Overall, I found this mentorship super awesome! There was a lot of work and challenges to overcome (of course) but the payoff was definitely worth it and I am very proud of my project. I’m especially grateful to my mentor who thankfully responded back to my email very quickly and was a superb person and guidance all around. She consistently provided me with amazing insight not just from herself, but also from other working designers on her team. In addition, she was able to patiently and expertly answer any of the questions I had for her, whether it’d be about how she likes to work and what processes she uses to design to how her workplace operates.
One of the most prominent things I’ve learned from her is that for UX/UI projects, most of the work is in refinement rather than in ideation. I was pretty surprised to hear this initially as here at IDEA, there’s a lot of focus on creating sketches and getting as many ideas down. For example, creating 200 sketches for logos, or even when a brand agency designer comes in as a speaker and they talk about filling up an entire sketchbook to find the Great Idea. However, my mentor brushed off the ideation as the Great Idea and more like the starting point where it can evolve into something very different at the final stage. It was mainly through user feedback and testing, I realized, that was the reason why refinement requires so much work. Unlike branding, where part of the appeal can be surprising the viewer, UX/UI projects work better when users are able to be familiar and use the product right away without much struggle. This quickly forced me to get into the habit of doing user testing which I was unuse to with other UX/UI projects at IDEA as most of the feedback I receive is from fellow designers.
A few more things I learned were tips and tricks about industry standard and norms. Did you know that in the industry, interactive designers prefer to use sizing/spacing that are in multiples of 8? Neither did I. Apparently, this makes the design most aesthetically pleasing which to my delight, does seem to be true! Little tricks like these help streamline the work better and bring focus to what’s really important: the big idea.
Through my learning experiences, there was one overarching challenge which was really the time constraint. While some (smaller) projects really are about 6 weeks, as my mentor described, a product design like this would not be feasible. Thus, I had to narrow my app down to one user flow and work very quickly. There was no time to slack off on each week and I often found myself working late at night to complete my milestones before I met with my mentor — a hilarious situation where my mentor left me feedback on my project file at 10 pm and was surprised to see me with much more work done the next day. Otherwise, I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the process is largely the same as the way we’re taught in school. There weren’t too many things to adjust to according to industry practices.
The most rewarding part of this mentorship was definitely my mentor. She has been the absolute favourite part of my mentorship and it wasn’t just because of her great personality. She provided a lot of resources, including how to interview users, a new process for me to try out on designing UI elements, and even the presentation deck she usually uses to for clients. She was able to show my project to other members of the agency and I am truly grateful for being able to receive feedback from not only her but other working professionals. I was able to learn how she operates in a small design team of a digital agency and although I know this is just one experience, it was reassuring to see that the industry world wasn’t too different from what we’re taught in school.
Overall, I would rate myself for this mentorship 9.5/10. I definitely gleaned a lot more from my mentor than just design advice and I’m quite proud of the project I created in the end. It tackles a very real problem and from the few people I’ve presented so far, I have received the comment of “I would definitely use this” more than once. Even if the app is not at its greatest potential (as I wasn’t able to mock-up every screen), I was able to receive a lot of feedback on features I could implement in the future and have designed a good system I can work off of. I worked hard on this project and had new questions for my mentor each week so that I could get the most out of these 6 weeks. I like what I’ve created and am definitely interested in pursuing this idea further so that it can become the best it can be!