2. UX Academy (Part-time)

 Look, I’ve got bones to pick with every bootcamp peddling pixel dreams and $8,000 delusions. Most are smoke some are mirrors. But Designlab? This one’s the whole circus. The ringleader of the scam parade. They dressed up busywork as curriculum, slapped “job-ready” on it like a clearance sticker, and let mentors half-baked and half-interested phone it in from the beach. (My one mentor ditched me and only gives linked in recommendations to hot chicks, the second one had a screaming toddlercrawling on her was always late couldn't speak English, my third one made false lies about how he had the power to hire people at his company and that I had a shot at working there.) It’s all shiny decks and Discord smoke until you realize you just paid a luxury price tag to learn what YouTube teaches for free, except with more gaslighting. I would highly recommend anyone stay away from any UX design school. While many online design schools operate in a murky space between education and marketing, Designlab stands out as the most egregious example of false promises and predatory practices. I’ve long suspected that many of these programs are more focused on profit than education. Still, this one takes the cake, offering hollow mentorship, copy-paste curriculum, and a refund policy designed to fail you. It hides behind slick branding and vague job guarantees while delivering little of real value. If other programs are merely disappointing, Designlab is outright deceptive—an insult to students who invest their time, money, and hope into building a better future.Enrolling in Designlab was one of the most disappointing and costly decisions I’ve ever made. What was promised as a launchpad into a UX career turned out to be an overpriced, underwhelming scam masked as a professional design education. My experience can only be described as a year and a half of wasted time, money, and trust.Key Issues:

Incompetent Mentorship: Despite claiming to be industry professionals, mentors offered little more than recycled clichés. Their advice was generic, unhelpful, and at times, outright wrong. It was clear they were there for a paycheck, not to teach.

Lack of Real Learning: After two years of self-study in UX, I expected to gain advanced, job-ready skills. Instead, I walked away having learned almost nothing new, as confirmed by a Fiverr designer who bluntly told me my portfolio was “pathetic.”

False Job Placement Promises: My mentor fabricated stories about internal hiring opportunities and job placements among past students. These were blatant lies. he contradicted himself only weeks later when he forgot he told me and offered it again like he was some saint.

Empty Career Support: The career services were laughable. Their so-called $8,000 value came down to using a free site (Huntr) and joining Discord channels anyone can access for free. Job tracking and community support can be found online at no cost, and with far better guidance.

Refund Policy is a Trap: Their tuition reimbursement guarantee is deceptive. Once you apply, they invent additional criteria not listed in their policy to deny you. It's a trap meant to sell you false hope.

Utterly Useless Outcomes: I’ve applied to thousands of jobs with my “job-ready” resume and portfolio. After two years, I haven’t received a single legitimate offer. Not one.
YouTube taught me more. Google’s Coursera UX course taught me more. Designlab 
Designlab was a mirage in the desert of ambition promising water, delivering dust. A monument to wasted time built by those who know better but choose profit over purpose.Designlab should be reviewed and investigated by both consumer protection agencies and educational oversight organizations due to its misleading advertising, unqualified mentorship, and deceptive refund practices. Agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the New York State Attorney General's Office are responsible for holding companies accountable for making false claims and engaging in fraudulent business practices. Additionally, platforms like the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and Trustpilot allow affected students to share their experiences publicly and warn others. I wonder why Design Labs isn't listed on the Better Business Bureau (BBB)? Because Designlab operates as an online educational service without recognized accreditation, it falls into a regulatory gray area where consumer rights groups and legal watchdogs must step in to evaluate whether it is engaging in predatory conduct under the guise of career advancement. While many online design schools operate in a murky space between education and marketing, Designlab stands out as the most egregious example of false promises and predatory practices. I’ve long suspected that many of these programs are more focused on profit than education. Still, this one takes the cake, offering hollow mentorship, copy-paste curriculum, and a refund policy designed to fail you. It hides behind slick branding and vague job guarantees while delivering little of real value. If other programs are merely disappointing, Designlab is outright deceptive—an insult to students who invest their time, money, and hope into building a better future.

