Ironhack’s UX/UI Bootcamp, reloaded.

Building the next generation of product designers.

Every presentation should start with a great GIF, that has no apparent meaning but also has all the meaning. Think about it 🧖🏽‍♀️

And while you are thinking about that GIF, I will tell you a story about how was the first big release I experienced working as a Product and Service Designer at Ironhack.

The scenario

In the past year, many things happened in Ironhack, the education startup that is revolutionizing tech training, and that I joined back in 2016. Let me give you a little bit of context:

• Ironhack grew from having four campuses (Miami, Madrid, Barcelona and, Paris) to nine Ironhack HQ around the world (with the opening of México City, Berlin, Amsterdam, Lisboa and Sao Paulo). That's a big wow!
• We developed the Data Analytics Bootcamp, available in all 9 locations.
• The family has grown! We’re now more than a hundred employees.
• We’re expanding our vision and culture to be up to an industry of change.
• More than 2000 Alumni around the world to connect with.

Probably that’s just some of the things that happened and not all, but I have to say the most important thing should be the retreat in Costa Brava to think about our values and culture. From those days together, we draw our vision:

Be the most outcomes-focused education institution in the world.

Our Career Services team is now one of the most active and powerful I have worked with so far. Their mission is connecting the recent grads to the companies and work on both ends to make that transition as smooth as possible.

The Challenge

In the past 2,5 years, Ironhack has graduated almost 1000 junior UX/UI Designers in seven different countries. And also, the industry where these designers work has changed a lot. Not only the awareness around UX Design and Design Thinking has raised globally almost reaching total awareness — I mean, like your mother knows what’s UX — , but also the markets have evolved climbing a few steps towards more user-centered design cultures. It was time to take a twist.

What we know about how to design products and services today is way more than what we knew a few years ago. This exponential growth of the field of studies is due to platforms like Medium and communities like Meetup letting all the growing professionals self-publish and keep learning, every day a little bit. That’s partially why I’m writing this post here, so I stay tuned.

We were witnessing the broadening of frontiers between roles, the expansion of design in all sorts of organizations and the more popular integration of agile as a working framework and in the position of doing something about a product that is building the working force of hundreds of new businesses.

Evaluating Subject Matter Expert -SME- and user feedback, we took a couple of early decisions:

• Multiply the number of projects finished in class.
• Diversify the outcome: students are the drivers of their future.
• Enhance the experience, though as a whole.
• Include new frameworks and tools (For example Service Design and The Value Proposition Canvas along with J-T-B-D).
• Simplify lectures to let time for more hands-on learning.
• Address the needs of diverse learners.

Now, we also had a few constraints:

• We were onboarding a lot of teachers who were trained using the previous version.
• Changing the product affects a lot of people. Not only students, who are not only our clients but the focus of our mission, but my co-workers who would undoubtedly do whatever is in their hands to make the most of everyone’s time at Ironhack even when things fall down.
• We wouldn’t have a lot of time to re-train the team to work with the new version.
• A lot of our documentation — syllabus, instruments, the website, agreements, etc.- has information that would render outdated with a big revamp.
• We had to stay true to people that had bought the product even before I started planning for it.

My team, that I can call friends, gave me the best advice and coached me along the way until I could say: Challenge accepted 💪

Hands-on learning

So, I’m the instructional designer at a school that trains newbies into tech careers by hands-on practice and a huge amount of effort…, let me tell you, this time I was the student. At first, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I recognize now that every problem is a design problem for me, because design is one. Right?

The education team decided on maintaining the same structure as the previous version so that the product would be, overall, communicated in the same way. We had then, an obstruction to work around. Digression: If you haven’t seen it yet and you are interested in the creative process, I have to recommend Lars Von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, the most influential movie for my understanding of how to make sh*t.

We also didn’t have time to write all the content of the course again, so using the lessons that were already included in the Bootcamp to that point, with the possibility of eliminating, changing status to optional, combining, reducing and rewriting some, was the way to go. The first exercise to redesign the UX/UI Curricula involved multiple colored and shaped post-it notes, sharpies and a whiteboard — I’m a design thinker, what did you expect? Spreadsheets?

This is the mantra that I repeat to myself every day:

The most important are the outcomes, the objectives. Nobody wants to use your product! People just want to live their lives ❤ Our students want to have cool jobs in great companies that are redefining how we relate to the world today.

That got me thinking about how different can our students be screening from Sao Paulo to Amsterdam…

• What if a graduate in Amsterdam finds an opportunity in Service Design?
• What if one of our students is a UI ninja and also has a passion for development?
• What if I come from a completely non-techie background and need to build my portfolio while finishing the Bootcamp?
• What if someone would like to combine a career as a business strategist with UXUI competencies?
• What if you are a project manager that wants to better help tech teams achieve success?

All these profiles make a more diverse and interesting Bootcamp and I wanted to create a meaningful experience for them all.

The result, in the making!

Two set of tests and some iterations ahead, we can proudly announce that we have a new UX/UI Bootcamp to offer globally. Still a nine-week or twenty-four-week course depending if you take full-time or part-time commitment and still divided into three broadly named units: the First module being UX, then UI and crowning with web design and a full stack final project.

It is planned as a project-based learning experience that involves developing nine projects done either solo or in design and cross-functional teams. The news is that Career Services, our big “perk” in terms of product, is now built-in the curricula so we can keep a better company in the job-seeking journey. Now, with more projects, we had the opportunity to address different audiences, needs and ultimately develop capacities to solve different problems and different stages of the process.

The projects

1. Wicked Problems: welcome to Service Design. You’ll be introduced to the core research methods to solve problems at the grand scale.
2. Local e-commerce: We foster real field-research to design a simple website adjusted to usability best practices.
3. Smart People: define an MVP and master agile.
4. Add a feature: deeply understand interface design and Design Systems.
5. Editorial Design: experiment with Typography, imagery and basic animations.
6. Curated Event Microsite: create a unique online experience for a festival of your choice.
7. Curated Event Responsive Website: use HTML & CSS to deploy a website. Experience the whole production-cycle and empathize with web developers.
8. Iron Hackathon: All students in campus take part in a one-day hackathon to learn about each other’s work.
9. 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.

As a result, graduates gain training not only in usability, interaction design, and visual design but also in other areas that inform UX and that make an important part of our everyday practice: project management, business analysis, front-end development, motion graphics, branding, service design, agile, among others.

According to the agile manifesto, roles will continue to blur over time

Our UX/UI Bootcamp has evolved to train A WIDE VARIETY OF PRODUCT PROFESSIONALS who are people-centric and design-culture carriers within a startup or blue chip organizations. We are, together, shaping the next generation of Service and Product designers, for a better world!

→ If you’re interested in knowing how we built our new UXUI Curricula, read my Case Study: Redesigning Ironhack’s UX/UI Bootcamp

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Contact us or apply to learn more!

And don’t hesitate to contact me to chat, I’d love to hear your thoughts, learn about your experience at Ironhack or have a passionate debate about the future of education. Reach out to my Linkedin

Built with ❤ at Ironhack