The Rise, Saturation, and Shift of UX Design

UX bootcamps were sold as the shortcut into a design career - and honestly, for a while, they worked. This is a look at what made them so appealing, why they fell out of sync with the industry, and where that leaves new designers today.

After finishing school, I landed in that uncomfortable space a lot of us know too well; full of ambition, but lacking the technical skills that seemed essential to getting hired. Somewhere along the way, the idea of a UX bootcamp started to sound like the perfect solution: a fast track to the future I wanted. A few thousand dollars, a few months of hustle, and you could reinvent yourself and your career into something cool, somewhat creative, and a lot more future-proof. For a while, it worked. Designers were in high demand, companies were scrambling to launch better apps, and the promise of a six-figure salary was enough to make anyone believe. But like most things that move too fast and promise too much, UX bootcamps turned out to be a little more complicated than they first appeared.

How the App Store Changed Everything

To really understand the rise of UX bootcamps, you have to rewind to the late 2000s. The iPhone was new. The App Store had just launched. And suddenly, there was an entire digital economy up for grabs.

Apps weren’t just little tools anymore; they were becoming businesses. Companies who built them quickly realized something important: good design wasn’t just nice to have - it was the thing that made you stand out. If your app was frustrating or ugly, users would simply delete it in seconds. If it was smooth and easy to use, you had a chance to hook people, and possibly even go viral and get rich.

This created an insane demand for UX designers - people who could make digital experiences feel intuitive, beautiful, and addictive. While UX felt like an exciting new field at the time, it wasn’t entirely invented from scratch. Disciplines like industrial design had been solving usability problems for decades, making physical products easier, safer, and more enjoyable to use. UX simply took those same human-centered design principles and shifted them into the digital space, where apps and interfaces became the new "products" people interacted with every day. 

The only problem? There weren’t enough of them. Universities weren’t producing UX designers fast enough (most didn’t even offer UX-specific degrees to be honest), and traditional graphic designers weren’t always trained for the complexity of app ecosystems. A massive supply-demand gap opened almost overnight in the industry.

And wherever there’s a gap that wide, someone’s going to find a way to fill it.

The Birth Of UX Bootcamps

And that’s how the early days of UX bootcamps appeared. They promised exactly what the market seemed to need:

• Fast-track programs that would turn you into a job-ready designer in 12–24 weeks.
  
  

• Practical, portfolio-driven education.
  
  

• A shortcut to the six-figure jobs flooding the tech world.
  
  

And to be honest? For a while, that approach made sense. Companies were desperate. A half-trained UX designer was still better than no designer at all, especially for startups racing against the clock to find the next big idea. If you could wireframe a basic app, speak a little bit of the right lingo, and convince shareholders they were sitting on a goldmine of an idea, you were probably going to succeed in that role.

The bootcamp pitch worked - and it drew the crowds, especially with career changers looking for more stability, higher pay, or creative people stuck in the corporate world who wanted to earn more without selling their souls to the devil. It felt like skipping the slow, expensive college route in favor of something faster and more practical. But fast isn’t always better. And practicality has its limits.

A Scripted Version Of Design Thinking

Now fast forward to the mid 2010s, more and more people poured into bootcamps and, unsurprisingly, many bootcamps adapted their model to prioritize volume. More students graduated and bigger promises were made. Programs were scaled and those schools now had insane enrollment goals to hit.

What could go wrong, right? Well, thousands of junior designers entered the market each year - many with portfolios that looked all very similar with the same cookie cutter layout, rational, and metrics of success. The methods used - double diamond diagrams, design thinking workshops, sticky note brainstorms to name a few - started to feel less like intentional and well thought out strategies and more like rituals people repeated because they were taught that's what "good practice" was supposed to be like.

And that’s something hiring managers could notice. It became harder to tell candidates apart. And it became harder for bootcamp grads to prove they could do more than follow a checklist.

That caused the market to get saturated, and like a domino effect it had repercussions on the hiring side. Even though tech was still growing, the pipeline of junior designers was overflowing with candidates who all talked and designed the same.

A Shift In Consumer Behaviours

When the pandemic hit, tech briefly experienced a strange hiring boom. Companies had to pivot fast, suddenly everything from meetings to marketplaces needed to live online. That led to an inflated demand for digital design and good products. Think about it for a second, the world shuts down because of COVID and surprisingly a lot of consumers still have disposable income considering the situation. Money that would normally be spent on restaurants and vacations was suddenly redirected towards other goods. Ecommerce reaches new heights.

That was followed by a slow economic reopening and suddenly capital investment funding dried up. Hiring freezes became layoffs. The appetite for potential vanished overnight. Companies pivoted from “train and grow” to “hire and survive.” Experience became the new safety net.

Bootcamp grads who once had a clear path to a career were now landing in a crowded, uncertain job market that was also smaller in size, sharper in competition, and insanely less forgiving.

Good Enough Is Good Enough

Today, the conversation around UX feels noticeably different. For years, the idea that good design = better business was the idea behind most tech brands. Invest in thoughtful design. Make your product beautiful. Create brand loyalty through amazing experiences.

And while there’s still truth to that, the mood has shifted. As Elizabeth Goodspeed pointed out in a recent article on It’s Nice That [past external link with article], the design landscape today feels far more pragmatic than ever,  where “good enough” is often, well, good enough.

Companies aren't always looking for the most beautiful, polished app anymore. They want something that works. Something that doesn’t break. Something they can build fast, test fast, and tweak later if needed.

I wouldn’t say design is dead. But the expectation that every digital experience needs to be meticulously crafted, pixel-perfect, and backed by research… kinda is (?). And that shift hits junior positions the hardest, where nuance and attention to details used to be the selling point.

So What Now?

I think there's been a clear shift in the mentality that used to fuel the UX bootcamp boom industry and it doesn’t really work anymore.

Today, to get noticed and succeed in UX you have to steer away from the perfectly linear process and develop an understanding of what actually works, something that only comes with hands-on experience. 

It’s less about following a specific framework, and more about watching, listening, and making sense of  the nuance and anticipating them when they arise. It’s about understanding the business, not just the user. It’s about making smart decisions under pressure, and staying steady when there’s no obvious best practice to lean on.

The truth is, bootcamps had their place - a solution for a specific moment in time. But like everything else in tech, the landscape shifted. The way we think about design, and how it brings value to a product, evolved. And the cookie-cutter approach that became synonymous with bootcamps just didn’t keep up.

The path is slower now, less certain - but maybe that’s the point. Good design has never been about shortcuts.