Agoda Design Mentorship
TDC X AGODA Design Challenge
Agoda design team is committed to bridge the gap between education and real-life experience, as well as to contribute to the design community. In the past, we’d provided talks and mentorship in different events. Since early 2020, we have partnered with Thammasat Design Center (TDC) in Bangkok to not only coach and mentor talented aspiring designers, but also to onboard our future colleagues. We have successfully recruited 3 very talented designers from the program since we started this journey.
Program background
One key skill of UX designers is thinking about usability and applying behavioral and motivational science insights into the design process. That’s why our partnership with TDC is focused on the Behavioral Design and Gamification Design programs led by Massimo Ingegno and Samuel Saizer.
In each program batch, we provide a 4-week design challenge for students to take up. Every week has different themes and focuses while Agoda Designers provides mentorship and support. The mentorship takes the form of regular check-ins and group critique sessions.
Design Challenge
We cater different design challenges to each batch of students based on the course they just took from TDC. At the beginning of the challenge, our students will have a clear understanding of the expected outcome. From our past experience, students were able to conduct several pieces of research and user profiling with the goal to understand the problems they are solving.
Through user interviews, creating personas, and conducting usability test with design prototypes, each week we see our students forming their design hypothesis stronger and articulate better on how to make design decisions not only benefits the users but also achieve business goals.
While coaching, our designers are learning from the program too. The 4-week experience provided our designers how to mentor and grow their coaching skills. One key factor is to provide guidance rather than giving solutions. Coming from different backgrounds our designers have learned to inspire from asking questions and giving feedback.
“It is not easy for the mentee that only has 20 minutes to present their weekly assessment but also challenging for the mentors. We need to quickly provide feedback that they can take action on and improve their work for the next session.”
What our students say
“The mentors from Agoda are extremely helpful and provide constant support and detailed feedback. It helped me broaden my knowledge as a UX designer”
“This challenge gave me the opportunity to conduct research and validate these insights to motivate users”
“Discussion opportunity is one of the best benefits when working on any challenges”
Through this program, our students will be able to get a taste of what it’s like working in a fast-paced environment such as Agoda. As well as working with our designers.
After the Design Challenge
With full scholarship as the prize on the table, we see our students giving their best effort and thriving on each batch of challenges. As mentioned earlier, this is also a great opportunity for us to find aspiring talents to expand our design team. After a couple of successful hires, we continue to mentor them from associate designers and see them grow in Agoda.
As a mentor, I learned more than I hoped from my mentee every day, and the sense of accomplishment and joy when they are promoted to product designer is beyond describable. You can listen to the podcast episode where I talked more about my collaboration with Bantita on and how we form a mentorship program within our design team.
