Work/Leadership/№04
Teaching & Mentorship
Coderschool
Teaching UX lifecycle
I co-designed and taught a 4 month evening course that took 40 students through the complete UX lifecycle while working on a real-world case study.
- Role
- UX Instructor
- Year
- 2019
- Team
- Co-taught with Julia McKellar · 40 students
- Stack
- Curriculum Design · Workshop Facilitation · Crazy 8s · Design Critique
Problem
Coderschool brought together 40 career changers, junior designers, and cross-functional professionals with very different levels of design experience. The course needed to make the full UX process practical and approachable without flattening it into a checklist.
Over four months, Julia McKellar and I created a structure for a large, mixed cohort to progress together while leaving room for each student to choose, investigate, and develop a real-life case study of their own.
Approach
We built the course around learning by doing. Each week, one evening session was focusing on theoretical lectures, while the other facilitated exercises, critique, and independent case-study work, with each stage preparing students for the next.
01
A visible learning roadmap
We translated the UX lifecycle into a 4 four-month curriculum with clear milestones, so students could understand where each method belonged and how their work connected across the course.
02
Practice before theory settled
Exercises such as Crazy 8s made ideation tangible and lowered the threshold for participation. Students learned methods by applying them, discussing the results, and trying again.
03
Real-life case studies
Students chose genuine problems to investigate and carried them through the lifecycle, turning isolated classroom techniques into a coherent design process and a final body of work.
04
Teaching as a partnership
Julia and I shared facilitation, feedback, and cohort support across long evening sessions, adapting the pace to a classroom with varied professional backgrounds and confidence levels.
Process
Artifacts from the room.
Outcome
The class completed an end-to-end UX journey rather than a sequence of disconnected exercises. Each student left with experience applying the process to a real-life case study and presenting final work shaped through critique.
Teaching the entire lifecycle sharpened my own design leadership: explaining why a method matters, recognizing where someone is blocked, and creating the conditions for different kinds of learners to move forward together.
4 months
End-to-end UX curriculum and guided case-study work
40
Career changers, junior designers, and cross-functional professionals
2 × 4h
Evening teaching sessions each week
2
UX instructors co-designing and facilitating the course
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