Behind the Screens: mentoring eight student UX teams

The interface design studio runs a single project across the whole term. Each team picks a real problem, researches it, and carries one concept all the way to a prototype that has been in front of users twice. My job was the loop in between: I ran the critique, sat in on the testing, and kept eight teams moving at roughly the same pace without designing anything for them.

The work below is the students’. Every tile links to the team’s own project site, credited by name.

Coaching eight teams through the same cycle, back to back, showed me my own process from the outside. Watching a team’s second usability round go smoothly after a rough first one, once the critique had actually landed, was the clearest signal I had that the coaching was doing as much work as the prototype itself.