I was initially the UX Technical Team lead along with two other: Project and PM lead later was promoted to UX Project Lead as we three together indulged in this journey equally for giving our all and mentored the journey of 11 participants and observers for their path of discovering about the world of user experience and their interactions with the screens that they see while traversing through any website or platform.
Objectives that we worked on:
Our initial motive was to the first land upon a project which is whether it is going to be based on Stem-Away or any other inspiration for further improvement. Which later on a poll was decided by the team to work on Stem-Away mobile version.
Further
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We three leads met prior to the very first meeting for an intra-team bonding and smooth functioning and had a session for breaking the ice and kickstarted the journey ( which I had a great time in my earlier June session)
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We made sure each and every fundament of the design process was clear to them while they will be designing their UI from scratch.
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Ensured that they go through intricate grounds for their user research and even presented to them mock interviews, hands-on sessions for an in-depth dive.
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Also, kept a balance for the diverse team so that they gel along while learning and grow together.
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Lastly, imbibe in them the quality of coming out and putting their thoughts in a flamboyant manner.
Meetings:
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Team-Based: Meetings were mostly based on the task accomplishments. In the initial week we had about 3 meetings and later on, as we gave them assignments and tasks to complete then we had 2 meetings with the team.
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Co-Leads: We had meetings every time 1-hour prior before the team meet and met at least twice for discussing the further course of action.
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One meeting with the pathway leads almost every week and one meeting with UX Mentor almost every week
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Explicit session with Stakeholder(Debaleena, CEO) and UX Mentor (Benjamin) for feedback.
Personal Growth and Takeaway:
After the June session as a participant, I had given a talk at various online events one being google developers group not only just after that got selected as a design intern at a firm and at the same time was handling lead position. But why I actually bothered?
Because I believe that with learning one teaches and with teaching one learns and I learned a lot, saw the transformation of the participants that were meek at the start but bloomed confidently at the end.
I wanted to pass on all what I had to the team and hence we decided to split the teams based on the how we might statement and I led the team working on the networking issue for the mobile interface, the team faced a lot of iterations along with some intra-clashes, that I handled with the utmost pacified approach with understanding their state of mind and actually ‘putting myself in their shoes’. Even cracked lame jokes to see them all smiling and didn’t even know how with all this laughing and learning we completed the course of our internship and the participants were finally able to come out of their shells and had their very first project for UI/UX.