More than nine months out from my latest post, I have a confession to make: The heaviness of last year’s events have kept me from being able to dedicate any mental energy to updating this blog.
I realize that there isn’t a teacher or boss sternly tapping their foot at me for neglecting to post here, but I must admit that this blog used to be fun for me to update. This blog was my place to reflect on failures and successes in my growing career–to keep track of my professional growth in real time.
As vaccinations rise and COVID infections fall, I’d like to get back to posting here more regularly, starting with this professional update post. While it has been an emotional roller-coaster of a year, within my career, I feel fortunate to report that I have had more highs than lows.
As I’ve discussed previously, I work as a UX/UI Designer within the IT division at Northeastern University. Working in IT at a university during a global pandemic has been interesting and challenging to say the least. My colleagues and I were tasked with working together on a dime to ensure all colleges and departments of the university could quickly transition to remote-operations.
To aid in this effort, I helped last spring to sitemap, wireframe, design, build, and launch Northeastern University’s Digital Resilience site within a matter of days. The site provided community members with the technology information and resources needed to quickly transition to fully-remote teaching, learning, and business operations.
In addition, with thousands of Huskies working, teaching, and learning off-campus for the first time, my Get Secure cybersecurity thesis project site was officially launched to ensure community members had the information needed to stay safe and secure from home.
The pandemic also forced me to rethink my UX purpose within the university as a whole. With so much burnout, fear, sadness, and frustration impacting our community that had suddenly become so reliant on technology to learn and work, I began to think more seriously about the way in which improving user-experiences could be seen as a moral imperative.
As COVID turned our lives upside down, many Northeastern community members struggled personally with a newfound lack of childcare, loss of employment within their households, isolation and loneliness, illness, and even death of loved ones.
Given these uniquely intense pressures, I felt (and still feel) strongly that our organization should be doing anything within our power to ensure we’re not adding to the stress that university community members are already facing.
Thankfully, this is a sentiment that leaders within my organization agreed with, and they provided me with the incredible opportunity to build and lead a UX student program designed to tackle this issue.
The Digital Experience Program
The Digital Experience program began last summer with a total of 5 students and has quickly grown to a team of 20, all of whom report to me. Their ultimate goal is to help Northeastern’s IT division to be more successful in serving the university community, particularly its student population. My team members come from a range of colleges and stages of their Northeastern journeys, from freshman to soon-to-be alumni grad students.
Main Idea 1: Students act as user-research participants, providing their perspectives and advocating for a more streamlined and user-friendly learning experience for themselves and their Husky peers.
This program gives students the opportunity to be advocates for the student community, and have a voice in shaping the digital products that they’re using and the customer experiences that they’re participating in everyday. Student team members are asked weekly to participate in feedback sessions with stakeholders from across the organization to provide their perspectives and help shape the direction of IT platforms and services.
Main Idea 2: Students are paired with mentors within the organization according to their interests and gain guidance and hands-on experience
This program also acts as an apprenticeship for Northeastern students with an interest in IT to attain instruction on and hands-on experience with the guidance of a professional mentor with expertise in their area of interest. Each student focuses on either UX research, Information Architecture, UI Design, Digital Accessibility, or Front-End Development during their employment cycle, which is roughly the duration of a semester.
Thus, in addition to being user-research participants, these students are able to practice, in a guided manner, being UX researchers, UI designers, Information Architects, Digital Accessibility Specialists, and Front-End Developers, and leverage their student perspectives to help shape IT projects they’re assigned to help with.
Next Steps for the Digital Experience Program
You may be able to tell that I am quite passionate about the student team that I have been working so hard to develop. While this program operates specifically within the realm of Northeastern University’s Information Technology Services, I think its fundamental idea can easily be translated to higher education as a whole. The guiding principle of the program is really simple:
Every decision made within an institution that will impact students should be made with student perspectives taken into account.
Within any college, department, or division at any university, a small, diverse group of student employees can be counted on to hustle to learn and grow professionally as well as help out with completing deliverables. I believe that leveraging that group to also consistently share their thoughts on what they need and want from their university experience and then acting on that feedback is the lightning in a bottle approach that can be utilized to power our success as an institution.
An institution that acts in-sync with the needs of its community is a successful one.
An institution that acts in-sync with the needs of its community is an innovative one.
An institution that acts in-sync with the needs of its community is a powerful one.
For now, IT is the Digital Experience program’s home, and I’ve been doing what I can to advertise its promise to my colleagues. While presenting to my organization earlier this year, I closed with some thoughts on the importance of gathering community feedback, saving my favorite reason for last…
The more user-centric our platforms and services are, the more our community members can focus on learning and contributing to Northeastern’s mission, and doing the work that makes the university go.
- Conducting cutting-edge research
- Preparing lesson plans to educate the next generation
- Planning student organization activities
- Helping to build vaccine distribution centers
- and much more!
To me, that’s what this is all about.
