Why Learn UX Design at CodeCraft School?
As the in-house marketing manager at CodeCraft School of Technology in Boulder, Colorado, I led the creation of this video to help recruit students for our UX design program. I developed the interview questions, prepared and interviewed the instructors, and worked with a videographer and an editor to shape the finished piece. We used it on social media and in our student-recruitment marketing to show prospective students how the program worked, who they would learn from, and what made our approach different.
Meet the instructors
All three were CodeCraft instructors and mentors. Roles shown are from the time of the recording.
- Jason Walzer — UX design lead at Google
- Chris Alvarez — UX designer at Derive Systems
- Nikki Pfarr — UX researcher and strategist at Akamai
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This was the second of two videos in the series. The first, What Is User Experience Design, and Why Does It Matter?, introduced the field. For this one, I wanted prospective students to hear directly from the people who designed and taught the curriculum: why they taught the full UX process, how students worked with real clients, and what classroom collaboration added to the experience.
The conversation below is an edited transcript of the video, organized by topic. I’ve removed verbal fillers and false starts for readability. The roles and program details describe CodeCraft at the time of the original 2017 article.
Their paths into UX
Jason
My name is Jason Walzer. I’m a UX design instructor at CodeCraft, but I’m also a UX manager and design lead at Google.
Chris
I’m Chris Alvarez. I’m a UX designer and have been for about ten years now. I’ve worked for product companies internally and also with consultancies.
Nikki
My name is Nikki Pfarr. I am a UX researcher and strategist. I got my start as a UX designer working at Google, and I went back to graduate school to focus a little bit more on the research and strategy portions of the UX process.
Teaching the whole UX process
Jason
The other instructors and I really put a lot of thought into creating this curriculum, and we made sure that we brought our different perspectives to the curriculum itself.
Nikki
We put a lot of time into designing a curriculum that would prepare students for real-world UX roles. We wanted to think about how we could tackle the entire UX process and not just focus on one sliver of the process, which is sometimes what you get when you look at some of these bootcamp curriculums.
For us, it was really important that we looked at everything from competitive research, market research, and user research, all the way through ideation, building the actual user interface and user experience, and increasing the fidelity up to that final interactive prototype level.
Jason
I think a lot of UX bootcamp programs nowadays, especially ones that are given online only, tend to focus on the tools that people use. What are the tools or the software programs that they use to create the UX design definition?
That’s great, and that’s part of the curriculum here as well. However, we really expand it out and approach things from a higher level, especially in the beginning. We teach our students how to approach user research and get that foundational understanding.
We help them explore and collaborate with other folks on a team, whether it’s engineers or product managers. Then we get into the actual tools and how they define their design definition and move forward.
Finding your place in the field
Nikki
The goal is that they get familiarity with the different methods that are part of all of the stages of the process, but then they can also decide what they’re most interested in and what they want to dig down deeper into.
We’re here to help them figure out what they love the most, and then also to connect them with the resources they might need later on to go more in depth into certain areas.
Not everyone has to be a soup-to-nuts UX research practitioner. That’s certainly a valuable type of role. But you might find yourself more drawn to UX research, UX writing, or the visual design aspects, and that’s great, too. We want to make sure we’re exposing students to the breadth so they can decide where they want to go deeper into the process.
Learning through face-to-face collaboration
Chris
There are a lot of things that you can’t get out of an online course. A lot of that is the personal interactions that you have on a real UX project. That’s really hard to imitate online, so we try to provide a place where we have those interactions in the classroom.
We have a lot of dynamics back and forth between the instructors, so it feels more like a real environment for learning.
Working with real clients in Boulder
Nikki
One of the things I’m excited about when it comes to CodeCraft’s curriculum is the fact that we’re working with local clients here in the Boulder community. Students get hooked up with a client organization that has some type of user experience need. They get to go through the class with a focus on a project that helps solve that problem for a real-world organization.
Jason
The idea of having students do a project with an actual client is really rooted in the fact that we have to be dealing with real people with real problems. Those people are not just the users, but also the client. They have real business problems, and when you’re able to work with a real client, you get that deeper understanding of what they’re trying to solve and how you can help them.
Nikki
This means that we’re not only teaching fundamental UX skills and methods, but we’re also teaching the intricacies and the nuances associated with interacting with a client. How do you tell the story of what you’re doing? How do you present your work to your stakeholders or to your client team?
Preparing for a UX role
Jason
As a hiring manager myself, I know that companies and organizations are looking for UX designers that have a wide range of skill sets, whether it’s user research, visual design, or interaction design. What I think CodeCraft is giving these students is a leg up in the industry.
