Bootcamp Report #1 : The Beginning of a Career Changing Experience
My first week at Ironhack Paris UX/UI bootcamp
Here I am, standing in front of my computer on a Sunday night after a relaxing weekend. The UX Padawan that I am can finally reflect on his first week at Ironhack Paris UX/UI bootcamp.
A whirlwind of learnings and discoveries
Needless to say, this first week has been intense! Meeting fellow students and teachers, assimilating lots of concepts, and practice, practice, PRACTICE. Here is a breakdown of this week, with my personal highlights.
Day 1: Back to school, and ready to roll
After a nice cup of (free) coffee, I started this first day by getting to know the Ironhack team and the other students. I was pleased to discover the different profiles of my new classmates, ranging from graphic designers, students, to marketing managers, who all have different reasons to study UX/UI at this point in their career. We then jumped straight into learning the ropes of Design Thinking, and I quickly realised how this could change my perspective on creatively solving problems, with one focus : the user.
We continued the day with a Sprint Exercise inspired by Hyper Island : 4 hours to map, target, sketch, decide, prototype and test a new solution that would improve the group gift giving experience… What a challenge! 2 main elements made this possible: group work and time management. It definitely gave me a taste of what the rest of this bootcamp would be about : coming up with user-centric and creative solutions in a time constrained environment, to meet both business goals and user needs.
Day 2: Project management and UX strategy
After learning the basics of the Design Thinking process, and its applications in different companies such as IBM, it was time for us to learn how these principles could be implemented in big companies. I had heard of Agile before and its application with Scrum, and I was curious to know more about it. From what I understood, Agile is more a tech project management tool, which is not necessarily suited for designers, given the time and scope constraints associated with it. We then talked about Lean management, and its application with Kanban rooted in Toyota’s development in the 1950’s.
We then got briefed on our first group project, and had to choose a retailer brand that needed to improve its UX through the design of a website/app feature. With my group, we first agreed on choosing Metro (the wholesaler), as we were interested in the B2B aspect of it. We eventually realised it would be tricky to collect data about restaurant owners/managers in the time that was given to us. We then chose Bio C’Bon, an organic product retailer. I was keen to understand more about how people consumed organic products, to design a solution that would fit their needs, and fulfil Bio C’Bon business goals.
We finished Day 2 with a focus on UX strategy, to understand how to make user-centric design decisions that fulfil business goals. I got really into this topic, and highly recommend this talk from Jaime Levy, author of “UX Strategy” who gives a very interesting intro to this concept.
Day 3: Getting to know your user
After conducting a business and competitive analysis of Bio C’Bon, we were ready to start empathising with their users, through qualitative and quantitative research. We first learnt how to design a user survey based on the lean survey canvas. We needed to define what we wanted to know about the users, which users we wanted to reach, and design clear and concise questions.
After learning about surveys, we talked about user interviews: in the Bio C’Bon case, these would help us understand why and how people consume organic products, and their pain points. I loved this exercise, as it really triggered my curiosity, interviewing people to uncover insights I hadn’t thought about before. I’m really looking forward to doing more user research in my next projects!
Day 4: How not to be overwhelmed with data
We started Day 4 by practising user interviews. We asked 5 organic product users to tell us more about their behaviours, before analysing the data collected both from the interviews and the survey launched the day before. It was difficult at first to identify patterns in user behaviours, but we learned a few tools UX designers can rely on to analyse data:
- Affinity Maps: we grouped sets of ideas found in our research and created main categories of pain points. I got super excited about this, seeing how bulk data could become structured and reveal bigger ideas.
- Personas: it was time to put a name, skin and clothes on our target user, to identify her profile, way of life, and the challenges she faces.
- Empathy Map: once our persona was built, we had to think how she would behave in the real world : defining what she would say and do, hear and see, to understand what her main pain points and aspirations are.
After using these different tools, we had a clearer idea of the pain points we wanted to solve with our design.
Day 5: Defining the problem
Friday, here we are! Pheew, time has flown by since our first day of bootcamp. On this Day 5, we learnt other tools that would help define the problem based on the user research we made:
- Brainstorming: Interestingly, I discovered that this tool was helpful to define problems, rather than coming up with new ideas. I’ve always practiced brainstorming with a group of people, throwing new ideas at each other, but never to define a problem.
- Mindmapping: I’ve always been interested in this tool, literally putting my flow of ideas/concepts on paper. By creating networks of ideas, I was able to identify key pain points that needed to be resolved.
- Storyboards: By creating user stories, you can see the pain points of your user “in action”. However, this tool takes time to master (you can refer to my drawing skills here).
- User Journey Maps: I really had fun building this map with my group. It was quite challenging to imagine a scenario for our persona that would include different touchpoints with Bio C’Bon. The aim here is to identify emotional states, and understand how to approach the user accordingly.
My key take aways from this 1st week
If you’ve read this article until this point, you now understand how intense this first week of bootcamp was! That said, I must say I am deeply enjoying the ride, for a few reasons:
- Curiosity: Every day, I am learning new things, and it feeds my curiosity. UX Design is a very broad field with so many concepts to assimilate, books to read, and tools to master, that I can’t wait to continue my journey.
- Empathy: I really enjoyed user research and interviewing people, discovering other ways of thinking (reminder: you are not the user). I love the process of putting the interviewees at ease so that they can open up about the problems they face every day.
- Creativity: UX design is obviously not only about abstract concepts. It is aimed at finding creative solutions that people will enjoy in their every day life while using our products.
Week 2 starts tomorrow and I can’t wait to see what’s next!
Thanks for reading my first bootcamp report! Feel free to clap, applaude and leave comments if you liked this article! I’ll try to post a bootcamp report every Sunday!
