Graduate School: Semester Two In Review
The 2nd semester of graduate school was characterized by far less sleep than the first. With this sleep deprivation though came a much wider bandwidth for meaningful research, actionable insight, and strategized implementation. As a UX Designer, I gained a more focused attention to minute detail, along with a comprehension for business goals and required research to initialize product conception.
A grasp on content strategy and the variety of technology that archived content is deployable to also greatly assisted my design decisions. The message “design once, publish everywhere”, admittedly rang in the brains of our cohort.
Exposure to tech such as conversational interfaces brought insight to appropriate use cases to meet problems with, along with reference to what a product could become given the circumstance of insight. Among all though, the champion introduction was integrating this knowledge of content strategy with design thinking — how might we utilize content to meet the user’s needs across various touch points?
Designing with the user in mind, and deploying the content through touch points that the user wants to interact with, or appropriately meets their needs, is the name of the game.
Beyond tools and ideology I’ve picked up over the course of the semester, I’ve also learned best practices of things not to do. Here are a few:
- Meet in-person to discuss product and design decisions. Only leave phone interaction for text for easy-to-fix issues.
- Make clear what your individual goals are for a project. Especially to yourself.
- Don’t take feedback personally. Use it to better your project and future design decisions.
- Fight with research, not personal bias. Be able to justify product and design decisions based on the goals of the user.
Over all, this semester challenged my workload capacity, tolerance for creative difference, and capability to justify decisions (and ratio of sleep to hours worked above all). But with these challenges came worthwhile knowledgeability and experience necessary to face real design scenarios — where money is on the line and stakeholders are betting on a product. With the stress of the semester, I feel prepared. That’s important.
