The best on-boarding is training
I remember when I joined Wolox. I had already gone through the entire
selection process and they gave me the news: We would love you to be part
of our team!
I was too happy, with high expectations… and I wasn’t disappointed! 😂.
Throughout the selection process, they had already told me a little about the first days and the induction to the company once I was in. They told me about the initial onboarding, where I would get to know the team, the culture and the xLab (design team) training.
1st day
As I had been told, the first day was fully onboarding, several welcome
meetings with other colleagues, context meetings about the company, its
structure, ways of working, benefits, dynamics <best slack channels>, among others.
On that very day they told me: “Well, tomorrow you will start the training.
You are going to do it with Luisa” (another new colleague), and then we had another meeting where they presented us the 6-week schedule structure and stages. In that moment I suffered a mini nervous breakdown hahaha. It was Monday, I had just arrived and I had to put together an entire (imaginary) project in 6 weeks with stages and tools that I didn’t know very well… it was like… I can’t believe you, we are not going to make it 😳.
But don’t worry, it’s not as terrible as it looks. In fact, it has been
the most valuable experience I’ve had when arriving at a company.
2nd day
On Tuesday we started the first stage: Research. We had about 4 days to
find and pose a problem with a tentative target audience, conduct interviews to validate hypotheses, define the real audience and draw conclusions that would allow us to present possible solutions to the pains we found. Just like in “real life”, and facing the challenge of learning while executing, all at the same time.
It was challenging, but also very exciting. There were moments of stress …
when I didn ́t understand certain things…I had so much information to
absorb and the feeling of not having enough time chased me at every moment. However, we always arrived on time; for each stage there was a trainer accompanying us at every moment of the process and explaining, giving us feedback and teaching us how things were done in Wolox.
After the research stage, we conclude that we were going to build an app and then we faced a Focus stage and I was really nervous here, because in one way or another, although I was focused in UI, I had already had the opportunity to participate in research processes. But now something different was coming, a stage too important for a project and in which I had almost no experience: defining the project scope, the MVP, estimating the roadmap and the base architecture to support these definitions.
Can you imagine how I felt, if most of the time I thought I wouldn’t have
enough time? But here we also had a trainer supporting us in every step we
had to take, giving us all the necessary bases to bring forward each activity
and shape our MVP. Although I was quite intimidated by this part of the
training, now I believe it was my favorite stage, because it was here where I
mostly learned new and important things for project development. Being
able to map your work, estimate the time it will take and define correctly
how far you can go with the time and resources you have is a great
challenge for any project.
Once this stage was closed, when we were clear about the path and the
architecture, we approached the UX stage, and it was very interesting to do
this remotely, one-on-one with a new partner. We divided the flows between the two of us, we started with low wireframes painting screens by hand quickly and putting together a basic guide of components and then we put together the high wireframes, which were the ones we were going to test. Can you believe it? We even had time to do usability tests, not even in real life can you achieve that much 😆. Here, to meet the deadline and results, what we did was to prioritize the flows that we really needed to test. For instance, we were not going to test the login that already suited the current patterns and had nothing relevant for what the app was going to do.
Once we had the test results, we made some adjustments that helped us a
lot to improve the experience and our prototype. We took these adjustments
directly to the next stage: The UI development.
It was week 4, we were about to celebrate our first month at Wolox and we
were ready to start the whole UI stage. In order to present our product, we
needed to give it a look that reflected what we wanted. So we made a moodboard to align our ideas, then we gave it a name, designed the logo and built a style guide. This was the foundation to start building our screens with the look that we wanted for the concept of our app. We had 1 week and a half to conduct this stage. During this time, we were able to define all the styles and set up all the flows that we had already defined from UX, including usability testing adjustments, and we even did a design review with some colleagues, where we could iterate some design details that helped us improve the interface. I really liked this stage since I am currently focused on UI and I enjoy it. We were able to generate a pretty clean and functional proposal for our flows.
At the end of the UI stage, we were approaching the end of the training and
everything was almost ready to close the project. Part of the training was to
make micro interaction proposals, build the functional prototype and the
presentation of all the work done to show the whole process to our colleagues; during the last week we were fully involved in these tasks, and we finally saw the light… After 6 weeks that seemed both very short and also very long, we had successfully completed each stage of the training. Finally, we made the presentation of the whole project and process to the xLab team, telling them everything we had learned from each stage, what we had achieved and all the value it had brought us. Now we were ready for the next challenge within Wolox!
If you want to see a bit of the process and result of our training you can see the case in this link
