🚧 ***This Case Study is UNDER CONSTRUCTION***🚧
Phase 1 at theCOOP:
Developing a training program for a startup accelerator
When new designers join theCOOP, they have to go through something called “Phase 1.” The goal of Phase 1 is to teach the designers the basic skills needed in order to be ready to take on their own projects.
I was tasked with the planning of Phase 1, as well as creating some of the learning tools needed to teach our new designers some important “more advanced” Figma skills that most UX bootcamp programs fail to teach.
Outline
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Introduction
What is theCOOP?
My Role
The Problem
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Iterating on Phase 1
Whiteboarding Ideas
Finding the Gaps
The Goals for Each Week
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The Rest of Phase 1
A week by week breakdown
Implementing it with real Designers
What I learned
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Aligning Goals
The Business Goal
The Users’ Goal
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Figma Exercises
The Exercises I built
Why
Results
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Next Steps
The current trajectory for Phase 1
Phase 2 in the works
Future Considerations
Introduction
What is theCOOP?
theCOOP is an accelerator program focused on helping bootcamp graduates break in to the engineering and design field faster by providing them with real-world experience.
In addition to building real products, theCOOP aims to provide mentorship, resources, and networking opportunities for individual growth.
My Role at theCOOP
I am an employee at theCOOP. I started out as a UX/UI Designer, but eventually became the Design Lead for theCOOP.
My role for this project was to help develop our training program for newly graduated boot camp students who wanted to join our accelerator program.
Here are some of the things I was in charge of:
Designing “Phase 1” for new Designers
Teaching Designers important skills on Figma
Teaching Designers about the various areas of UX (for example Content Strategy, UX Writing, Product Design, and Research)
Creating Training Material for Designers to use
The Problem
New bootcamp graduates did not have the skills necessary to work on the projects we had waiting for them. To be quite honest, I knew this from personal experience after graduating myself. But I also knew because I tried to give work to the first set of “newbies” and they could not get it done.
We needed a way to teach more advanced skills to new designers at theCOOP to make them:
Skilled enough to take on their own projects
More well-rounded, with the ability to practice in many areas of UX (including UX Writing, Content Strategy, Research, Interface Design, etc.) in order to determine what type of niche or role they want to pursue.
More job-ready (that’s really the point)
Basically we needed to teach our new chicks how to fly theCOOP.
Aligning Goals
The Business Goal
I was handed a brief from my Project Manager, asking me to build Phase 1. It would be a 4 week program, built around the following objectives:
Build good habits in our designers
They need to have a good understanding of the product they will be working on (probably t.ux)
Estimate Baseline Skills
Figma
Prototyping
Design System Utilization
Develop a design process
The User Goal
My user for this project, was the UX bootcamp graduate.
Bootcamp grads all had the same complaints:
They struggled to find a job
Most companies did not want to hire them due to lack of experience
Their main goals were:
Gain enough skills to feel confident going into the workforce
Learn more about the various areas of UX, so they can determine which jobs would be right for them.
Get a job
Our chicks were hungry for knowledge, and I, their mother hen, had to feed it to them.