「How to survive as a designer just moving to the UK」Design Workshop

Personas, User Journey Map and Brainstorming

The Origin of the Workshop

I held a design workshop 3 weeks ago for a Taiwanese designer who is just moving to the UK. I had this thought to hold this event because I want the newly-arrived designers to get helps on their new lives in the UK. It was a tough time for me when I had just moved to London without a job and knew not much about here.

A group called Taiwanese UI/UX Designer in UK is established on Facebook. We hold simple meet-ups at the beginning to let people share their life here and information including renting a flat, opening a bank account, and job searching.

In the meantime, I was thinking about if there are any activities that can help Taiwanese designers in the UK. I came out with ideas like mentor plans, lectures, interview simulation classes, etc. Then I thought maybe it would be better to get ideas from other creative people rather than me as a single individual. A design workshop would be a great idea because it could achieve 3 goals at the same time:

1. For the designers who are interested in Service Design & User Experience Design but have no works, they can have a new design project as their showcase. For the relatively experienced designers, they can have extra experience of workshop holding and design team directing.
2. The outcome of the workshop may be helpful for other designers. The ideas generated in that workshop may be applied to our group to validate if the solution is useful for designers or not.
3. The workshop is an opportunity that brings people together, so they can make new friends, share experiences and talk about their difficulties and feelings in the activity.

This is a kind of idea, “God helps those who help themselves”. Rather than receiving help from others passively, people who need assistance can do some efforts by themselves first. Then everyone can get benefits from this system.

Later, after discussion with another workshop organiser, Hsin Chieh Yeh, we decided that the main purpose of this workshop could be the “User Experience Design Course for Beginners” as our first workshop. That will be great if we have amazing outcomes, but even if we don’t, also totally fine. We asked ourselves “How can we know if this event is successful or not?” After discussion, we thought a successful workshop should be smooth and everyone be involved.

The Way We Run the Workshop

The topic was set very general: For designers just arriving in the UK, purpose a service/solution to resolve the difficulties on bank account opening, room searching, and job hunting. We didn’t know what the most urgent need is for designers, so we would like to confirm their needs through the design workshop and then focus on one need that they think is most important.

After posting the event in the Facebook group, in addition to 2 lecturers, we finally recruited 8 designers from different backgrounds. 3 of them were students, who were not or just graduated. 4 of them were designers with Tier 5 looking for a job. 1 participant had been here with Tier 5 visa, but now she is back with a dependent visa and trying to find a design job. Half of the participants have graphic and industrial design backgrounds.

The activities in the workshop include a brief introduction of user experience design and service design, user journey map, and brainstorming. Originally we also planned to have a session for the storyboard but because of poor time control, we didn’t have enough time for that part. What a shame!

In the session of the user experience design introduction, we briefly talk about all designs under the umbrella of UX design and explain the definition of design terms for the participants who have no UX background. We also encourage people to use their words to explain some terms to other participants as if explaining them to their elder family members so they can understand what you are learning in the school or doing for your job.

About the persona, we decide to create a provisional persona before the workshop. Normally personas should be created based on the findings from qualitative research, but try to create one based on our personal experiences and stories we heard from others first. Then we refine and validate this persona in the workshop by inviting others to provide feedback. That’s a kind of cooperative design.

The initial version of Persona. The end goals (the motivation of using the product) are quite broad. There is some useless and meaningless information. We re-wrote it later in the workshop.

In the workshop after discussion, all participants agree that we wanted to focus on job seeking. The season why they think it’s important is because most of them have already found their accommodation and opened bank accounts. They are still searching for jobs and living without income, so finding a job is the most urgent thing they need to do.

In the session of the User Journey Map, the participants are split into 2 groups to discuss separately. The participants are asked to discuss and refine the main phases, which have been pre-defined by me, in the user journey map. They also are asked to recall the difficulty, feelings, thoughts, the people they met, the tools they used, the actions they took in each phase. And then, 2 groups shared their outcome of the journey map and the experience of job searching.

At the beginning of the session of brainstorming, we simply summarise the findings in the user journey map. We eventually decide we want to select the phase, “Preparing Portfolio and Resume”, as our brainstorming topic because we can find there’s a serious depression in that stage. My team members all are stuck in these stages and have less experience of the next phase, the interview.

Worthy of note, job seekers have lots of pressure. They say “Have limited time and money”, “Feel lost…Afraid only pain no gain” “Feel guilty for hanging out” and ”Tackle the caring greetings from family and friends”… keep appearing in all phases. They also keep practicing English and build their confidence in every stage.

The finalised user journey map after the workshop

From the user journey map, we can find the pain points and opportunities. We use an unfinished sentence “What if…” to help us brainstorm and ideation. For example, someone mentioned she always visits LinkedIn to view other designers’ resumes and portfolios and collect them gradually. The process of collection is quite time-consuming. So we think what if there is a web crawler that can help us to collect the portfolios on LinkedIn. We may just need to type keywords on that system and then it will generate a list with screenshots of the portfolio websites.

