My UX/UI Experience at Flatiron School

While Flatiron School has closed their UX/UI program, if they ever open it up again, here are some of the things I experienced during my time there from November 2019 to May 2020.

There are a total of five phases in the program. I signed up for the in person course which starts from the third phase and ends in the fifth phase. The first phase was an introduction to UX/UI basics. At the end of the first phase, students were expected to choose either the UX or UI route. I ended up choosing the UI route. The UX students and the UI students have completely different instructors and different assignments.

The phase 2 UI course was similar to a beginner’s graphic design course. We learned how to work with typography and Adobe Illustrator (for vector designs). A majority of this phase was to build up or knowledge on how to make the branding for a company and their product. We created mood boards, style tiles, wireframes, prototypes, and a style guide.

Phase 3 UI and UX students have the option to attend the classes in person. The classes I went to were located in the Financial District of New York City. I had two great instructors, unfortunately, our main instructor left during the second or third week of classes due to conflicts with the school. Everything was proceeding what seemed like perfectly until our main instructor left.

How Flatiron School handled it was very poor. They didn’t give us another main instructor who could work with us full-time. Instead we were given instructors who worked remotely with us and had assigned time slots with us. So we felt like we were missing our main instructor until our allotted times were up.

That is not to say that the instructors who were subbed in were bad, in fact they were great! However, it still felt very different from having an instructor who would be in class in person with us from the beginning of class to the end of class.

Our assistant instructor was suddenly thrown into this situation as well, and had to step up as the lead instructor for us. His job was usually to support the lead instructor, provide resources to the students and help answer any questions if our lead instructor was busy. But after our lead instructor left, he had to create lectures from scratch for us, and you can only imagine how difficult it is to prepare for it with such little notice. In the end, he did the best he could for us, had many sleepless nights to help us pull through the course and content. We were really grateful that he took the time and effort to lead us through this tough time. It was through him we also met another great lead instructor who offered to help us along with our assistant-turned-lead instructor.

Phase 3 UI was more hands on and more in depth with user research and design. We made many iterations and had many more user interactions than we had in previous phases. This phase and the ones after felt way more user experience heavy than the previous phases we encountered.

Phase 4 UI was similar to phase 3 but instead, we were working for a client. We learned how to conduct presentations with our stakeholders and we also learned on our own how to handoff our project to the clients.

Phase 5 was the wrap up portfolio phase to end the entire course. We learned how to write our case studies, review and edit with critiques from our instructors.