commitments
• You are highly motivated to complete the course within 3 months
• You are experienced and confident at independent learning

The part-time track might be better suited for you if:

• You need to balance UX Academy with other commitments (a 30+ hour job and children, for example)
• You are happy for the course to take 6 months
• You would prefer to study more flexibly and at a slower pace

Choose a track based on your schedule. For the full-time track, you’ll need to be able to commit to spending 40 hours a week on coursework. Our part-time track is designed to be combined with a full time job, and to enable you to complete coursework during evenings and weekends. For the part time option, you should plan to devote 20 hours a week to coursework.

The first thing to say is that UX Academy is, by design, an intensive experience. We want all of our students to succeed and achieve their goals, so remember you’re not alone in figuring this out!

A perk of the online community is that you’ll be able to share the challenges you’re facing with others in the UX Academy Slack channels and get tips from people who are in the same position.

We’ll also send you reminders and resources if you fall behind to help you get back on track. If you decide you can’t keep up with the pace of your track, we’ll quickly jump on a call to discuss your options. The most important thing is to always keep us in the loop!

We offer three tuition options for UX Academy:

• Upfront Payment (via PayPal or by credit/debit card)
• Extended Payment Plan (serviced by Climb Credit)
• 6-month Payment Plan ($400 fee, serviced by Designlab)

Regardless of which payment option you choose, you will also need to make a $399 refundable deposit at the time of enrollment to save your spot in the program. For upfront payments and payment plans serviced through Designlab, the next payment is due on the cohort’s start date.

As an example, a 6-month payment plan serviced by Designlab would look like this:

$7,749 (total tuition, including service fee) – $399 (deposit) = $7,350 (balance), split into 6 payments of $1,225 with the first payment due on the cohort start date.

If you take UX Academy Foundations first, we’ll apply a $500 credit by subtracting it from the balance before calculating your next payment(s).

UX Academy will set you up to land your first position as a professional designer capable of taking on a range of UX and UI design work. Graduates of UX Academy are most commonly hired for one of the following roles:

• UX/UI Designer
• UX Designer
• Product Designer

We’ve also had students work in more specialized roles, such as UI Designer or UX Researcher. However, this is more common after a few years of working in the industry.

Recent UX Academy graduates have landed roles at notable companies such as Adidas, TechStyle Fashion Group, Eved, Backbase, Comrade Agency, and Microsoft. To find out more, check out our UX Academy Success Stories.

Yes. Design is a fast-moving industry, with standards, tools, and market needs changing every year. Your portfolio is by far the primary point of reference for employers looking for evidence that you have the skills for the job.

With UX design in particular, college courses often lag behind the industry. UX Academy’s curriculum will equip you with up-to-date, relevant UX design skills that hiring managers are looking for. If you’re unsure, check out our UX Academy Success Stories.

Yes. As part of UX Academy you will have access to Career Services, a program where we help guide you through your job search for up to 6 months following graduation. Once you pass your portfolio review, you’ll have a well-rounded set of skills, the ability to use new tools, and a solid portfolio that showcases your background and work.

During Career Services, you will transition from your regular mentor to a Career Coach who will help with your portfolio, job applications, and interview technique. Our Career Coaches have extensive hiring experience and a fantastic track record of guiding students towards opportunities at well known companies.

We aim to pair students with Career Coaches who have specialized knowledge about industry locales and roles most relevant to the student's individual pursuits. Please note, that the majority of our students actually land a job within 2-4 months, so you can expect to start working and earning within a much shorter time frame!