General Assembly

  • Title: Course Instructor
  • Year: 2017
  • Category: Community

General Assembly is an independent, privately run, pioneer in experiencial education. Offering courses in the current and most in-demand skills, they specialise in helping people skill up or move into these high-demand career areas faster than traditional education systems. They are best know for courses such as Project Management, Web Development, UX design, Online Marketing and Data Science.

See it live at: generalassembly.ly
See my courses at: General Assembly Instructors - HS

Course Instructor

I first came upon General Assembly as a hiring manager for the AGL UX/UI team, in search for good junior UX talent to give a foot in the door to, and to diversify our digital team. I attended an open day where recent graduates of UX Design were presenting their course projects and was pleasantly surprised at the great standard of work and course content that these graduates had just gone through in 11 short weeks. (I compared the course sillabus to other UX courses available at the time.)

Over the next few months I ended up hiring 2-3 graduates from General Assembly who had moved into UX from Design or Creative backgrounds, and was so impressed with their skills on deck, that I decided I would like to continue supporting GA by joining as an Instructor and continuing to help develop new designers, connect them to opportunities, and grow our pool of UX resources in Melbourne.

  • Role & Responsibilities:
  • Content development
  • Class material preparation
  • Course Delivery
  • Design & Career Mentoring
  • Advocate for Design Industry & Design Education partnership
  • Topics & Courses:
  • UX Design
  • Design Thinking
  • Information Architecture
  • Journey Mapping
  • Interface Design

Subject Area Details

Topic Area

UX Design & Interface Design

UX & Experience Design courses are intended to expose you to each of the three main facets of the UX end-to-end process - Research, Interaction Design & Interface Design. We start high level about why and how these disciplines work together, and then delve deeper into the bones of each area, from research methods and practices, to Information Architecture, Journey Mapping & Persona Development, thru to Visual Design, Prototyping & Validation. Through this course, we also walk through a design case study as a class, finishing up with some prototyping and design hands-on activities individually.

Topic Area

Information Architecture

In Information Architecture we learn about the organization of ideas, from Ontology, Linguistics and the importance of shared understanding,- do you know what you mean when you say what you say? We also look at other things that affect meaning like context, taxonomy (the other terms and things used alongside a word can change it's meaning), and choreography (how things change meanings over time across channels). We go through different methods used to develop and validate information architecture, the tools, processes, and user testing methods.

Topic Area

Design Thinking & Journey Mapping

For some design thinking sounds like a fluffy word, but it is the exact opposite. In fact, Design Thinking is a powerful method that can guide you step by step to clean up, sort, or solve any problem you may find facing you. It is popularly represented by the Double Diamond diagram, and in this course, we go through each stage of the double diamond, and understand why, how, and when to use them. Also, when to stop and move to the next step. We then relate these stages in the discipline of Product Development and see how it is a crucial part of any career in technology & design.