RoleMentor & Educator, Design and UI Foundations
July 2023 - February 2024
OverviewIn mid 2023, the Attentive Product Design team saw an influx of junior designers from the soon-to-be downsized Strategic Design team. The senior product designers saw an opportunity to “level up” these new people with design knowledge and technical skills, so that their integration would be most effective.
Spearheaded by the VP of Design, I co-created a comprehensive, introductory product design education bootcamp with my team’s Design Manager. We split the instructional course work into our strongest focus areas- mine was visual UI foundations, hers was user experience foundations- and developed a flexible curriculum that adapted to our team’s external time constraints.
The goal was to upskill these eager junior designers with the soft and hard skills of modern product design and instill confidence and capability in them.
ProcessDeveloped from both our firsthand working knowledge of product design and universal, established thought leaders in related fields, the Product Design Immersive gave the junior designers weekly topics to dive into deeply.
Meeting remotely, we had a blast on sharing the weekly lesson, taking in feedback from the participants about what went well and what could be improved, refining the next lesson plan, and giving out homework assignments and additional reading.
A few recaps:
They learned about topics such as performing heuristic evaluations, the design process, conducting and analyzing user interviews, and creating personas.
They ran through exercises like card sorting, prototyping, interviewing techniques, and more in solo mode and in pairs. Each unit of the curriculum built upon the last.
We looped in “guest stars” from User Experience Research and Frontend Engineering to add in their real working viewpoints on the design process and what it is to collaborate with designers in a variety of projects.
(We did explicitly say at the start of the program that this was not a guarantee for increased compensation or advancement.)
The culminating project was to see the designers work as a team on a fictitious product brief for an imaginary travel company’s mobile app.
OutcomeParticipants loved it! Everyone reported high satisfaction and confidence growth, citing the immersive format as both approachable and motivating.
Senior designers established mentorships with new designers, giving us a structured way to guide their professional development.
The final project showcased each designer’s growth in presentation skills, design thinking, and collaboration.
The program strengthened team culture, built shared vocabulary, and reinforced Attentive’s commitment to continuous learning and design excellence.
LearningsMentoring through the Product Design Immersive reminded me how much I value teaching my peers in close 1:1 relationships. I thrive on sharing knowledge about topics I love, so the ability to go deep into the realms of design foundations filled me with inspiration.
I rediscovered my passion for cultivating new talent and telling stories about complex visual design principles in clear and unique ways.
This experience left me with a deep and humble sense of service. I care a lot about the next generation of designers, so my chance to impart some hard-won practical wisdom from my years in the field of design to receptive learners was a big hallmark for me.
True things spoken by my Attentive comrades about me.
“Everything she touches is elevated because of her input, her design thinking, and her design skill and she has a knack for making things better.
She is efficient, organized, detail-oriented, clever and I call her the QUEEN of the joy delivery system. Even if we are talking about something as simple as the PDI schedule or if it is indeed something more detailed like outlining a brainstorming session for one of the steps in the design thinking process, Dom puts together the most "joyful" deliverables. There is always an element of joy with her whether that be her meticulous design files or her silly remarks that always have me chuckling.
She has a sense of magic about her that really makes my experience working with her so fun and so elevated. She takes on things to ensure their precision and accuracy and to uphold the high design standard that is anticipated and expected of our team.”
— Lauren Sherby, Design Manager, Attentive
“Dom and Lauren collaborated to create this course for our team's new Product Designers who had joined from Strategic Design. These classes gave them a foundation in UX and UI design, user research, and design thinking. They put these skills to use in assignments and a final project that was presented to the larger team. The feedback from the participants and design leadership for this course was overwhelmingly positive.”
— Alex Statom, Design Director, Attentive