Lesson I Learned

For the final pitch night, it was a great experience for me, for every one of us. I was never thought that I could totally relax to present my work with full confidence before. It was easy for me to get nervous, stressed and out of words. But eventually, I did it, with all the support of my cool teammates throughout the whole semester. I was proud of myself at that moment when I stood in front of the awesome start-up founders, presenting our product with a confident tone. It seemed like every effort did count a lot and the feedback from the audiences reflected that Glo-Up was a success.

Here are our presentation slides, which involved our Final Demo during the pitch night, with our final concept: a Smart Wristband that senses student-athletes’ mental stress through a set of physiological signals, and helps them recognize and regulate stress by journaling their feelings via talking/texting with our chatbot, and offer self-care tips.

Actually, it was a long way for me to reach here. Before this class, I lacked a cohesive system thinking about how a rough concept could be validated over time, how the co-founders of a start-up company cooperate with each other, how many potential pivots could happen, and we had to make changes based on tons of testing until the concept is validated. This was a really informative and practical course I’ve ever taken. I should say it was worthy for everyone who wants to become a better UX researcher and UX designer to take. Not only did the lecture offered us various strategies, such as MVP, BMC, TAM, SAM, SOM, Acquisition Experiments and etc. I felt more structured with these kinds of knowledge. It was clear that I developed a better information architecture of my previous knowledge. Before, I was simply a person caring more about polished visual design. Right now, I learned how important it was to validate a concept before building it. Many start-ups failed due to unvalidated concept without real marketing value. A polished design just visually looked good, but the strategy and information architecture behind were far more significant.

Don’t make beautiful trash. Care about what your target customers really need and test your concept to fit their needs.

Creative founder really helped me out with practical strategies, team cooperation, and real-world interaction. Thanks to every juicy lecture of our lovely professor, Kate, who offer us a lot of valuable feedback every time when we pivoted, and my cool teammates to work together, I learned a lot from them! Rachel, our CEO, who always put the whole team in her mind, was great at project management and interview recruiting. Her thoughtful strategy kept our team on the right track. Richie, our CMO, an inclusive and sunny boy, helped our team to be open to different ideas. He valued convincing evidence to support the concept we came up with. Vicky, our CFO, a really thoughtful and hard-working girl, always put her whole effort to our group work and made the fantastic physical prototype for our product. As an industrial designer, she helped the rest of us thinking from a different perspective. Although I usually felt hard to express myself due to some language barrier, my lovely teammates showed their great understanding and always encouraged me to stand out and appreciate every of my involvement. I really enjoyed the whole semester working with them. And right now, I felt much more confident to present my ideas in front of people.

Truly, nobody is an expert from the beginning, practice and the passion for design can make make a big difference. We should believe ourselves and move forward.

When I go out into the world, I would carry what I’ve learned from this class with more confidence. For the first stage concept, I’d test the concept in the beginning until it is validated and then move to the polished design. For team cooperation, I would engage more and learn how to express myself much clear. I hope everyone will have a bright future lol. One day, when we really get out future start-up founded, we will be pleased with the lesson we learned very beginning :)