UX Mentoring

Had a great time mentoring the Jobxee fellowship program a few days ago! When I was approached to speak about UX Design to a group of budding computer science students, I went into overdrive! Wondering what would be the best topic to indulge into. Looking back into my own years at college I realized the need of the hour, or infact the need of every hour for the last few years has been Design Thinking.

So to enlighten and encourage these students into understanding and using the design thinking process I held an in-depth one hour session explaining the importance of Design Thinking and what the process entails. One hour is definitely not enough time to go over the fine print of understanding and using the process, but it definitely got a lot of students interested and invested to pursue it further through other online courses and tutorials.

While working on this presentation, I was taken back to my university days and I found myself looking through my course material in classes such as Service Design, taught by a very lovely Professor Kiran Sajwani who’s materials I’ve saved on my hardrive under “irreplaceable design materials”. I remember how much I used to hate having to read those “Woo, Wow & Win” book excerpts and wonder what was I going to learn from this. Funny enough, I spent an hour on Saturday reading all the one’s I had collected in our classes and it reminded me how important all the content we got in university was. 

I cannot talk about Design Thinking and not refer to one of my favorite professors back in university, Professor Kathryn Best who actually made me understand what Design Thinking + Design Management is and made me fall in love with it. (All her resources are also saved under the same folder in my hardrive!!) Not to forget also the author of multiple Design Thinking & Design Management books. She had been a constant source of reconnecting with my major and reminding myself that design is the future. 

From understanding and learning about the processes, the tools and the importance, I’m now being able to teach it. 19 year old me had no clue this is what I would’ve been doing with my knowledge.

Looking forward to more such experiences where I get to share my take and knowledge on Design Thinking! And like I told the wonderful fellowship students as well, there’s never a wrong time to keep learning, growing & exploring. Especially in UX Design and Design Thinking.