How a Deep Dive in UX Research Stepped up My Expertise
Fountain Institute alumnus Sara Pattacini tells us how a Fountain Institute course impacted her UX design practice and helped her move into UX Strategy. Sara is a Product Designer at DasLab health, a Berlin-based health startup.
I am not usually a fan of online courses. Either it's too "flat" and hard to grasp, or the effort put in to be "collaborative" is just unfortunately not very nicely done, potentially embarrassing, and ends up being a plain loss of time, money, and energy.
Impactful methods with direct results
I am a senior Product Designer working in the tech industry. I didn’t need a crash course in UX nor another "10 golden practices to follow" online methods. I wanted to up-level my skills and learn something new. Furthermore, I wanted it to be helpful, applicable, and realistic. And I think this was the most powerful aspect of this course for me.
Everything I learned, every exercise I did, was for my company. It directly impacted my daily tasks. I picked an area of research that has been significantly impacting the products I was working on, and I dug into it efficiently and quickly, within six weeks, from start to finish.
An interactive course that really works
The experience of the course itself was quite impressive. It was smooth, very easy to grasp, and to keep focus. Always interactive, but in a way that works, not embarrassing, not this "classroom feeling" where the discussion is one-sided.
It is also time-boxed in a way that it's not too much and nor too little. As this was still 4 hours of the workshop after work every week for six weeks, I wondered if it might be too much if, at some point, I struggled to stay focused, but it didn't happen.
Expert teachers, useful content
Jeff and Hannah are really good teachers and facilitators. They deeply know what they are talking about, and it shows. They managed to keep it always interesting and enticing.
This course was very different from what I have experienced so far, and I gained a lot from it. From my research theme and through all the methods and approaches they taught me, I got powerful insights that will greatly impact the use of the products I am working on.
I strongly recommend it to any UX, UI, or Product Designer who already has strong UX skills but wants to level up their research and problem-framing approach.