Overall Experience 
Overall, I'm so glad I invested the time and money into Designlab and my UX career. However, I went into it with a design background and a really good working knowledge of Figma, and I think this made my experience less stressful. 
Everything took twice as long as Designlab's time estimates. Projects slated for 4 hours took 8, and I took a full year to do the part-time academy program. Feeling "behind" is common, but the staff will work with you as long as you communicate with them. 
Even with its flaws, Designlab is still the best value for the money among the bootcamps. 
Instructors It can be hit or miss. Everyone is assigned a mentor and you choose a crit session each week to go to. I ended up having great mentors and stumbling upon an amazing crit facilitator (Carmela FTW!). Still, I knew other people in the program who felt like they weren't getting the right support from their mentor, and the quality of the crit facilitators varied widely. CurriculumMy cohort was the last under the old curriculum so I can't speak to the new curriculum.Job Assistance
Designlab did the best they could to match me with a career coach, and she was great, but they were not able to pair me with a coach from my specific industry (civic tech). 
I got a job within 3 months of graduating from Designlab in a tough tech economy. 
I felt like the portfolio I made with Designlab is professional and appealing to employers. 
Tips
The program says that you don't need design training to succeed, and that's true, but I highly recommend going into the program at least knowing how to use Figma. 
Connect with your classmates as much as possible- participating in research requests is a great way to do this. 
Treat bootcamp like 60% of your UX education and make sure you fill in the rest with workshops, webinars, practice sessions, etc. 

Designlab stood out to me from other bootcamps because they pair you up with a dedicated mentor. I met with my mentor every week and they helped me review my designs and taught me so much more that you don’t get from just studying. I found Designlab to also be much more affordable than other bootcamps. I’d recommend Designlab to anyone looking for a career in design. 

I had a great experience with Designlab throughout the course of 2021. I enrolled in Foundations and the Academy in a part time capacity (20 hours per week) and finished up my capstone projects and graduated within a year. I personally felt the experience was well worth the price and I certainly learned a lot in my time there. The course itself was relatively "self-paced" with deadlines each week and a weekly meeting with a design mentor. My initial mentor was pretty slow in providing feedback so I switched mentors and got one who was fantastic! After graduating, it took me about 4 months of interviewing and applying to land my first full time offer. I took the role and made my transition into design!

Designlab was just what I needed when looking for a career change. Their challenging curriculum paired with team cohort crits and INCREDIBLE mentorship from my mentor was just what I needed to get my UX career off the ground. I consider myself one of the luckier ones, but got a job in the field before graduating from the course. The only downside from DL was how students who landed a job were treated in career services. I wanted to use the resources to improve my application/interviewing/ portfolio skills but was only given 2 sessions, even though I had a contract gig that was ending 6 months later. Even with the small grievance, Designlab was exactly what I wanted in a bootcamp and successfully aided me in my career change to UX Design.

If you’re looking to get into User Experience design, consider DesignLab.  Their program takes you from the most basic level of interface design, elevates you to a problem solver that can offer UX best practices to a company, and supports you through the job search process until you land a role. You’ll start the program by going through their in-depth curriculum on research, idea generation, information architecture, interaction design, UI design, and testing. Once you’ve cleared the curriculum you’ll dive into your three capstone projects that you’ll showcase on your portfolio, which is your main tangible product coming out of this boot camp as you’ll use this to apply for your new UX job. During both of these phases, you’ll have an assigned mentor who will meet with you weekly to discuss your progress or anything you’d like, to help answer questions and provide clarification and encouragement. These sessions are also great for keeping you accountable to a steady pace of work as you don’t want to waste your time joining a Zoom call with a UX mentor and have nothing to talk about. I learned a lot about the curriculum but my one piece of feedback for DesignLab was to provide a continuous, uniform example that stretches across many units. They provide great examples but I felt I would've had an easier time connecting the dots if the examples all tied in together closely, much like the lifecycle of a real project that a company might execute. Once you’ve completed your curriculum and capstones you’ll enter the career services phase where you’ll be assigned a mentor specifically skilled in helping candidates with job placement. They’ll help you polish your portfolio, look at job reqs, critique your resume, practice interviews, and anything else you might need help with. The career services portion was the biggest part I had questions about going into this program as job placement was extremely important to me. Admittedly this support is dependent on the mentor that you get, but I feel that DesignLab’s approach to getting you someone experienced in UX job placement enforces a minimum level of quality needed. They have a strict but extremely fair tuition reimbursement policy (as of when I graduated in April 2023). At a high level, if you exert a genuine effort in getting a generalist UX job and get zero offers within six months, you get your full tuition back. Obviously, you can’t just sit and wait six months to get tuition back. You have to be applying to the minimum amount of jobs weekly. You have to attend a networking event once a month. There are other qualifications, but you get the picture. These restrictions are in place so you’re doing the minimum amount that would make you successful in getting interviews and jobs. Success in this boot camp, as with any other boot camp, completely depends on your effort. If you go into this planning to half-ass the curriculum and projects, you significantly reduce your chances of getting a job. You decide not to make an effort to network with people during career services or don't apply to the minimum job count, you probably won't get a job at all.  You go in with a good attitude and a willingness to apply yourself, you come out with a strong chance to get a job even in a market going through layoffs.

