Twitter Thread: Experience at Lambda School for UX
This story probably represents the single greatest failure of Lambda School ever. There are times when the whole story isn’t being told, but this isn’t one of them, Nicole is right. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Nicole and her cohort, have cancelled her ISA, and we are working on a full retrospective for her cohort (UX6).<p>It started with misaligned expectations. We worked with a lot of hiring partners to create a UX curriculum that would be easiest to jump into a first UX career from, and it was clear in doing that research that a <i>research-first</i> perspective with less emphasis on design is what would get students hired faster in a field that can be notoriously difficult to break into (relative to software engineering). We hired experts in that aspect of UX design, which can be terribly broad.<p>Partway through the data started to show that half of the class was pretty happy and about half was not. Usually it’s not split like that - there’s always an outlier student or two but not half totally happy and half frustrated, so we started to dig in.<p>Two things happened:<p>1. We realized half of the students were expecting a design-heavy experience, and we hadn’t communicated well enough what to expect. There were pieces on design, but you wouldn’t come out of this curriculum as a UI designer, and students were expecting that.<p>2. We decided to try and help those students who wanted the UI emphasis, hired more folks, and started creating curriculum in a pretty rushed manner to help them reach their goals. In retrospect that was a huge mistake; there simply wasn’t enough time to build a full design-heavy curriculum in flight, and the students who wanted design-heavy curriculum were very disappointed.<p>That cohort was (rightly) frustrated because we tried to do too much too late. I recognized that was a risk going into those curriculum changes, but took on the risk because the most important thing is making students successful and happy. In retrospect it was the wrong call.<p>I wish like hell that I could go back and make everything perfect for that cohort of students; there are about 20 of them and I’ve spent time one on one with every one. We brought in more people to work with them one on one and that curriculum is much better now, but understandably 5 or 6 students in that cohort had lost their faith in our ability to deliver and opted to leave the program. Of course, we cancelled their ISAs; we lost a ton of money training these students and they don’t owe us anything, but that’s the right thing to do. We promise an awesome experience and in this instance didn’t deliver. We tried to do too much in too short a timeframe and missed the mark.