Product Design Bootcamp

The UX Design Bootcamp is a free 12-week course teaching students the fundamentals of user research and design.

Timeframe
Fall semester 2021
Spring semester 2022

What
12 week course with weekly lectures and homework, a semester-long case study project, and interactive workshops.

Instructors
Simon Zhang (Spring ‘22)
Michelle Hou (Spring ‘22)
Kimberly Do (Fall ‘21)
Mira Dhingra (Fall ‘21)

Skills
Leadership
Collaboration
Visual Design
Storytelling / Presenting

What is Bits of Good?

Bits of Good is a student run organization at Georgia Tech (GT’s chapter of the national Hack4Impact organization) that educates and connects students with local-nonprofits to create powerful web apps.

The Design Bootcamp trains and equips students to later join Bits of Good as Product Designers where they can use design to serve non-profits✨

Why the design bootcamp?

After working as a BoG product designer, I noticed that many of my fellow GT students also wanted to become product designers but lacked formal UX design classes and resources. To help bridge this skill-gap, Mira, Kimberly, and I volunteered to lead a bootcamp covering the fundamentals of user research and design.

💡 Our goal was to help facilitate a pipeline of students equipped with design skills from the bootcamp into becoming Product Designers to work on Bits of Good’s non-profit projects.

My Impact

I am passionate about breaking down barriers to design education and building community—as a Design Bootcamp Instructor, I was able to merge both of these passions! My impact included:

Delivering lectures and interactive workshops
Providing feedback and critique on students’ work
Communicating with execs and advocating for my students
Organizing class bonding events (boba🧋 + protfolio jams)
Facilitating project showcases to increase students' visibility

Learning & growing

Teaching this bootcamp twice allowed me to learn what worked well and what needed improvement for the next semester’s bootcamp iteration. Here are some of the struggles I faced as an instructor and how I resolved this issues.

⏰ Last minute projects

Several students waited until the last few days of the bootcamp to do the bulk of their semester-long case study project work. This case study requires user research, low-fi design, usability testing, and a final high-fi design...none of which could be effecitively rushed into 2-3 days of work.

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✅ Multiple project check-ins

My second semester teaching, I established a cadence of two progress presentations and several group check-ins with myself or another instructor over the course of the semester. This set-up check points to keep students on track, accountable, and completing their projects in a timely manor.

🗣 Lecture-heavy classes

A piece of feedback we recieved from students during the first semester was that many of our bootcamp sessions were too lecture heavy. After a long day of Georgia Tech classes, students are too fatigued to stay engaged for another 2-hour bootcamp lecture in the evenings.

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✅ Engaging interactive compontents

Incorporating the student feedback into my semester planning, I decided to cap bootcamp sessions at 30 minutes of lecture time and to fill the rest of the time with critiques and hands-on activities. This intiative proved to be a huge success in increasing student engagement and allowing students to practice course concepts while recieving guidance from instructors.

💬 Scattered communication

Between multiple Slack channels & DMs, Notion pages, Figma, and Bluejeans video calls, students expressed being overwhelmed about where to look for information about about bootcamp sessions, events, projects, and homework.

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✅ Course hub

For the second semester, I created the “Bootcamp Syllabus & Hub” via Notion: this master document included all due-dates, relevant event info, links to lecture slides and Figma files, and class video recordings for the semester. The implementation of the Bootcamp Hub was a success and has been replicated in newer additions of the bootcamp.