The Power of Diverse Teams: My UX Breakthroughs in Collaboration

Assumptions made, lessons learned — my journey from struggling with team dynamics to the moment we clicked and made design magic happen.

Eugene Bos
The Curious Designer
5 min readFeb 28, 2019

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My journey into Product Design started from the need to understand the ‘why' behind my designs. My curiosity helped me survive as a teenager; the urge to explore and seek novelty kept me vigilant and always seeking to gain knowledge about my constantly changing environment. I didn’t grow up in an environment of Technology or creativity. Heck!… I only started knowing the full capabilities of the internet and computers when I turned 19 years. But my desire for knowledge kept me going. I always aspired to live a purpose driven life, questioning the reason behind things.

“Why?”… by “why?” I needed to find my purpose, my beliefs, why I do what I do. After 2 years of being an in-house graphic designer at Huawei Technologies, I felt stuck.

It happens to the best of us: you got into your dream school or landed an awesome job, but after a while, you start losing motivation and interest. You start counting down the minutes till the end of your shift. Feeling unfulfilled, you wonder if you’ll be stuck in this rut until you retire.

What gave me fulfillment at that stage, were moments of seeing my artwork influencing people’s emotions by creating a great experience with a product. I got an aha!-moment through this feeling, I wanted to take it further by designing meaningful digital experiences and products for people.

I relocated to Amsterdam from Ghana to start over. My desire to create experiences with digital products lead me to enroll in Ironhack Amsterdam’s UI/UX Bootcamp a month and a half ago.

Working with People from Diverse Backgrounds

My experience in the Bootcamp so far has been enlightening. My cohort mates are amazing — what I love about my class is that, it is not just about people from different backgrounds coming together to change something in their lives, but that we all came here for the same reason.

Every single one of us came here because we share something — a passion to create meaningful designs and experiences in order to engage an audience.

We don’t know each other, and yet we know something about each other. I believe, we work better in a group situation, surrounding ourselves with people who have similar beliefs or passions. It lies in our human nature to seek others who have similar ideas.

Almudena Vigara, Maarten van Hoogdalem, Rogier Knoops, Milla Dovgal, Ashlee Valdes, Dina Korkmazova, Claudia Cheng, Neville Tjon-Fo, Cristina Calderon, Juliana Argôlo, Cinzia, Joep Seuren & Manouk Meilof

Empathy is Key

I recently finished working with two of my classmates on a UX case-study through to UI development using the Agile method. We were given the task to design an e-commerce platform for high quality groceries. You can read more about it in my previous article — Sticky Situations.

The UX design and thinking process is different from my previous experiences, especially finding myself working in a team.

Diversity is more than just a moral responsibility. In my opinion, it is fundamental to the success of any team. While working on this project, being honest and open-minded helped us a lot with our team dynamics. As individuals, we all had a different approach to things and working as a single unit required some getting used to.

We started making assumptions about each other, which disrupted the team’s dynamic.

Weekly Retrospective

We solved this by being more empathic. Rather than making assumptions, asking why someone does things a certain way, helps to understand each other better. I learned more about empathy this way — by having the ability to understand the emotions that someone else is feeling and being able to identify with them. You share their feelings.

During the course of the project, we had morning stand-up and weekly retrospective meetings. Having a platform to update each other on the progress of our project really helped. By the way, we were brutally honest with each during these sessions and this gave us enough feedback to work on ourselves as well.

What I learnt Working on this Project

  • Make people feel included. Every opinion counts. Especially if it’s not along the same lines as yours.
  • Debate if you disagree.
  • Seek for honest and open feedback. This is how we grow and become better inside and outside of the work environment.
  • Show an example of how to be a good team player. Your teammates will appreciate your honesty, openness and ability to compromise when possible.
  • Share the knowledge. If you came across a certain problem before and have experience solving it, share your wisdom! If you’ve picked up some new tools, or want to teach your team some new Sketch tricks, set some time aside to teach people what you’ve learned. Your contribution to the team’s “knowledge base” would go a long way.

Everybody’s “why” can be different, while it takes effort to harness and align such different perspectives, it is at the intersection of our differences that our most meaningful breakthroughs emerge. Diversity is not a problem, it is a Solution!

Eugene Bos, Adina Ghita & Cristina Calderon

Thanks for reading!

Give some claps if you can👏🏾. Do you have any thoughts or opinions? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments!

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Eugene Bos
The Curious Designer

I specialize in crafting exceptional experiences, building ventures, and Inspiring minds as a UX Product Designer, Entrepreneur, Writer, Consultant, & Mentor