9 ways we help our designers to improve themselves

If you ask someone in our team if he/she is a good designer, the answer will probably be "I want to be a good one". Not because they are not good enough (honestly, they are the best I know), but because learning and continuous professional and personal development is in the core of our DNA. No one wants to settle, everyone wants to take the next step forward. Here are 9 things we do to help our team evolve.

Education event every second week

We have an education event in every second Friday morning. We usually invite someone from other companies to speak or one of us teaches something for the rest of the crew. We had speakers from Lisbon and Tallin too. The team suggest interesting topics. We usually have different topics for designers and researchers.

How-we-work meetings

We have a self-organizing team, working in the Studio Model, so we have weekly how-we-work meetings. This time everyone can suggest problems and tensions we have to solve. In many cases these are organizational or management issues, but sometimes professional questions pop up too.

The purpose of this meeting is to enhance our processes together, so we talk about our design process and methods many times. While education events is for learning new things, how-we-work is for making sure we will use the best-practices we learned.

Creative breakfast

On Wednesday mornings we eat together and sketch together. The common breakfast is always fun, and after eating, we take an hour to brainstorm on one specific design problem together. Anyone can suggest a topic. If you get stuck with something in your project you will get help from the whole team. You can learn a lot by seeing other people's ideas. And it can save your ass sometimes.

Peer review and a lot of feedback

In our team every designer has a pair and they review each other's work frequently. As a designer it is essential to get as much feedback as you can. So we make sure our designers get feedback from 3 different sources every week: from their designer pair, from the business and dev lead of the project (aka our clients), and from researchers. Oh, have I mentioned it? We have a serious research team.

Research and feedback from real end-users

Full time psychologists are working in our team as UX researchers. They test every single piece of design we do with real people from the target group. Our clients can't opt-out from research, we always delegate a researcher for every project we do.

We do usability tests, field research, ethnographic interviews, card sorting, A/B tests, fake-door testing, evaluate analytics and several other techniques, to make sure we design something real people want and love. We iterate fast, so when you design something you got feedback from research in a few days. By the time we finish the design, it has gone through many iterations and many people tried it.

Lab projects

We have lab projects, when we are not working for clients, but pursuit our own ideas. Lab projects are perfect to try out new things. And its even better that you can do it in work time. We usually learn so much from them.

We have our own design course

In every semester we have a design course. We teach designers our lean UX process. During the course they design an app with the new method. The best part is usually the research day, when they test and modify their prototypes based on the user tests they do with real people. (No show it to your class-mates bullshit...).

Every new team mate at our UX company has to do our design course. It's our common ground. And of course after the course every newbie gets a mentor, who helps you to implement what you learned.

Designer exchange

Our new experiment is designer exchange. We invite foreign senior designers to spend a month with us and work together. This is a unique opportunity for them to travel, learn and get a new perspective. And a good opportunity for us to learn from them.

We are part of the UX community

We try to give back as much as we can to the design community here in Budapest. We were the sponsor of the Budapest Service Design Jam, where our designers also played a mentoring role. And we also sponsored the largest UX design conference in Baudapest, the Amuse Conf. Our whole team went to the event, we even had a booth. It was really cool to meet with so many interesting people from around the world.

We do a lot every day to make UX studio the best place, where you can develop your skills.

We consult companies building amazing products every day. Reach out to us if you need help with product problems.