A real brief. A real client. A real presentation back.

Yes. Your team of three or four shares the brief and divides up the research, but each person does their own design work and writes their own case study: what you decided, what you tested, what you'd do differently. The brief is shared and the portfolio piece is yours. It ends with something a course exercise can't give you -- your team presents the work back to the real client, and their reaction goes into the case study.

Yes, in two ways. Your project team reviews the work between sessions as the project moves, and the cohort shares work for review on Fridays. On top of that your team meets a mentor live each week for around 30 minutes. That check-in is with the whole team rather than one-to-one, which matters if a dedicated personal mentor is what you're looking for.

It depends on the brief. For usability testing you generally don't need more than five people to get a clear read -- it's rare to get a split like two-two-one, so five people nearly always gives you a clear majority view, which our lead instructor Natalia Veretenyk teaches as a rule of thumb. In a real business, teams often test with tools such as usertesting.com, where you set a target persona and get feedback on your interface from people who match it. For a B2B brief specifically, the testers are usually people who are realistic to find -- a product manager or another designer, for example -- rather than a specialist role that would be too hard to recruit. That's also one of the reasons we turn down a brief if its real users would be too hard for a student team to reach.

Yes. Send us your company's billing details, plus a PO number if your company uses one, and we'll invoice them directly. There's no deposit when an employer is paying. Book a call at myuxacademy.com/book-a-call/ or email hello@myuxacademy.com and we'll sort it.

8 weeks, one live session a week -- wednesday evenings, 6:00 to 8:30pm uk time. Every session is live. Nothing is pre-recorded, though sessions are recorded so you can catch up if you miss one.

Around 5 to 6 hours a week in total, including the independent project work you do between sessions.

A small team, usually three to four people, working on one client brief together for the whole course. A mentor reviews your team's project live, once a week, for around 30 minutes -- a team check-in, not one-to-one mentorship.

No prior design experience is required. If you have already done some free or self-paced UX learning, that helps -- the course is intensive and practical, and people who arrive already comfortable with the basics tend to get more out of it.

Cohorts are capped at 10 people, and most run smaller than that.

You receive a certificate confirming you completed the course. It's a certificate of completion, not an accredited qualification.

UX Academy has partnerships with design software companies, so students get free access to some tools while studying -- not every tool, but a genuine saving on the ones we can secure.

We validate the project itself before we take the company on -- not every brief that comes to us gets used. The company needs an existing prototype or working product; we don't build projects from a blank page, and most of the companies we work with are early-stage. They have to agree upfront that your team can publish the work as a portfolio case study, and they normally provide the users for testing. We turn down briefs whose users would be too hard for a student team to recruit -- a brief that needs a nuclear scientist or a senior accountant isn't one we take on.