Designing for real people in real situations
A structured 6-month program that teaches you how designers working at product companies actually approach interface problems — from first-pass research to a finished design system ready for handoff.
What the programme covers
6 modules, 24 weeks, one complete skill set
The curriculum was built around a single question: what does a designer actually do in the first 90 days at a product company? Each module answers a part of that question with specific tools, reviewed work, and instructor feedback.
Research Methods
Interviews, observation, and synthesis — conducted across 3 live user sessions per student.
Information Architecture
Card sorting, tree testing, and sitemap construction for a mid-scale product with 40+ screens.
Interaction Design & Prototyping
Figma-based prototyping from lo-fi sketches to fully interactive flows, reviewed by a practising product designer each week. Students build 2 end-to-end prototypes and run usability tests with at least 5 participants per round.
Visual Design
Typography, spacing, colour systems — applied to the prototype built in module 03.
Design Systems
Component libraries, tokens, and documentation. Students hand off a system to a developer partner and iterate on the feedback.
Capstone Project
A self-directed project from research through to a polished case study, presented to a panel of 3 working designers for critique. This is the portfolio piece students leave with.
Scheduled sessions, asynchronous practice
- Live sessions Two 90-minute video sessions per week with a cohort of no more than 16 students. Sessions are recorded and available for 12 months.
- Weekly assignment Each module ends with a reviewed deliverable — not a quiz, but actual design work critiqued by your instructor within 48 hours.
- Async community A dedicated workspace where students share work-in-progress, ask questions, and get peer feedback between sessions. Active instructors, not bots.
- Time commitment Approximately 9–11 hours per week. Students who completed the programme in 2023 reported an average of 10.2 hours. It is honest work, not passive video watching.
Maximum cohort size — small enough that instructors remember your work by name
Cohorts run per year, with staggered start dates across time zones
Maximum response window for all assignment feedback, without exception
What you will be able to do
Not credentials — specific skills that show up in actual work
Run a full research cycle
Plan, recruit, conduct, and synthesise user interviews into a findings report that a product team can act on within a sprint.
Deliver a design system
Build a component library in Figma with documented usage rules — the kind a developer can use without a 45-minute walkthrough call.
Present work under critique
Articulate design decisions to a panel, respond to pushback with rationale, and revise based on feedback — a skill most designers only learn on the job.
One portfolio-ready case study
The capstone project is a complete case study — problem, process, decisions, outcome — written and structured for a hiring audience, not just a course submission.