Growing up in my teen years of getting through high school I was one of the students who didn’t enjoy doing team projects because I was always an independent person who was raised to get things solved alone. While I was in high school I decided to take an online course for UI/UX to be able to graduate with a skill. Taking this course was fun but I quickly started to learn how important team work is. I remember the day that the person who was the head of the course named Ty, told me that he could tell that I wasn’t a big group person. He said “in order to have a job you will need to learn to work with others”, after he said that I sat to myself and thought about it and realized that he was right. Looking at his background he was a UI/UX director who had over a decade of experience in Corporate America. After that meeting, we started conducting several meetings a week and he put us in groups.
While in the group I learned how important teamwork really is. Starting off with brainstorming ideas we were all coming up with good ideas that sped up the process. Having a group of 4 people also made it easy to vote out ideas and focus on one great idea. From there we then were able to set assignments for each other and expectations on what we all expected, this was very important because at the end we would have to present the project to Ty, who was the head of the whole course. I must say that in high school I was assigned many different group projects but I would always have lazy partners who didn’t care about the grade. Doing this UI/UX assignment was way better because everyone was patient about what they were doing and wanted to have a role in the project. This was by far the best experience I had ever had with a team of people.
My team was assigned to create UI and UX Frameworks for a gas station with a digital pump screen for the users. Out of all four of us I was the one who was pointed to be the team lead. Ty gave me a list of things to complete along side my partners and spread the work evenly. Out of the list I decided to focus in on the pain points of the users at regular gas pumps. I started out doing real surveys which were sent out to my friends and I had to write these down and come up with ways that we could solve these pain points with the digital pump technology. Being in a group made this great because I was able to get the results and present them to my teammates and see their thoughts on how we could go about solving them. Many of us came up with ideas and many of us were against certain ideas but in the end we figured it out. While during the the biggest challenge for us was narrowing down to on specific Idea. There were so many ideas that people had and the voting would always be tough. We overcame this challenge by spending time looking at the most important parts of a gas pump and looking at the qualitative survey responses. After that, we were able to bring voting back up and everyone explained why they liked an Idea or disliked an Idea. This helped us move forward in the process and complete the task.
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