Silke

This was supposed to be posted a year ago. I forgot to, sorry. But it still feels relevant. So…

I get nervous in front of a crowd. This has been a known fact since seven year old me, stood on a stage, about to sing one moment in time. So what the heck am I doing in front of a group? Why did I volunteer to present something?

Summer/Fall 2020. A programmer colleague of mine joined the UX meeting to ask for help. An internship would not be complete without UX. I felt obligated to offer some help. Here’s another fact, when someone asks for help, I do not speak up directly. But if no one does after a while, I do. But I could have just delegated the task to someone else, right?

Face your fears, that was what I thought. And so, the quest for the perfect presentation began. How about a personas workshop? Nah, that has been done a couple of times, and it does not really cover the whole UX process. So I opted for the Design Thinking Workshop, Ultra Lite.

Why Ultra Lite? Well:

1. It was intended for interns that had little to no UX experience.
2. I only had a max of 5 hours.

Have I already joined a DTW before, you ask? Nope! I have read about it. Have I already joined any workshops that would give me the right to facilitate one? Yeah, well, no.

So I researched. And I found a lot. But Career Foundry’s “How to run a design thinking workshop” was the most helpful. I read through everything, then started preparing. What exactly?

1. An awesome powerpoint presentation (not an apple user, so no keynote)
2. A couple of small projects the interns can work on
3. A Miro team plus 3 boards to collaborate (the internship took place during the beginning of lockdown, so it had to be remote)
4. Some icebreakers
5. OBS studio. I wanted to be seen whilst presenting. I mean with ~11 persons present who knows who’s talking? I felt like a Twitch celebrity because of this.

With all 5 prepared, plus a list of participants I did the DTW. Twice. Why twice? Well this colleague of mine from the Netherlands informed another colleague of mine from Hungary about my plan. And they also had their own interns.

The Presentation:

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The Results:

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I got feedback from the participants, like “The best workshop I have ever had!” and “I never thought workshops for internships could be so fun.” and even “Have you been doing this for a long time now?”.

In the end, I learned that it was actually fun to face your fears. Well only after everything is over. Let us see how I fare when I need to do it again.

😅