We give 15 minutes for people to brainstorm and ask them to write or draw their thoughts. After 15 minutes, we let everyone present their ideas and encourage other people to extend those ideas if they came out with some thoughts. Some ideas generated in the brainstorm are listed below:

1. Tinder for Designers: There is a social & match app like Tinder but for designers only. You can find your mentor or other job seekers like you there. Based on this idea, I think maybe we can only show their work at the beginning rather than their profile photo, and designers can see others’ works and decide like they want to like or not. They will match if both of them like each other’s works.
2. Resume Optimisation System: After updating profiles including their CV, users can search the company names in which they are interested. Then the system will tell them how many percentages you can get the job and what skills they need get improve to increase the chance. Based on this idea, I come out that you can upload your CV and the system will tell you which companies you may have a higher chance to be their employee. Someone also says that from the company side, they also want to find a suitable employee, so maybe we can create a system for both sides to use.
3. Portfolio Templates: There are too many different types of designers, like UI designers, UX designers, and interaction designers, and each one may have different focus points. You can choose what kind of designer you want to be, can recommend a portfolio template for you.
4. Portfolio Style Recommender: You can choose the templates you like first, and then the system will recommend to you more similar styles you may be interested in. You can put your work into it will automatically generate an almost wonderful portfolio. You still can fine-tune or make adjustments by yourself.
5. Mentor Chatbot: After your portfolio is uploaded, your portfolio will be analysed and a chatbot will tell you where you should improve and give you a simulation interview by asking typical questions and questions about your portfolios.
6. VR Interviewer: There is a VR glass and software that can help you practice interviews like talking to real people. I come out with another idea that maybe we can cooperate with design masters and famous designers, the interviewer could be Norman for example.
7. Pyramid Scheme: The senior designers can be mentors for juniors to share their experiences and help them to find a job. If the junior designer finds a job, he needs to pay a little percentage of his salary to the mentor every month. The junior designer can also be a mentor for those who are looking for a job. Not only the junior designer but his mentor can get paid if junior designer’s students find a job.
8. Self Tracking System: It is a system that helps us to examine our problems. The system will provide data showing you when are the highest performance during the day and your frequency of preparing a portfolio. It has an alert to remind you if you are behind the progress. I thought the reminder would not work. People are unable to complete their portfolio because finishing a portfolio is a tough and huge goal so it is easy to give up rather than forget to do. The system will divide the big goat into small tasks you need to achieve every day. We can also visualise the process, so users can clearly know they are on course. If you go on a track every day for a period, you will get a reward like free mentors.
9. Self Management System: We can manage ourselves like managing a project. The system can help us to review ourselves and plan. It clearly shows us what things need to be done or improved and how much time we spend on what and when it should be done. Also tell us, what is plan B if we failed to finish our tasks.
10. Peer Finder: There are different stages in seeking jobs, like searching, preparing, interviews, etc. The designers in the same stage can share information and help each other. They cannot interact with others in the next stages until they pass this stage and unlock the next one. Hsin Chieh thinks this is an interesting idea and says, “People might think other job seekers are competitors, so they will not help each other. But I just thought when I interviewed with a company that my friend also interviewed with. But when I didn’t pass the interview, I shared some information about the interview questions with my friend. We tried to help each other at that time.
11. Skill Exchange: A skill exchange platform that designers with different skill sets can teach each other. Some people may be good at prototyping and some may have good visual design skills. They can teach each other to learn more skills.

From the ideas above, we can find there are patterns. Those concepts are trying to answer the same questions:

1. How to easily generate a better portfolio and resume to increase the chance of getting interviews: Portfolio Templates, Portfolio Style Recommender & Resume Optimisation System.
2. How to connect people to help each other: Pyramid Scheme, Tinder for Designers, Skill Exchange & Peer Finder
3. How to present my design works in an interview: Mentor Chatbot & VR Interviewer:
4. How to increase my professional skills: Tinder for Designers & Skill
5. How to plan a schedule and self-monitoring: Self Tracking System &Self Management System

For me, there are lots of ideas that can be combined into a great concept. Quite a lot of them are worth continuing to develop. Some of them find the essence of problems and also come up with an “inducement” that can drive the system.

The Next Step

From the ideas generated in the brainstorming session, I find job seekers have 5 needs in the “Preparation” phase. There are 2 ways to do it for the next step. The first one is we can keep brainstorming based on those 5 needs. The second one is we can directly develop those ideas we have. There are no more details and user flow for those ideas which are just simple thoughts. If we are going to hold a new event for new participants, I will take the first way. But I would like to take the second one because I have some thoughts on those ideas and want to start to design.

Retrospective

This workshop is quite successful, I think. It’s more smooth than expected. Perhaps because all the participants are designers and they are more familiar with those creative activities.

As an activity leader and holder, there is something that can be improved. First, I didn’t provide enough hints or guides for my team members, so there was a period that they didn’t know what to do. I think I should ask them more questions to help them think, like “what did you do? What tools did you use? What did you feel? Why did you want to do that? We should more focus on generating thoughts. Discussion about Journey phases can be done later.

I also do a small survey after the workshop. Most of the feedback is positive. About course, people think the user journey map and persons are quite useful. About event arrangement, the prior notification gets a higher rating. Ice-breaking and ending get fewer points. It could be improved in terms of food as well.

About time control, we did not do well. The activity time was expanded to 2 more hours and also we did not have enough time to conduct a storyboard to develop the ideas. I think perhaps our schedule expended is too tight. Each session costs more time than expected.

It is the first time we hold this event, so there are many details we missed. Thanks to all participants, Yu Chi Chu, Li Chun Kan, Kai-Shing Hwang, Chia-Chi Liao, Peiyun Lin, Wei-Cheng Huang, Chiu-Hsuan Huang, and Hsiang Ju Huang, for joining the design workshop. Thanks to Hsin Chieh Yeh for being our lecturer and spending some time with me to discuss the activity. We may have other workshops or events the next time if people love to join!