teaching design
Sharing my love for design through mentorship, leading workshops, and giving talks
Sharing my love for design through mentorship, leading workshops, and giving talks
I’ve been so fortunate to have opportunities to share my love for design both within and beyond my current role at PROS. My own career journey and personal growth have been deeply shaped by mentorship and learning from others, and I believe sharing our own knowledge with others is impactful and important. Teaching is also one of the best ways to learn — I learn something new every time I teach!
Jump to a section:
I developed an interactive, 2-hour UX design workshop for the PROS internship program. Our session included 12 students from a wide variety of academic backgrounds. Since the internship program was virtual in 2021 😷, I tried to make the workshop engaging through group activities in Miro and breakout sessions.
The goal for the workshop was to give students a taste of building user flows, wireframing, prototyping, and testing. I thought it’d be fun to have participants work in teams to design a grocery delivery app. 🍎 We first covered some basics of UX design, including personas and sketching.
Our first breakout session involved creating a workflow for a user placing a grocery order. I divided the participants into 3 teams and hopped between breakout rooms to check in and answer questions.
Check out some of the workflows the students built!
In the following two activities, teams worked together to wireframe and prototype their app screens. I loved observing how students collaborated to bring their ideas to life!
Here are some of the designs the interns came up with (in just 30 min!)
The final activity was switching up the teams a little and having one member from each team test another team’s prototype. Each team assigned the following roles:
Test another team's prototype and give feedback
Moderate testing of your own prototype
Take notes while your prototype is tested
This was my favorite activity because I got to see reactions to different workflows, and how students reflected upon and reconsidered their designs. This is a large part of my day-to-day work! 🕵🏻
I sent out a survey to collect feedback on how things went, so that we can improve for next time. The workshop got great feedback, and several students reached out to me afterward with follow-up questions ☺️
strongly agreed or agreed that the workshop was engaging
strongly agreed or agreed that the workshop was informative
During this time, I also mentored our UX intern through a 12-week project on one of our core products. We worked together to research, brainstorm, prototype, and iterate. At the end of her internship she successfully delivered designs to our Product Management and Engineering teams! 🥳
Progressing from low-fidelity sketches and research presentations to final design:
I was invited to give a talk to graduate students in Rice’s Human Factors & Ergonomics Society (HFES) chapter. The main focus of my presentation was sharing the application of my academic coursework as well as insights from my day-to-day work as a UX Designer. Many of the Master’s and PhD students had a more research-focused background, so I had a great time hearing about their experiences and sharing my own.
I’ve had a lot of wonderful opportunities to share about our UX work at PROS, but one of my favorite presentations was demoing our prototyping process with our engineering team. Our teams work closely together, but we often don’t get to share our research and design methodology in detail. Our Lead UX Researcher, one of our UI Designers and I presented to an audience of 20 engineers about our design process and it was a lot of fun!
Demoing how we transform paper sketches into prototypes suitable for testing with customers:
As a Writing Consultant at Rice University's Center for Academic and Professional Communication, I spent 3 years advising graduate and undergrad students during 150+ consultations. Beyond teaching design, coaching students in communication has always been a passion of mine. I believe writing is one of the most powerful ways of preserving and sharing both our experiences and convictions. Careful articulation enables us to effectively convey our ideas to others, but also works to clarify our own thought processes. Witnessing each writer immerse themselves in this transformative process was one of the most rewarding parts of my role. 😌
Here's some feedback I got from the surveys students complete at the end of every session:
During my time at Rice, I also served as a Teaching Assistant for Business Communications (Fall 2019) and won an Award for Exemplary Service!
feel free to reach out and let's collaborate on something new together! 🌻