When deciding to pivot my career from nursing to UX design, I researched different bootcamps and compared their curriculum with prices. I found Designlab to be the most impactful for an affordable price. Community: My favorite thing about this bootcamp was the community aspect. I met some life-long friends and colleagues through their Discord channel. I heard about my first internship from someone I met via the "Los Angeles channel" on Discord, whom I personally met up with at a coffee shop. There are endless opportunities provided by the DL community (i.e. job opportunities, tips and tricks for interviewing, resources, webinars, etc). I ended up joining a hackathon upon hearing about it on the DL Discord chat and it was by far one of the greatest experiences of my UX career. Curriculum: Aside from the community aspect, I learned a lot from the curriculum itself. I was enrolled in UX Foundations and UX Academy, which gave me a profound understanding of UX principles and the design process. I found the videos and resources to be super helpful. I know that many have complained that there isn't enough focus on learning about Figma and how to actually do the designing, but I feel that it's only fair since the purpose of the bootcamp is more about understanding what goes on behind the designs rather than learning how to design step-by-step. As a student, there is a lot of self- learning to do and it is up to them how much work they want to put in on their own. Mentorship: I was fortunate to have really good mentors along the way. It's quite possible to have a mentor whose mentoring style that does not align with the students' personal needs. Luckily, there's the option to request for a new mentor. Students are responsible for knowing their own learning needs and how they want to be mentored. I personally found that having a mentor who allows me to work independently while being available to provide feedback and resources as needed was more helpful than having someone micromanage my work. I also found that it was useful to have questions and ideas ready to be presented to my mentors prior to meeting so that each meeting was productive. Overall, I had a really positive experience with Designlab and would highly recommend it, especially for those who have zero design experience!

Designlab is a great platform everybody who want to learn UX design course from basic level and people who want to switch into new career segment. Content of this course is incredible. Wonderful!

I took DesignLab's Foundations course and their UX Academy. I compared several different boot camps and DesignLab seemed to be the best value. I was attracted by their job guarantee, but it should be noted that there are a lot of caveats to that. You have to finish on time and you're disqualified from the refund if you're offered any kind of work, paid or not. I think that's fair but it's just to say that it's a program you should only do if you're serious and committed to it. It's a lot of work and much of the outcome has to do with the mentors you get paired with and how much work you're willing to put into it. If you're not sure, the foundations course is a great place to start. It's true that you could learn a lot of this stuff online for free but the structure of the course, the mentorship, and the community are what make it really valuable. It took me 6 months of searching to find a design job which was longer than I anticipated but I'm thrilled to be on the other side of it. UXA provides a strong foundation, but to land a job and to be successful as a designer, you have to commit to continually growing your skillset and pushing yourself to improve. The abundance of design bootcamps might give the impression that they're handing these jobs out like candy, but the truth is that it's really challenging and competitive to land an early career UX design role. 

I really enjoyed my time at DesignLab. I am thankful for all of my mentors who supported me throughout my learning experience. You only get what you put in, so if you work hard, the hard work will pay off. 

