Pitching my group’s project idea at the training 😊

#W0: User Experience: my own at the 115 UX-garage

I began 2020 with personal development in product management as one of my goals. To work on that, I attended the UX training organised by 115 garage last week (the 13th to the 17th).

For me, it was an amazing time. The first day open with Kitan David’s talk on design thinking and how life is all about design, as long as we humans continue to be, the need to make things easier and better would never stop. His talk walked us through an individual redesign and framing of our mind to seek problems, to look beyond the surface, and think about every process, thing and activity.

Evi Uwede and Pascal Chukwuma were our tutors for the rest of the week. We were put into groups and taught the fundamentals of User experience design while we came up with group projects based on processes or problems had seen or experienced in our daily life.

While I had my reservations about the order of the program at the end of the third day. (as we daily brainstormed and applied lessons learnt in lively groups, after each day’s lecture). I soon realised my Nigerian education mindset was trying to get the best of me- the 100% theoretical mind was at work. However, David’s amazing talk was a quick reset button for me. I was later able to appreciate the lessons of teamwork, playful learning and human-centred interactive learning.

From the training, I was able to improve my ability to identify good and bad designs (through the cantunsee and user inyerface games we played), I learnt the importance of user research in the user experience design process. Particularly, Evi was great at making us think ahead, think simple, think solutions and think for the user through the critical thinking questions she asked at every stage of the design.

Evi in her natural habitat of asking questions 😎

If I could sum up the whole week in a summary of three sentences. I would say:

• Learning is better when its fun, it is when you have the right tutors and we had that privilege.
• When you always try to think simplicity, you will always have ideas and one more problem to solve.
• Questions, questions, questions! Evi is the queen of questions, and she subtly taught the importance of always doing that.