Case Study: Redesigning Ironhack’s UX/UI Bootcamp
People over tools. Interactions over processes. Collaborate to grow.
A little bit of intro
For the last year, I’ve been in charge of the UX/UI Design Bootcamp at Ironhack. I’m the Product Owner for UX/UI, meaning I take care of our UX/UI Bootcamp and other design-related products (B2B retraining courses, lead-gen endeavors, Full-time vs. Part-time programs, etc.). In the last quarter of 2018, I decided to strategically revamp our Bootcamp structure to help build better prepared and more resilient professionals ready to land their first job as UX designers, Product Owners or UI Developers and conquer a position in this ever-changing industry.
Background
At Ironhack we keep a lean product development approach, consulting our customers, SMEs, and key stakeholders to maintain our courses relevant in the industry. We conduct periodical employer surveys, thus remaining up-to-date in the professional community, monitoring job placement rate now at 90%.
The education team felt the need to revamp the UXUI product. We could forecast a problem, observing a declining job placement rate of UX graduates. On top of that, the career paths within product design broaden including new frameworks and areas of expertise. We knew we could do more to help young professionals achieve their dream career.
Another important reason to change the UX/UI Curricula was to make it more modular. We want to personalize student development and diversify learning outcomes, which can help students launch design-related jobs — service design, project management or UI development for example— rather than designer jobs only. In order to personalize student learning paths, we need to first make the curriculum adaptable, which can be achieved with modularity.
Ironhack’s vision is to be the most outcome-focused and student-centric education institution in the world. So, for this project, it translates to:
Make a more modular and flexible course that teachers can adapt depending on the local tech landscape, level of maturity of UX within the ecosystem and class needs according to students interests.
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Once I was informed and had benchmarked the industry standards, I took time to communicate the news with the faculty and start collaborating to make the best Bootcamp a girl can dream of. The teachers, the real warriors over here, gave me very relevant feedback along the way based on what they could observe in class, students feedback and Outcomes figures from all around the world. I could have never fine-combed the product to take it to its actual state if it wasn’t for the virtuous cycle we keep to ensure a real Lean product development.
Let us deep dive into what’s new in Ironhack’s UX/UI Bootcamp v.4.0
The strategy
Ironhack has been training UX/UI Designers for 2,5 years already. When we first launched the Bootcamp, it was the first of its nature in Europe and I first joined it as a student. Throughout these couple of years, the state of affairs regarding how to successfully enter into the tech community as a designer has changed a lot. Also, we need to consider that the company has grown to have a presence in 9 different locations in Europe, USA, and Latin America, adding a little more complexity to the mix. What at first seemed like a very scalable formula, having a course template “one fits all” solution, started to give more pains than gains.
Priorities for the new version:
- Have more projects done during the Bootcamp, helping to achieve outcomes by performing portfolio-driven practice.
- Fully adopt the Thinking Classrooms framework in all campuses.
- Diversify the program outcomes, training every student to help them achieve their dream job (it can be very different according to students background and job listings available in their region).
- Give the teachers a greater degree of liberty to plan for their classes and adapt them to students/ecosystem needs, thus meeting the objective of 100% placement rate in all our products.
- Include some relevant tools, software, and frameworks to collaborate in the best way possible in creating amazing products and services.
- Enhance Agile practice throughout the Bootcamp to get Ironhackers ready for the real world. We didn’t want to merely teach a lesson about agile. The best way to learn agile is by using it and adopting its values! We also use agile internally, to keep improving our professional practice and campus operations.
Working with such a big, disperse and diverse group of amazing human beings, I didn’t want to keep all the work to myself, even when it was WIP. Crafting the Bootcamp in such an open, collaborative and vulnerable way provided me with one of the most important learnings I’ve had as a professional so far:
If you appear assertive, propositive and secure about a project and at the same time you offer it for collaboration/feedback in an open, vulnerable and discovery-oriented way, you are basically broadening you team and attracting more value to the product. Also, this way of leading the team, more Bottom-up than top-down, more consultative than prescriptive, results in better adoption and life-cycle of the product in the long run.
The planning
When I started this project, I had no idea where to start to be honest. I knew for a fact that the content itself wasn’t the problem, as many hiring partners had already told me that Ironhackers knew the tools and methodology well enough to work in any agency or product company. Nevertheless, I kept reading the feedback that our students submit weekly through surveys… it was far from comforting. There were concerns about the number and quality of projects, alongside collaboration issues and demands. On top of that, the main feedback from teaching teams locally was referred to the sequence and pace of the program: some fixes would serve ones need but affecting other campus’ experience with the product at the same time.
Early on 2018 I had started mapping the feedback I received from different stakeholders into a radar, just to make sure I wasn’t overlooking any piece of information received at the various stages of the product development: planning the projects, writing the projects, organizing the existing content, creating new content, structuring the product, etc. I took inspiration from Thoughtwork’s Innovation Radar and completely vandalized it for my own good 😈 So when I was ready to start the new plan, I would have all the ingredients and constraints at sight.
