Test Pilot on Campus
Test Pilot can never have too many good ideas! That was the original thought behind co-hosting a 12-week course with Tatung University (TTU)’s Department of Media Design in Taiwan. We expected to cultivate new ideas by guiding students through a simplified UX design process, and we did!
Scope of collaboration
In 2017, the Campus Seeding program in Taipei encouraged us to grow our influence in schools, so the Taipei UX team decided to work with TTU’s Professor Chia-yin Yu and Professor Peirong Cheng as our first step to creating a win-win collaboration: students learns new things, Mozilla collects new ideas. After several meetings, we finalized the course information and the modality of cooperation. There were 12 graduate students from diverse backgrounds who were divided into four teams.
Taipei UX team gave three in-class lessons covering our design process, including user research, a design workshop, prototyping, and user testing.
Professors shared relevant knowledge to form a compact program. Students completed assignments in Google Docs so that we could review and give feedback online. At the end of this semester, we asked students to give presentations in the Mozilla Taipei office and invited Firefox UX designers to critique.
1st lesson: User Research
For the first lesson, I gave an introduction to the Firefox browser and Test Pilot to help students understand who we are and what we do. Next, Ruby Hsu, our Senior User Researcher, gave a User Research 101 lesson and demonstrated interviews, breaking the research method down into step-by-step exercises. After students practiced several rounds of interviews with each other, the assignment was to put what they learned to use and deliver a report which contained user needs and insights for the next lesson: design workshop.
2nd lesson: Design Workshop
Juwei Huang, our Senior User Experience Designer, with support from me, UX designers Tina Hsieh and Tori Chen, prepared a series of brainstorming tools to help students diverge from their reports and converge to concrete design proposals. With students’ research reports posted on the wall, the four of us led each team to practice various brainstorming exercises, including affinity diagramming, How Might We, and 3–12–3 brainstorming.
3rd lesson: Prototyping & User Testing
In the last lesson, Mark Liang, our UX Designer/Prototyper, introduced different prototyping instruments. Mark also elaborated on the importance and performance of user testing from Ruby’s lesson. From instruction to execution, we guided students to build paper prototypes based on their proposals and tested them with each other.
Final challenge: Presentations
At the end of the semester, we invited students to the Mozilla Taipei office. We gave an office tour to talk about Mozilla’s vision, manifesto, and the history of Taipei office. More importantly, students experienced how we review and critique at Mozilla by presenting their final presentations and what they learned. The participation from various Mozillians was invaluable. John Gruen, Test Pilot Product Manager, reviewed presentations from the product perspective. Philipp Sackl, Firefox Product Design Lead and Michael Verdi, Firefox Senior Interaction Designer, shared more international perspectives, not to mention the helpful critique from Taipei UX team members.
Looking ahead
To wrap up, it was a fabulous journey for students and for us. Thanks to everyone who contributed time on this project and joined us to learn about design process. We’ve collected potential experiment ideas and compelling proposals for the next phase of Test Pilot, and we’ll keep collaborating with schools and students for more fresh ideas. We can never have too many good ideas, right?
