UX Guide: Apprenticeship Program

Project Areas:
Mentorship, Goal and Scope Setting, User Interviews, Persona Development, User Testing, Information Architecture, HCI Fundamentals

Then & Now

The UX team established a formal apprenticeship program which enabled internal employees to apply, up-skill, and practice the skills that they learned on a project in their space in which the UX guides helped them to select and scope. For this iteration of the program, I had the privilege to be partnered with Mateusz Kosciuk, who quickly took to the subject matter and developed a passion for UX and human-computer interaction fundamentals.

Today, Mateusz is currently pursuing his formal master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction at my own alma mater at the Indiana University School of Informatics and pivoting into a UX Career.

Approach & Role

I began the apprenticeship by getting to know Mateusz’s goals, motivations, and reasons for entering the program in order to tailor my approach to his personality and desired outcomes. Together we began definition to the project canvas, which was a templated document intended to create critical thought around the goals, scope, milestone, risks, users, activities, and deliverables that would be key features of the apprenticeship experience. After the initial iteration of the project canvas activity, I helped Mateusz to decide about which short-term formal training program he would attend, choosing Human Factors International’s Certified Usability Analyst (CUA) program.

Upon his return from the CUA course, Mateusz had a strong understanding of HCI fundamentals which enabled us to collaborate on a full scope research study and redesign of a chemical safety dashboard application.

Through our experience together in the apprenticeship program, Mateusz found inspiration to pursue a master’s in human-computer interaction, and pivot into UX as a career field.

Exploration & Discovery

Goals
Scope
Milestones
Risks
Tools
Training

Identify Themes & Focus Areas

Lead Design and Execution

Mentorship
User Personas
Usability Testing & Analysis
Progress Reviews
Critical Thinking Challenges

Output

Worked with Mateusz to understand him and his working space while assisting him to select a project of accomplishable scope in which to apply concepts and learnings gained through experiences in the program.

Established Project ‘Canvas’

Used to determine the committed to goals, deliverables, and major milestones of the apprenticeship experience.

Conducted User Interviews

Identified and interviewed a diverse group of both expert and novice users to inform personas and design direction.

Built Personas

Used data collected from interviews to define North Star of core user representation.

“Jeff was and continues to be a great UX mentor. His knowledge and passion of the UX space inspired me to pursue HCI as a full-time career when I saw the potential it has for improving human experiences.”

-Mateusz Kosciuk, UX Apprentice

Team Output

Mateusz worked diligently and effectively to improve the way users consume Chemical Safety data that is located in the Chemhaz application. He was able to work with directly with the ChemHaz team as they worked towards rebuilding the application from the bottom up.

Original Interface

*displaying faux data

On the left is search.

Right is ALL Search Results for reactivity Data.

To get all the search results, you need to click Search without putting in any criteria.

This is a good example of pure feature-based development.

The feature to search for all data is there; however, it is implemented in a confusing way.

Apprenticeship Delivery

*displaying faux data

Users are Domain Experts: Its ok to name columns just by their acronyms due to users being highly knowledgeable in this data.

Don’t need ability to search every column: Limited it to what data is most important to user.

Users create excel tables of this data: Have Separate view where they can export only relevant data.