As a startup founder and product manager, the UX Academy helped me to understand better how designers think. The training improved the way I work with designers.

The MUXL 8 weeks training course is a great introduction for a beginner looking to work in the field or anyone curious about the UX industry. The scope of topics covered by four industry experts ranged from ideation, flow creation, wireframing basics, usability testing methods and stakeholder management. Each three hour workshop, held once a week involved the trainer presenting their topics of expertise followed by a series of team exercises to expand on what was learnt.

I’ve recently completed the brilliant UX Academy course run by Mobile UX London. With many UX courses popping up all the time, here’s a few of my thoughts on this one… Firstly it was a great user experience. Having already been working as a Junior UX Designer for a few months the course was a great way of consolidating all my knowledge so far & brushing up on the areas which I haven’t yet worked on as much.

One of the most valuable aspects of the course was gaining a better understanding of the break down of the different stages of a User Experience and having the chance to put each of them to practice in teams. Working in a star-up, we go through most of the stages informally but it has been very helpful knowing how to run through things in a more structured manner.

The course has given me food for thought. I’m still as in love with UX as before, so that’s good. It’s given me ideas for where to find decent resources and how to use them. Now that I have completed the course I will be more confident to challenge people’s assumptions when we are building new products, and I feel more confident that this is the right path for me. ‘It is better to learn something than to be right’ – I’ll be carrying this phrase with me from now on!

As a project manager from a development background, now that I have a better understanding of the basics of UX, I can better hire and communicate with UX professionals to make sure the products we put out have good UX.

I think my favourite moment on the course was the introduction to creativity exercises. As an example, we took a random object and used its properties to generate a much broader range of design references for our service. Our object was a silver toy aeroplane that was also a pen and, as a result, we ended up focusing more clearly on whether our service needed to be tangible and what ethos of interaction it would bring for the user. We asked different types of questions: Would it be sleek or modular? What would the balance of play and function be?

The course was a really good introduction and overview to UX. It presented all elements of the process from inception to completion, with an opportunity to work through an idea while learning important concepts.

The interaction was really good – I also really appreciated the resources as it was good to go over them after the course. Sometimes it’s hard to take all of the information in, having the resources allowed me to do so in my spare time.