What would I recommend to someone that is going to do a bootcamp
Since I finished the UX/UI Design Bootcamp at Ironhack, a lot of people have asked me for advice on how to face the bootcamp. Here are my five cents:
Before anything and most important, ENJOY 😁
A course like this is an experience you are not going to have every year, you should enjoy each week, each class, each moment.
Every bootcamp is intense, so although it may seem like a long time, it will fly by.
Bootcamps are marathons, not sprints
Even there are 9 weeks of course (in most cases), you can’t stay up working until 3 am to “finish all the work that needs to be done”. At the end, you’ll be wasted and you’ll not be able to enjoy or learn what comes next.
Remember, the bootcamp doesn’t end at week 9, right after you’ll have a Hiring Fair in which you’ll interview with multiple companies, and then you’ll start working. And you don’t want to be at half gas in any of these moments, don’t you?
Personally, sleeping consistently 8 hours every day and (alternating) doing activities through the day (going to the gym or playing videogames) helped a lot.
Don’t be a workaholic or work without resting
There’s always going to be a lot of work, this is the main reason for a bootcamp lasting only 9 weeks. But you don’t have to confuse working a lot with working good.
More hours working doesn’t mean better results
Don’t understand me wrong, working more hours will yield you better results, but only if you know how to take advantage of the hours, not if you are working without thinking and without resting.
It seems so easy and simple. But when you are focused on a particular problem, it’s easy to lose the notion of time and spend hours trying to solve it. A lot of times you need to abstract yourself from a problem to see the whole picture.
For example: with exercises of visual design, in my experience it is not something you could make in one day, you need to rest to be able to critique your own designs, otherwise, you’ll be drunk of your design and it will be impossible to see ways of improving it.
One of the tools that helped me most was the Pomodoro technique, which resumes in 25 minutes focus on one task, resting during 5 minutes and starting again (if you want to know more, here is an article that explains it). In my case, I realized that 50 minutes pomodoros worked better because 25 minutes always felt short and interrupted my workflow.
There is no secret formula, try different options and choose the one that gives you better results.
The importance of attitude
Attitude matters a lot more than you think. It’s way more important than your background or your previous job.
Networking
Go to every event you can and take advantage of every moment to network and talk to people (both inside and outside Ironhack), you never know who is going to be your next work mate, boss or best friend.
The group project is more important than the individual project
This projects will not be 100% aligned with what you want, but that is an huge opportunity to see how it is to work with a real team (normally the work you’ll find after finishing the bootcamp won’t be creating a team from scratch, but to join a team already created, so you must know how to work as a team).
Take advantage of these projects to create much better products than you could create individually, do not focus on whether you make your ideas or those of another, leave your ego apart and focus on finding the best solution to the problem. Fall in love with the problem, not with your solution.
Not every person is equal
We are all different from each other, we have different backgrounds (cookers, construction workers, fire rescuers, graphic designers, engineers, etc), and consequently, we have our strengths and weaknesses.
An exercise that helped me a lot was to think about the outcomes I want for the bootcamp before starting it.
- Do I want to be more focus on the UX part or on the UI one?
- Do I want to be more focused on the front end or the back end?
- Do I want to write post on Medium and create a personal brand or I want to go deeper on the curriculum of the bootcamp?
“Hey Pablo, this is so easy said when you already have done the bootcamp, but how can I know it if I don’t truly understand what the bootcamp is about?”
Obviously is easier said than done. If before starting the bootcamp you don’t know the outcomes you want, talk with previous students, talk with the instructors…
The difference between “deliverables” and exercises that give you value (output vs outcome)
Making something “prettier” will not help you more with solving a problem.
Not every exercise that you realize have to be perfect aesthetically, you don’t have to draw a perfect user persona with every detail or create an empathy map like an art piece.
In a lot of cases, you may need exercises for your portfolio o for a job interview, for which you will have to make them as perfect as possible. But, you must always know that the aesthetics of deliverables are not the value of that deliverable. The value is the questions that the exercise raise or the answers that give you.
For example, the outcome of making a user persona is to empathize with the user, not to have a beautiful draw of your users (output).
If you want to know more about the value that an exercise provides, Lean UX is a good starting point.
Complement all the things you learn (without losing your head)
Don’t be drawn by the number of articles that pop up every day about design. You don’t have to know every tool possible, you don’t have to know what’s happening exactly in this second in the world of design.
When you are starting, more than reading a lot of short articles that are not going to give you a good base to build upon, it can be more interesting to read books that are the foundation of today’s design (like Paul Rand: a Designer’s Art, The Art Of Looking Sideways, Branding: In Five and a Half Steps, How to, Exposing the Magic of Design, Lean UX, Google Sprint o The Design of Everyday Things).
You LinkedIn title doesn’t make you a better designer
Not by adding a title, you have the knowledge of that title.
In an ideal world, each person would have the title they really have, Product Designers would be Product Designers, UX Designers would be UX Designers, Lead Designers would be Lead Designers and so on.
Work to improve and learn as a designer, not to improve your LinkedIn Title.
“I’m making the prework and I would love to learn more things to be better prepared for the bootcamp, what do you recommend me?”
Read, investigate, make courses, start creating your portfolio or your personal brand. But try to complement everything you are going to see in the course. It doesn’t serve you well to study things you are going to see to be the smart kid in the class.
For the UX/UI Design bootcamp, there are some resources that can help you:
- Hackdesign has mini-courses about design which are send by email.
- High Resolution is a series of interviews dedicated to Design, they have interviewed a lot of designers from companies like Airbnb, IDEO, Uber, Spotify, etc…
- Curso de Diseño de Producto de Udacity
- WWDC Design Talks from Apple, every year, designers from Apple give a lot of talks inside the Worldwide Developers Conference, you can watch them all online or even download them.
- If you like video content, there are a lot of interesting channels like Google Design, The Futur, Sketch Together, Jesse Showalter, Mike Locke o Flux.
About me
hello 👋, Alonso here.
I’ve spent some time working at Ironhack and mendesaltaren as a Product Designer.
You can read me on Medium (I usually post in Spanish) and follow me on Twitter or Instagram.
