A blog by Aiziel Nazario about his one-week work experience.
So I just finished my one week work-experience with Lagom and I am astounded and grateful.
I felt supported and invested in…it felt like it was all about me! They had a meeting and thought: “let’s make this week…Zel week”.
What was so different with this experience was that I never heard the words “I don’t know what you should be doing now”, something I heard often in my past internships.
Everything was planned and curated for my learning that this one-week internship felt like a month’s worth of knowledge and experiences.
I was involved and introduced to so many things; from co-designing with participants to sprint planning meetings with clients, transcribing and analysing usability testing sessions to curating my own user interview questions were just some of it.
I’ll talk about some of the key things I’ve learnt, because if I wrote about ALL of them…I might be here another week!
Always question the normal way you’re doing things – ask yourself how could I make this process or method better?
I’ve found that there seems to be this great attitude at Lagom. The amount of times I heard conversations between the team on how they could improve the way things are. I will carry this mature mindset as a designer with me in future.
Using Miro for project kick-off meetings
By using visuals to assist in communicating the key goals and timelines, I found that it helps to frame everyone’s understanding and sets the right tone of the project from the get-go. Fast, but organised.
As Stephen said: “showing clients how organised you are from the very start really pays off” – and I agree!
Transcribing and analysing research takes a lot of time
I thought there must be ways in which this could be made faster or more automated. But there is merit to the current process, as Adam said: “you become the advocate of your users”.
Their current ways of doing things empowers us to do just that. It can be time-consuming, but it allows us to fully understand users’ contexts and their needs.
Quantitatively validating the user needs identified by qualitative methods
This is the incredible thing Lagom does. They provide evidence on which user needs are most important and should be addressed, by using statistical analysis to back up their recommendations.
It allows clients to truly understand the gravitation of certain needs and justify them in a quantifiable way.
I’d like to thank everyone at Lagom for investing their time on me: to learn more about user research, Lagom’s wider skill sets and to gain insight to your business process and working in the public sector.
It has been a fruitful week!
