Learnings from teaching UX design
As the field of UX gained interest in Georgia, companies started providing various interactive courses, most of which covered basics and never went deep enough. To change the situation, a lot of practitioners around the country got involved and took part in educating the community and helping Georgians get into digital fields. I decided to jump on board ⛴️
My co-worker (UX researcher) and I were invited as lecturers at the Tbilisi School of Communication to teach UX Research and Design. As I understood the situation on the market, I decided to try my best to create something truly useful and practical. We accepted the offer and created our first UX design and Research BootCamp together.
In my current role as a UX leader, I support, help, and mentor designers in the organization, so I felt pretty confident in taking up this challenge. For three months we helped students learn how to work on the project from start to end by conducting their own research and designing their own products.
Structure and content
Bootcamp started with an overview of the UX field, digital products, team structures, and roles. Students gained an understanding of how they have to work, who will they collaborate with, and what skills they need to work on to be able to thrive in the competitive environment. For the next 3 months, students worked independently on their own projects from analyzing user needs to testing and finalizing their design solutions.
They crafted screeners and research guides, recruited and interviewed real potential users, distributed surveys, analyzed their research insights, crafted personas, formed ideas about their products, understood who they were designing for, crafted journeys for their personas, brainstormed possible features, prioritized them, and overall created a solid foundation for their projects.
As students progressed in their projects, they gained an understanding of user problems and needs, and to form ideas around these needs they learned the importance of rapid sketching. They sketched storyboards, features, and flows, brainstormed solutions, and learned how fun and rewarding sketching and ideating really are. Sketching exercises encouraged them to experiment, and prioritize ideas over visuals.
In terms of UI design, we covered: interface design principles, using Figma as a design tool, creating interface elements, and designing different types of interfaces. Students drafted visual identities, worked on high-fidelity mockups, recruited participants for usability studies, created usability testing guides, and crafted interactive prototypes to test their solutions.
Near the end of the Bootcamp, we reviewed the current job market in Georgia, talked about salaries, and interview questions, and practiced doing design and research tasks. Students practiced exercises from Artiom Dashinsky’s book — Solving Product Design Exercises. They learned the methodology behind solving problems presented in design exercises, understood what questions should be asked and why, and learned how to present their design solutions.
We also dived deep into design sprints, workshops, stakeholder interviews and presentations, development handoff, and overall collaboration with other designers, researchers, developers, PMs, POs, and everybody involved in digital product creation.
Each lecture provided theoretical explanations of terms, techniques, and methods, practical examples from products they use, discussion topics, group exercises to do during the lectures, and take-home exercises to apply gathered knowledge.
At the end of the Bootcamp, we discussed case studies and design presentations and reviewed different ways to showcase their work. Students created final presentations and case studies using different tools and presented them to the class. Now they have a portfolio piece they can use as a starting point in their design or research careers.
Personal challenges and learnings
Feeling responsible
When you are teaching something to others, no matter the years of experience, you want to make sure you are giving correct information and your facts are accurate. That’s why each lecture requires hours of preparation and research. It is our responsibility to help students enter the field with confidence. Other than that, I felt responsible for their perception of the field and profession. I wanted them to see how exciting, fun, collaborative, creative, and impactful UX design and research are. But at the same time, I wanted to make them understand how challenging, analytical, and mentally consuming they can be.
Making sure everyone understands you
We, as designers, always think about how accessible our design is for different kinds of users and we strive to make it as simple and understandable as we can. The same goes for lectures, you want everybody to understand the concepts and terms you are explaining. Groups usually include people from different backgrounds and during live lectures, people are reluctant to ask all the questions, especially the ones they think are too simple. That's why, for me, it was one of the most important objectives to overexplain things, to sense when something was not quite clear for somebody, and to create an environment where questions are welcomed and encouraged.
They say that the more you understand the subject the easier you can explain it, so ditch professional language and put time and effort into simplifying your lectures. It has an amazingly positive effect on engagement and creates a warm, inviting atmosphere.
Pushing them out of their comfort zone
A lot has changed since the pandemic, our online lives, meetings, and social media decreased our attention span and ability to focus on one thing at a time. Courses were held online, so it was easy for the students to just turn off their cameras, listen along, scroll social media, play games on their phones, or just zone out.
We decided to tackle the problem by including group exercises in nearly every lecture. Students had to work on Miro boards, sketch in groups, give and receive feedback and discuss their decisions openly. This changed the dynamic in the group, they seemed more open, got more involved, and overall felt more comfortable with working with other people.
Learning from my students
The most exciting part of the experience was learning from the students. Their different backgrounds and different experiences brought a lot of interesting insights and perspectives.
The most rewarding part of the experience was the feedback, love, and appreciation I received from students. Hearing about how the course helped, encouraged, and pushed them makes every single hour spent, worth it.
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