I loved my experience at design lab. You have to put in the work to reap the benefits but I gained so much knowledge, a strong portfolio, and a ton of connection to help get into the job market. Breaking into UX is hard, I can't lie - but you have so many people around you supporting you throughout the entire process.

Consistently they make us do projects that they don't explain how to do it. For example there is a project of making a sitemap but there are no lessons before than explaining how to do it well so we can be confident in our work. Their lessons are usually over some design thinking or a topic relating to the module but when it comes to the projects they don't explain how to carry them out well and you end up feeling very stressed out and confused. Also the estimated time that a project or lesson takes to complete is almost always too short. Several lessons will take you longer to read it and think about it well and some projects will have a very short time requirements so it feels like you cannot finish everything that you need to. This leads to a lot of undue stress if they would just adjust the times for how much they would take.

I started taking Designlab’s foundation courses to learn more about web design and design basics as I was a self-taught graphic designer. I absolutely fell in love with UX/UI and was accepted into their UX Academy program. Designlab has completely changed my life. Two months after graduating, I was able to get a job in ag tech as a UX Designer. I absolutely love what I do and I owe it all to Designlab for giving me the tools to succeed and change my career trajectory! Furthermore, my academy mentor, Hugh, pushed me to really think through assignments and capstones that I believe has helped me to hit the ground running at my new company. Thanks Hugh and Designlab!

I had a series of mentor problems and changes that I had NO control over or part in over the course of my enrollment at DesignLab. DesignLab let me down and I'm deeply hurt.I was forced to change mentors 3 times! 2 of them in the middle of a capstone project.The first one was badly affected due to the change of styles between mentors. And then I had the same problem again with the second project!I was not happy at all with my progress or the quality of my work, unfortunately.I lost a lot of sessions thinking that a 30 mins session would count as a half session plus due to my pause I really needed help to improve and move forward faster to meet my already delayed deadline to graduate which I failed to meet my deadline because I had to change jobs and countries at the same time too!I wasn't lazy or slacking or dragging things. I was still determined to finish the program, but they canceled my program and took away my remaining mentor's sessions.they took away my mentor's sessions, and my career service and haven't even offered to partially refund me! I'm still stuck in the last project for almost a year with no guidance and still struggling to pay off a loan I had to take to be able to join that program.

I was more than ready for a career change after 17 years in the classroom. I did my research and chose DesignLab for the mentors and group crits. I thoroughly enjoyed the structure and delivery of the curriculum. My mentors were crucial in giving me the encouragement and support I needed to make a life changing career switch. I never actually made it to Career Services because I landed a job before I was done with Phase 2. 

I am so glad that I decided to study with Designlab. The course was structured well with great resources which prepared me well for the real world. I really appreciated my 1-on-1 mentor sessions where I got really valuable feedback. The course set me up for creating a solid portfolio and preparing for a job.

I really enjoyed the UX Academy bootcamp program offered by DesignLab, and it helped me land my dream role. The course is well structured, and you are paired with an experienced mentor who helps guide you through the coursework and offers advice on career switches, design, and any other relevant topics. I took the part time track and even though I found it difficult to complete course work at times, the pauses were helpful in taking mental health breaks and having time to recharge. Overall, I definitely recommend this program to anyone interested in UX Design. 

I would highly recommend Designlab's UX Academy course if you are planning to switch careers to UX Design. 1-1 mentorship, student community, group critic sessions, flexible class hours, career services are just few of the many amazing aspects of the program.

UX Academy Foundations was great! I started the course with no formal design training and learned so much in a short period of time. The curriculum was easy to learn and I was able to set my own pace. Having a mentor was very helpful. He helped so much during the course and guided me with my understanding and design. 

Definitely loved the mentorship and the group critiques. They both allowed me to come out of my shell and be more confident in my design thinking. For anyone who's looking to switch career paths, DesignLab is a great place to get into UX Design. Idid the part-time route and worked part-time at my accounting job. Once I completed the program, I was able to land an internship in a couple months, then landed a full-time job a few months after that. If you know this is the field you want to be in, I highly recommend DesignLab.