General Assembly UX Design Class Experience

A few weeks ago, I completed a 10-week course at General Assembly Flatiron in NYC to get my certificate in UX Design. My main goal in taking this course was to expand my product design skills. I love learning new techniques, and staying on top of industry tools and trends. I’m excited to implement some of the great things I learned!

I want to get my thoughts down while the experience is still fresh, so I can possibly help anyone who is considering taking this course make their decision.

I wanted to take this class to expand and formalize my knowledge in the field. There were a lot of things I was already doing, but I also learned some new methods that I had never tried before—overall, it was a great experience. The course included 40 hours in class, and about 100-120 hours outside of class doing research and working on projects.

I design using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop every day, so I was excited to learn some newer programs for prototyping, like Sketch and InVision.

The class covered UX design processes from initial product ideation, all the way through to a finished high fidelity prototype portfolio piece. The course explained agile processes and lean UX methods—work environments that I had heard about, but not experienced. The course resulted in a polished portfolio piece, which each student presented to the class. I was impressed with the content and structure of the class—I felt that I gained a deep knowledge of the field.

There were a broad range of students—from experienced graphic design professionals like me, to young college kids, to other kinds of professionals who were sent by the companies they work for to design a product specific to that company’s goals. This gave me a fascinating glimpse into the broad range of problems that UX design and research could solve.

General Assembly offers several different versions of this course—a weekend mini bootcamp, a 1-week full time course, a 10-week part-time course (which I took), and a 10-week full time immersive course. All of these courses are also offered online for remote students.

I had difficulty deciding which class to take, but I feel confident I made the right choice, though, with the 10-week part-time course. For the money, I got so much out of this course. I could barely keep up with the reading list over the 10 weeks, so I’m sure the 1-week full time immersive course would have completely overwhelmed me (assuming it had the same course materials). The 10-week full time class was out of the question due to the 15K cost, and probably overkill since I already have professional digital product design experience.