Written by: Qianhui 2022 Cohort
I got a lot from this 2-month project. I was initially only to learn the UX/UI skills, but it exceeded my expectations. I did gain UI/UX experience during the Neesh project, but there was a more crucial impact on me. The collaboration showed me what good teamwork looks like, which gives me confidence for future team projects.
Thinking about the team
Based on my observation and reflection, we are High-performing teams for these main reasons.
Clear role assignment. At the beginning of the project, we assigned roles based on each person’s background and willingness. Each position had its scope of work, which helped us to develop a clear plan for each project process, and then each person followed the method to go deeper and deeper in their area of responsibility. In addition, this helped us to reduce the “free riding” behaviour because the leader could check the members’ contributions at each projected point, which I call accountability, and everyone ended up delivering high output.
Balanced skills. None of us has excellent technical or social skills, but each has a relatively flat skillset. For example, Ty has good communication skills and strong logic. At the same time, Han is good at art and logical thinking, so the two collaborated well as researchers and eventually got a “1+1>2” result. At the same time, Han also gave us some suggestions on the colour and style of the UI design. I was also able to provide my advice for her questionnaire. Although everyone had different responsibilities, the balanced skills allowed us to be involved in all parts of the project process instead of working alone.
Diverse culture. Diversity in culture, knowledge, and perspectives can help teams be more creative and avoid groupthink. This advantage is even more apparent when it comes to MDM. By contrast, people unconsciously choose similar problem-solving approaches if a team is from the same culture. For example, in Chinese culture, people tend to tolerate team conflicts rather than communicate with each other in person. This can either end up burying their heads in the sand and barely accomplishing the goal or building up the conflict and eventually exploding. All of these can be highly destructive to teamwork. Our group members come from different cultures and have different problem-solving styles. When we encounter a conflict, such as dissatisfaction with a task assignment, we prefer to speak openly and ask each person’s opinion. This has helped us resolve the disputes, and no one felt offended.
Timely feedback. Chinese people tend to work hard and prefer to avoid mentioning their contributions. We discussed this in our group. So, we all agreed to report our results in the project group for every small job we completed, and the group members would give feedback and suggest improvement simultaneously. Once I needed to finish prototype animations, but this was the first time I had done it. So, after a day of self-study on YouTube, I spent a few hours making them. I was worried if they were good enough, but I got immediate compliments from the team and also tips on improving the work. This experience motivated me even more to improve our prototype. This team fully respected me.
Thinking about myself
My background is in architectural design, so my skill tree oriented toward 3D design, problem analysis, and research ability. Research should be a more matching role for me. But I wanted to learn some UI/UX skills, so I decided to be a UI/UX designer for this project. I was involved in the whole UX process and finished the UI design of part of the prototype. It was challenging for me. But the good thing is that there are many resources on YouTube, and my group members actively encouraged me, so it was an exciting and fast learning process.
However, there is still something I could have done better.
Being punctual. I was so nervous the day before my final presentation that I didn’t sleep well at night, so I woke up late the next day. I started to prepare for the presentation in a hurry and ended up being unfortunately late. This was actually due to the need for adequate preparation in advance. If I had finished preparing for the presentation 2-3 days earlier, I might have been more relaxed, which would not lead to consequences later.
Being better at English. We need to familiarize ourselves with the jargon terms used in workplace scenarios. For example, about the term “stacking system,” some said “folding system,” while others said “fold up function” or “put them together,” and actually, we mentioned the same thing. The different words caused much confusion among the group members. In addition, expressing requirements in English still needed to be solved. We often had repetitive discussions because we needed help understanding each other’s meanings. And this reduced our efficiency in teamwork.
Overall, the Neesh project has brought me UIUX experience and teamwork skills. This would be a good start.