DevMountain · 2014 – 2020
Building Utah's First UX Bootcamp
In 2014, Utah's tech scene was thriving — but designers had nowhere to learn. I built the curriculum that became the first UX bootcamp in the state.
Over seven years and 230+ graduates, the program grew into one of the offerings that drove DevMountain's $20M acquisition by Capella University.
The Gap That Wasn't Being Filled
Utah's tech scene was on the rise. Adobe, Qualtrics, Vivint, Lucid — companies were hiring fast. But UX education didn't exist locally. Designers were either self-taught, transplants, or moving away.
DevMountain had built a respected dev bootcamp. UX was the natural expansion. They needed someone who could build the program from nothing — curriculum, cohort structure, instruction model — while teaching it at the same time.
No local UX education
The state had design programs at universities, but nothing accelerated, applied, and connected to industry hiring.
Demand outpacing supply
Tech companies were posting UX roles faster than the local talent pool could fill them. Most hires came from out of state.
No curriculum to copy
UX bootcamps elsewhere existed but were uneven. Many treated UX as visual design with research bolted on. The program needed to be built right.
Four Pillars, Built In That Order
I designed the curriculum around four pillars that compound. Each pillar shapes how students think about every later one — so the order mattered.
Research first
JTBD interviews, usability testing, synthesis. Students learned to listen before they sketched. Every later assignment started with research, because that's how the discipline works in real teams.
Accessibility as foundation
Most bootcamps taught accessibility as week 11 of 12 — a checklist bolted on before graduation. I made it a core pillar from day one. WCAG, semantic markup, keyboard interaction, color contrast: built into every project.
Interaction & prototyping
Patterns, state, prototyping in real tools. Students shipped clickable prototypes by week six. The output was always testable — not a deck, not a static comp, but something a user could actually try.
Design systems
Components, tokens, scalable patterns. Every cohort built and used a design system together. Students left understanding that good design at scale is systems work, not screen work.
Why Accessibility Came Second, Not Last
Skills compound. If you treat accessibility as a final-week module, your entire portfolio reflects that — every project you made along the way is inaccessible, and the bolt-on at the end doesn't undo it.
By making accessibility a foundational pillar — second only to research — every assignment, every prototype, every mock students made for the rest of the program had a11y built in. Graduates entered the industry already thinking this way. That habit transferred to whoever they worked with next.
The principle
Don't teach accessibility as a topic. Teach it as a constraint that shapes every other decision. Then it becomes a habit, not a checklist.
What Got Built
Seven years. Multiple cohorts a year. The program kept evolving, but the pillars stayed.
UX professionals trained and placed in industry roles
Acquisition by Capella University — the UX program was a key offering in the portfolio
Continuous program operation, evolved through tools and frameworks
Graduates landed at Apple, Amazon, Adobe, Qualtrics, Lucid, Vivint, and dozens of startups. Many are now senior designers, design leads, or running their own teams. A handful went on to teach the next generation themselves.
What Teaching Gave Me
I taught at DevMountain from 2014 to 2020 — six years, starting with the very first cohort.
Teaching forces you to articulate what you really know. The hard questions from a sharp student strip away assumed knowledge fast. Many of the principles I used at LogMeIn, Jive, and TubeBuddy were sharpened in front of a cohort first.
It kept me sharp — there's no faster way to surface a blind spot than a smart student asking why. And it gave me reps: hundreds of UX designers mentored one-on-one, years before I was doing it as a design leader.
Many of those former students are now peers, hiring managers, and friends. The relationship didn't end at graduation — it shifted.
Why I Stepped Away
The program I built ran after hours, and that was the whole point. It let me staff it entirely with working practitioners — people building real products by day and teaching what they knew by night. It ran longer than most, cost about half the going rate, and success meant one thing: students got hired.
When DevMountain moved toward a full-time model, they asked me to come build and run it. I'm a practitioner, not an academic — I love doing the work, and I didn't want to leave it behind. So I said no, and I declined to sell them my curriculum. They brought in someone full-time to run the program, and I kept teaching the after-hours track for a while.
Around then, DevMountain changed hands. I can't speak to everything that shifted, but my read is that new ownership — a larger organization — sat further from the students, and the program drifted from what had made it work: the curriculum was rewritten, students seemed to graduate less prepared than they had been, and the price climbed sharply.
I stayed as long as I could stand behind what students were getting. When that changed, I stepped away — I didn't feel I could keep being part of a program I no longer believed in.