I have mentored and helped a few intern and junior team members to get a permanent UX role at News as well as teaching and upskilling other team members with UX research practices and helping them make an informed decisions about their designs.
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Margarita. From design to ux.
Margarita worked as a visual designer in the UX and Design team. She had a goal of moving to UX side eventually whether it would be here at News or in a new company.
I started mentoring and upskilling Margarita with UX research practices, workshop techniques and prototyping tools. I included Margarita in different UX activities, moving her gradually from observing to helping out to finally organising and facilitating different UX activities such as innovative workshops, in-lab and remote research, playing back and presenting the findings to her team.
I helped Margarita to stay inspired and motivated and save the company a good resource as she would have left otherwise.
When an opportunity came Margarita was ready and had been taught all the necessary skills to successfully apply for UX Architect role in News Corp.
Kat.
designer hybrid.
Kat was working as a hybrid of a visual designer and UX and was confident to produce the solutions as well as to validate them.
Even though Kat did a very good job of validating the marketing messages with usability tests, marketing pushed back saying the sample wasn’t big enough to be representative.
This is where I joined to help her find the right quantitative research tools that could give a steady data on how many people experienced the issue with the marketing messages.
Combined together the quantitative and the qualitative research did a good job of convincing the marketing to improve their message to our users. The whole research Kat and I did together become a good case study for other team members on how quantitative research can support usability tests and vice versa and what tools can be used to achieve the goal.
anna.
From an intern
to UX Architect.
Anna joined our team as a UX intern. She was very keen to help and learn from experience.
I started including Anna in research activities, workshops and prototyping methods. I exposed her to different UX processes and techniques.
When I felt Anna was ready to facilitate her first usability test I let her run it, sitting close by and reassuring she was doing great. I gave her my feedback and highlighted the areas to work on. Soon after I let Anna help with the recruitment process explaining how it works and what to look for.
I introduced Anna to Axure for her interactive prototypes and shared my knowledge on different aspects of UX work.
By the time Anna’s internship program was finished she was quite confident in different research techniques and was offered a permanent UX Architect role in our team.
User centred design thinking.
At some point, I was moved from The Australian team to Mastheads team to find out they didn’t have any research practices in place.
I gradually engaged the team in different research activities and innovative workshops, making sure there was a user placed in the middle of every decision they made.
I exposed the team to some online research tools such as Lopp11 and taught them how to organise and facilitate in-lab and remote usability tests, making sure they comply with legal requirements e.g. signing and keeping consent forms, the way they contacted users etc.