Career Development
Free
Online
Wednesday, 4 June -
Wednesday, 4 June
12
–
1:30
pm
EDT
Outcomes Technical Interview Prep Essentials
About This Workshop Series
The User Experience Design Tech Interview Prep Essentials is our monthly alumni job seeker webinar series designed to offer impactful advice, approaches and practice that empowers you to feel prepared and confident to successfully complete the technical interview employers heavily rely on to assess an applicant's technical skills. These sessions are hands-on practice so participants should be prepared to roll up their sleeves and participate in the challenges and breakout groups delivered in these workshops. It's also an opportunity to meet and network with fellow GA alumni from all over the world.
The Career Services Team is proud to partner with our Instructor team to provide a well rounded experience and motivate grads with relevant content they can use to drive success. This global initiative emphasizes necessary technical skills and focuses on content that leads to getting jobs faster with an emphasis on driving results.
All sessions are FREE and will run via Zoom. Registered attendees will receive the webinar Zoom link, 1-hour prior to the session via email.
All sessions will be recorded and made available along with any materials and decks from the session.
Takeaways
This global initiative emphasizes the GA Career Services experience and focuses on content and best practices to drive results so job seekers feel more confident in performing successfully in the technical interview. These are safe spaces and participants are encouraged to try their best and ask questions in an effort to understand the challenge and how best to approach arriving at a solution.
Preparation
Follow this page to receive emails to upcoming sessions.
Register for each monthly session via the event post so we have an estimated headcount of attendees.
All sessions are FREE and will run via Zoom.
Registered attendees will receive the webinar Zoom link, 1-hour prior to the session via email.
Mark your calendars. It’s important to have these session times blocked on your calendar so you remember to attend and can schedule around them.
Be prepared to work. Participants will work on actual challenges both individually and in groups. These sessions are hands-on workshops so participation is required.
These are safe spaces and judgment-free zones. Participants are encouraged to try their best and ask questions in an effort to understand the challenge and how best to approach arriving at a solution.
Be on time. Sessions start right at the hour. Attendees will be let in from the waiting room by the host. To avoid disruption and to be courteous to other participants it is required to be on time. At their discretion, the host reserves the right to not admit latecomers into a session.
Review recorded sessions. All sessions will be recorded and made available along with any materials and decks from the session within 48 hours of the session completion.
About the Instructor
Nareh Hovhannisian
UXDI Lead Instructor
Nareh is a multi-lingual UX/UI designer with a degree in anthropology and ethnographic research. She uses the fundamentals of UX and human-centered design to ideate, test, create, and perfect user-centered designs and products.
IN CONVERSATION WITH NAREH:
What is your favorite technical skill to work with on your own projects and why?
I absolutely love affinity mapping in order to synthesize and make sense of interview data. It's one of the first technical practices in the UX process and collaboration is not only welcomed but also yields results.
There's something really fun about having a pile of sticky notes and having no idea what you will inevitably learn in one to two hours, by conversing with whomever else you are working (or with yourself) as you try to make sense of, and find trends from the data. Ultimately emerging with hyper-clear insights about users’ experiences, desires, and frustrations.
"But why (does this happen to users)?"
"But why (do users feel this way)?"
"But why (do they prefer X over Y)?" Affinity mapping gets you to the Why!
You have to sit with the discomfort and messiness of data or the messiness of ideas and go through the essential processes to come out of the mess with beautiful, refined insights and clear next steps.
What is your favorite technical skill to teach to students and why?
I love teaching usability testing to students because they often think it is more complicated than it is, so I have them conduct one with me, and convey insights I would have gotten out of the usability test.
I stress that they observe a version of their prototype being used by users and note navigation flaws, placement of buttons, etc. I like to use this moment to remind students about working "cheap and fast," which simply means prioritizing putting ideas in front of users instead of trying to perfect the design on their own, "because it won't be perfect and you will have wasted time when you could have just watched users use it and had an Ah-ha! moment."
I also like to point out that quantitative data here (numbers, such as how many errors occurred, or how many times a particular error occurred) is practically worthless to us if not paired with qualitative data (WHY did that many errors occur at that point? What did the user say? Where did the user's cursor go? Did the user make a noise that insinuated that they were frustrated? What did the user do instead of what you thought they were going to do and why?).
What is most important to you about teaching technical skills at General Assembly?
The absolute most important thing about teaching technical skills is to ensure students understand WHY we conduct each technical skill and their particular value. This comes from asking good questions and grappling with the instruction material critically. For the first project, and for the first few weeks, students will be going through the motions and completing the bullet points of assignments that they are told to complete.
However, they eventually must understand why in the UX process, the information that was uncovered from the last technical skill inspires the current one; why things are done in a particular order, and how that order is subject to change—given what is uncovered while utilizing the methodologies.
The goal is to strengthen their expertise to the point they may even tweak the way a technical skill is conducted based on a particular situation, or even decide that a different approach than the one that I've suggested would be better in that situation.
Sometimes we think of data and research as numbers and facts. In fact, it is a lot more human and nuanced than that. I need my students to get confident enough with their understanding of technical skills so that they gain the courage to be more human about conducting and interpreting the results. This is when the best work and the best designers are produced.
What advice do you have for anyone looking to learn technical skills to reach new career goals?
Don't think that you need to be a different person when you're learning and practicing new technical skills than you are doing whatever else it is that you enjoy doing.
It's a myth that you have to hide or be insecure about who you are in professional settings. In doing that, I promise the quality of your work and learning experience will suffer.
Be yourself. Ask all the questions you have. Be funny if that's your thing. Bring up what this reminds you of from your past job that has nothing to do with UX. See something in this practice that the person next to you doesn't and share it. Design thinking is centered around including as many perspectives as possible to generate optimal experiences. Realize your perspective is valuable! And that sharing your perspective (even if it is confusion about something) is contributing to the quality of everyone's learning experience.
What would you like to highlight about your experience in your technical domain outside of teaching?
I have experience leading creative direction for a range of projects, from helping startups launch MVPs to helping leading industry companies improve their existing products. For the last few years, I have pivoted into taking on more UX researcher roles as I appreciate focusing and delving deeper into uncovering insights about users and leading creative direction.
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