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I created a 20-minute extra ​credit project for my design ​students.

It turned into an educational platform that has helped ​over 45,000 designers advance their skills and careers.

What is Bitesize UX?

What is Bitesize UX?

An educational platform, live courses, and community to learn UX by doing it. It ​started as a simple extra credit project, and to date has helped over 45,000 ​designers enhance their skills and careers.

What I'm Most Proud Of

The (almost) daily feedback, emails, and messages from students saying how ​Bitesize has had a massively positive effect on their lives and careers.

Biggest Product Challenge

Creating self-paced learning tools that match the quality of our live workshops.

Biggest Lesson I Learned

Startups are fun, but hard.

It all started with the ole' ​chicken & egg problem

When trying to break into a career in tech, there is no substitute for hands-on ​experience. I was teaching a UX design course at General Assembly, and saw that ​my students were having trouble getting that experience outside of our class. They ​struggled to build skills, a portfolio, and get jobs because they lacked experience. I ​experienced the same frustrating Catch 22 early in my career.

If you need design experience, to get design experience, how does anyone break ​into a career in UX?

I wanted to give new designers experience with the real challenges I was working on ​every day for clients, and help them build the skills to prepare them for “day one” on ​the job.

Expanding beyond the ​classroom

I took projects that I was working on during the day, and turned them into extra ​credit "mini-challenges" for my students, helping them build their skills, portfolio, and ​confidence in their ability to do "on the job" UX work.

After a few months, I noticed a few things.

Students were producing really strong work, even as beginners.

Their skills were improving 10X by working on small, focused projects.

Students began to get jobs, as the mini-challenges helped them build a portfolio ​full of marketable skills that appealed to hiring managers

Our group grew because students were having FUN! What started out as 4 students ​looking for extra credit work, turned into 20+ students every week.

Our little extra credit work eventually grew out of ​our classroom, and evolved into a meetup group ​with over 2,000 members.

Going from a local meetup ​to world-class design ​education

Taking the best aspects of our informal design challenges, I began building and ​teaching structured courses and workshops.

This evolution led to the development of over 100 highly impactful and top-rated live ​courses in key areas of UX design, providing hands-on experience and practical ​knowledge to thousands of aspiring designers.

The world doesn't need any ​more boring online courses

We wanted to take design education to the next level, and began developing new ​ways for our workshops to help students towards their goals.

We created hundreds ​(thousands?) of customized ​templates and learning resources

We provided custom-made design templates, FigJam ​boards, and digital worksheets for continuous learning ​and practice. Our case study templates, in particular, ​are highly praised for helping students highlight their ​work and create professional portfolios that get noticed.

We built a community to support ​designers from around the world

Breaking into UX design isn’t just about learning skills; it's ​also about having support. We built a community of ​over 2,500 designers where students could ask ​questions, share work, and get feedback, fostering an ​environment of peer support and continuous learning.

Streamlining Processes and ​Scaling Our Platform

As Bitesize grew, we needed to make it easier and more efficient to create new ​learning material, launch courses, market our platform, and deliver awesome ​learning experiences to our people.

I led the design and development of new products and features to launch and ​facilitate workshops efficiently - accounting for with multiple instructors, a ​marketing team, and thousands of students per week.

Flexible, High Converting Landing Pages

We designed, developed, and tested copy, design, layouts, and content to increase ​signups for both paid and free workshops. I designed templates with flexible ​backends so new workshops could be quickly added - they’d look great, and were ​flexible enough to account for specific details like schedule, partners, guest ​speakers, and available resources.

We centralized all learning ​resources - for us, and our users

We designed templates for resource guides to give students easy access to all ​learning materials and to promote upcoming courses. These guides also offered ​recommendations and discount codes for continued learning, making it easy for ​students to get all necessary materials and for us to target campaigns about ​related classes.

We stopped making the same assets ​from scratch over and over and over ​and over again

I developed a system to pull workshop material from a centralized database using ​APIs and no-code apps, automatically creating emails, social posts, graphics, and ​other promotional material. This system allowed us to quickly create marketing ​materials and use them across different platforms efficiently.

Partnerships with ​Industry Leaders

Our approach to design education caught the attention of leading design and ​education companies who wanted to bring the same hands-on learning to their ​communities.

We built a platform to make ​partnership promotion easy ​& profitable

Creating partnerships with design products, communities, and other groups was a ​successful strategy for bringing new designers into the Bitesize UX community and ​workshops.

However, setting up these collaborations was time-consuming and involved a lot of ​back and forth. We built a partnership platform to streamline this process and ​increase our workshop attendance and audience by 3X in just two months.