The first thing I did to plan the future Bootcamp was, in fact, something that we call backward planning or retro-planning: it’s basically cascading from your curricula high-level objectives going towards the definition of assessments and how to organize content. I decided to work together with Nevan, the UX/UI Lead instructor in Campus Barcelona, who already has a lot of experience in training teaching teams and designing curricula. Not only did he give me insight being a key stakeholder, but also the support I needed, being more or less a UX team of one person! We had amazing debates and experimented with the possibilities that the set-up would allow.
Because we’re UX Designers, the most eye-opening and effective exercises included several post-it notes, whiteboard markets and drafts that would rapidly end their life-cycle in the office bin. None of these afternoons were vain, as all iterations help me better understand the users, and the product, and our direction as a team was becoming increasingly clear. That gave me a sense of ownership and along with that, security that we were doing a great job in re-making the best Bootcamp in the market (…I’m only saying this because Ironhack’s UX/UI Bootcamp received the BEST BOOTCAMP badge from Switchup in 2018, so I didn’t want to rest in my laurels 💅🏼).
New Structure, more content.
Practice structures the learning at Ironhack’s Bootcamp.
These are the new projects in v.4.0.:
- Wicked Problems: Focus - Service Design. Students are introduced to the core research methods to solve problems at the grand scale using Design Thinking.
- Local e-commerce: We foster real field-research and develop Information Architecture capacity by designing a simple website adjusted to usability best practices.
- Smart People: Students are invited to define an MVP of an app and master agile to keep a healthy flow.
- Add a feature: We look at the most popular products in the market to deeply understand interface design and Design Systems.
- Editorial Design: Lets students experiment with Typography, imagery and basic animations.
- Curated Event Microsite: Students create a unique online experience for a festival of their choice.
- Curated Event Responsive Website: Deploy a website using HTML & CSS only. Lets designers experience the whole production-cycle and empathize with web developers.
- Iron Hackathon: All students on campus take part in a one-day hackathon to learn about each other’s work.
- Final Project: this is every students’ cover letter to start heavy job-seek. You can bring your idea or collaborate with one of our Hiring Partners.
The making
Once I had a clear idea of how to structure the new Bootcamp — we would stick to our current structure-, gain clarity on what new content to include and what to take out/synthesize and how to replace/renew the projects I was ready to take my Bootcamp for a test run.
I took advantage of our brand new Lead Teacher in Campus Amsterdam onboarding in Barcelona Offices. Marjon came here for about a week to get some training on andragogy, attend classes and gain further insight on best practices to implement the product.
I decided to design an exercise for us to better understand the product and planning for classes. We would write down the projects names, nine in the new 4.0 version, and define them:
- What kind of assessment is this: evaluative, summative or self-guided.
- What unit does it belong to: UX, UI or Web Design.
- What content do students need to know to complete the activity: this would inform, step by step, the order and timing of the class lessons.
We also had prepared all lessons names in a different color post-it note (the yellow ones in this picture) and started organizing them under each of the project’s names (the big pink post-its in the above picture). The aftermatch was comparing the results of our exercise and the actual planning for 4.0 that I had put together. The results were great! There was enough coincidence to know that my planning was making sense, I learned a few new ways to explain it and had the opportunity to collaboratively re-think and fine-tune the product for the first real beta test.
Test and Learnings
In December I was ready to plan for 4.0 rollout. We decided to launch it first in only one location, to gain insight on how implementation goes, polishing the materials and planning for the choreography between the class and other actors: Program Manager, Outcomes Manager, field-trips, fun activities, etc.
Murilo agreed to work with me for the first quarter of 2019. He was running his second Bootcamp as Berlin’s Lead Teacher and has agile in his veins: he’s experimental and gives very honest and at the same time constructive and respectful feedback.
We would connect every week if possible. At first, the meetings were more thorough and structured, following the weekly planning and discussing every point. After a few sync calls, we’d only highlight a cumulus of events and talk about them, and how to deal with that in class. Lastly, we do a little bit of therapy, giving advice to each other of how to act at given circumstances or how to do this and that more effectively. I make lists of bullet points, tasks on Trello cards o crazy diagrams that I send over to Muri through Slack. As the tests and weeks go by, towards the end of our testing quarter together we’re more and more dedicated to fine-tuning to make the perfect choreography and let it be a pleasurable experience.
With this first experience, I trained two other instructors to test the Part-time Bootcamp in México City and in Barcelona. We are now running three tests at the same time :)
Global roll-out
Together with Zhou, the head of Education in Ironhack, we have planned for the communication and roll-out strategy for the new version of the product.
Starting in April of 2019 this new release of the UX/UI Bootcamp is live at your local Ironhack Campus 🎉 If you want to know more about it, you can read this article and ask for more info to your local admissions manager. If you’re about to start the course, just remember:
Trust the process, be kind to each other, respect the diverse and learn from it. Have fun and enjoy the ride!
Written with ❤ by Sofía Dalponte
