Taking an Advanced UX Course from the Fountain Institute
Cansu Kıpırdı, an alumnus of the Fountain Institute, detailed her course experience in a quick interview. She talks about why she signed up, the practical and theoretical learnings in the class, and how she will apply them to her work as a product designer at TrueNode, a venture-driven product studio in Berlin, Amsterdam, and San Francisco.
Q: Cansu, you are currently participating in a product design course by the Fountain Institute. When you signed up, what were you hoping to get out of it?
As a working product designer, I wanted to develop my capabilities through user research and "discover" the phase of a double diamond. – Double Diamond is a framework for the design process created by the UK Design Council in 2005 and remains one of the most fundamental design processes in use today. The first phase "Discovery" phase helps people understand, what the problem is. – So when checking the curriculum, I saw the course was encouraging you to focus on the end-to-end design methods of UX and UI design. Those will help us to shape the problem space and work effectively with other stakeholders of the project. Also, it was not only about aesthetics but also covering the advanced principles to equip me to design experience and functionality. On the other hand, having a community to study together, meeting with multiple designers from all around the world is something I was missing. Due to corona restrictions, we are not able to join meetups in person or meet with people face to face. So it was a great opportunity for me to be a part of a community.
Q: Now, after the first half of the course lies behind you, what practical and theoretical learnings did you gain already?
The course is not only about learning UX/UI methods. It encourages you to implement it in your daily activities in your company. I knew most of the methods but was curious about how to decide which one is the best in different use cases. With the help of some of the templates that they have shared with us, I have started to structure my research data in a fruitful way. That helped me to explore how to plan and format goal-focused research, even on very tight timelines. Also, thanks to interactive discussions with the team, we are able to learn from others' experiences. The community encourages us to ask more questions, be more curious, and discover more about real-world examples. It is super helpful to be given exercises to get the ability to identify when to use which design method in which project.
Q: How will you transfer these learnings to your work at TrueNode?
The final goal of the course is to build a project for your organization. We are asked to resolve an organization-specific design issue that we think needs some work. So not only have I been thinking about our potential pitfalls a lot but also invested time and energy to come up with solutions that will enhance our workflow.
I am planning to offer research & project plan templates to the TrueNode team at the end of the course. On the other hand, I really appreciate the peers and colleagues from the course for their knowledge and sharing of sources. Already, we have a collection of resources that I need to read and digest to standardize our design projects. This course also helps me to level up as a designer and take practical decisions based on the data.
Q: Did the course change how you perceive your role as a designer?
I have discovered that communication with other stakeholders in a design project is important. Everybody involved in a project has useful insights, but as a designer, it is my role to guide in the right direction. So I have to emphasize the right message to the right people, find out what lies behind their motivation, and plan accordingly what to do next in a transparent way. Hopefully, my final project regarding research & project plan templates will enable this transparent communication and help me guide groups towards taking the right decisions.
Update: This review is based on our six-week course, Advanced UX Design for the Real World. We have since split this six-week course into more specialized, advanced courses with more classes.