Streamlined Promotions

Promoting workshops was time-consuming for partners, often requiring them to ​design graphics and write copy. We automated this process by pulling all assets ​and copy from Airtable, allowing partners to copy any version of marketing ​materials without creating assets on their own from scratch

Automated Reminders

Partners often forgot to post about our workshops or did so at inconvenient times. ​We created automated reminders and a promotion schedule that sent partners ​emails leading up to the workshop, allowing them to copy and paste promotional ​material easily. This ensured consistent promotion and maximized workshop ​attendance.

Dead Simple Sharing

One of the biggest problems with partnerships was the complexity of sharing links, ​platforms, and landing pages. We made it super easy for partners to log into the ​platform, click once, and copy a link to share with their community. This link included ​all tracking and referral information, eliminating friction and simplifying ​collaboration.

Fast, automated rewards and ​payouts

We took all of the legwork, tracking, and confusion out of paying partners for ​referrals. Payouts were simple, on time, and kept partners excited about working ​with us.

Creating Self-Paced ​Learning That Doesn't Suck

Our live workshops were top-rated and growing massively in attendance, but we ​saw a huge opportunity and challenge to create self-paced learning tools that ​matched the quality and vibe of our live courses. We aimed to break the boring ​status quo of typical online classes with engaging and effective on-demand ​workshops and design challenges.

Soooooo much better than a Zoom ​recording

We designed a platform and process to simulate the best parts of our live workshop ​experience. This included real questions from past students, activities, timers, ​templates, and all the resources and collaboration that a student would get in a live ​course.

The idea was to focus on delivering a great engaging experience, just like our ​workshops, while allowing students to take these workshops at their own time and ​pace.

Real People, Questions and ​Collaboration

In our self-paced course platform, we wanted to replicate the experience of live ​workshops by incorporating real questions from the chat, great comments, and ​actual participation from live students.

This made the on-demand workshops feel like a live experience with other ​designers giving input, answering questions, and sharing their work.

Just Press Play

One of the biggest benefits of our workshops is that students can join and follow ​along without any complicated platforms, steps, stages, or having lessons broken ​up into multiple parts.

For our on-demand workshops, we created an experience where students could ​just press play, get their materials, and follow along with everything they needed. ​This led to a 92% completion rate on our on-demand workshops, significantly higher ​than industry averages.

Feedback and Continued ​Learning

We created a system for students to submit their work for ​feedback and leveraged our community for ongoing ​support. This allowed students to share their work and ​continue progressing with their projects even after the ​workshop was over.

By doing all these things, we took the best aspects of our ​live workshops and designed a product that replicated the ​same positive feedback, with many students saying it was ​the best recorded class they had ever taken.

Level up your skills, ​portfolio, and career ​in 15 minutes a day

The quickest, and most effective way ​to level up your design skills

There are plenty of sites for design practice, but do they actually help you become a ​better designer? We set out to make design challenges that were fast, fun, and ​instantly applicable to real-world design work.

Effective learning that feels like a game

We designed a platform for 15-minute design challenges that combined the best ​aspects of showing progress, breaking things into short activities, and creating an ​engaging experience. Students could complete these challenges in 15 to 30 minutes ​and make tangible progress in their UX design journey.

Built to Scale

Our design challenge platform was modular, allowing us to create high-quality UX ​design challenges quickly. It wasn't limited to one skill or challenge type, making it ​versatile and scalable. This system ensured we could deliver diverse, engaging ​design challenges efficiently.

Everything in one place

One major factor that often causes drop-off in online learning is having multiple ​links, resources, and tabs open. We put in all in one place to tune out the distractions ​and allow students to create their best possible work.

Lessons Learned

Be resourceful, scrappy, and creative when looking for solutions to problems. ​Today, there are more tools and resources than ever before for founders to create ​effective solutions, without needing to depend on a developer than ever before. It ​just takes some creativity and hacking.

Nothing is more valuable than taking real time to listen to your customers.

I learned to make a persona of a "customer we can't let down". I know this person ​(and those like her) on a deep personal level. As soon as you stop the lines of ​communication and only understand their needs on a surface level, you will start to ​make bad product decisions.

The hardest lesson I have learned, and am still learning, is the discipline to work ​on things that *actually*move the needle.

In a startup, there are SO many things to do - it can be comforting to work on "busy-​work" and minutiae, because it feels like you're making progress - even though ​you're really not. I am learning to take a hard look at my daily tasks, and cut out or ​delegate the small items that lead to more work, but less overall progress.

This can be tough!