UX Studio TA 📓

Background

The UX Experience Studio grants students the opportunity to collaborate with corporate sponsors on projects.

With an emphasis on leadership, teamwork, and presentation skills, this class pushes students to continuously evolve as UX professionals and grow their network.

The project sponsors during my time as TA included, but were not limited Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and UE Group.

Having taken the course five times, at ever advancing levels, I was well prepared to take on a sixth and seventh semester as the course Teaching Assistant.

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Teaching Assistant Responsbilites

My duties included, but were not limited to:

• Managing attendance records via Blackboard, Google Sheets, and Slack.
• Review of testing and interview protocols.
• Mentorship of team leaders.
• Moderation of intra or inter team issues.
• Weekly progress check-in and critique with each team.
• Grading of assignments.

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Mentoring Team Leads

I would regularly meet with team leads to discuss project progress.

Each meeting included, but was not limited to the following topics:

• Project goals evaluation as the team iterates.
• Leadership strategies (e.g. helping first years adjust to the class style)
• Where each team is succeeding/struggling.
• Inter or intra team conflict.
• Desired resources (e.g. compensation for testing participants)

Each leader had three formal meetings with me throughout the semester; start, midpoint, and end. In addition, I was available for more informal conversations during class and via Slack.

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Moderation of Inter/Intra Team Conflict

In situations that necessitated TA intervention, I would sit down with the conflicting team members privately to review the issue(s) at hand.

• Allow each team member time to to respectfully state their POV.
• Collaboratively create an issue statement. (e.g. A lack of clear communication on both ends has lead to disagreement regarding our final goal.)
• Do a three part reflection on the semester thus far. What to keep doing. What to stop doing. What to start doing.
• Whiteboard out their plan of action for resolving conflict going forward.

After this, teams that were having issues typically saw an increase in innovation, communication, team spirit, and improvement of their project documentation.

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