Classes 2 Careers is a case study conducted in TWC 544 User Experience with Professor Andrew Mara. The goal of this semester-long project was to identify a problem or topic we wanted to investigate further regarding the transition from “class to career” for User Experience students at Arizona State University. Alongside classmates Maica Avila, Katelyn Dang, Poorva Ketkar, Erin Mishark, and Atharva Nikam, we decided to narrow in on the job application process, in hope of identifying key problems in the experience that we can improve in the later half of the semester. After the research is completed as a team, we break apart to create individual solutions for the problems we identified in our two research methodologies.

The significance of this project stands true most in my growth as a collaborative worker, listener, and leader, but also through the sheer scale of Classes 2 Careers. Looking back on the semester as a whole, the project had integration of the UX design process, analysis and reporting on user research (including supporting documents based on data), initial sketches, and final high-fidelity interfaces. This project provided insight on every stage of the design cycle, and allowed us as students to better understand the needs of this cycle as a whole.

To reflect on my own individual performance in this class: I played a role of writing, content organization and ideation during the collaborative tasks of this class (especially including the research plan and research findings report). Much of the time spent in team environments was for brainstorming, planning, and outlining who would need to do each task and what the deadline would be. Once me moved to individually completed tasks, I took on both a mentoring role for various classmates, as well as the role of a student and listener. Multiple times throughout the later half of the semester, classmates would message me asking for advice and suggestions regarding their work-in-progress designs; alongside this, I would frequently reach out to the same classmates bouncing my ideas off of their perspectives.

Overall, Classes 2 Careers taught me the value of collaboration, and offered irreplaceable experience in every stage of the design cycle.