Test Pilot can never have too many good ideas! That was the original thought behind co-hosting a 12-week course with Tatung University (TTU)’s Department of Media Design in Taiwan. We expected to cultivate new ideas by guiding students through a simplified UX design process, and we did!

Scope of collaboration

In 2017, the Campus Seeding program in Taipei encouraged us to grow our influence in schools, so the Taipei UX team decided to work with TTU’s Professor Chia-yin Yu and Professor Peirong Cheng as our first step to creating a win-win collaboration: students learns new things, Mozilla collects new ideas. After several meetings, we finalized the course information and the modality of cooperation. There were 12 graduate students from diverse backgrounds who were divided into four teams.

Taipei UX team gave three in-class lessons covering our design process, including user research, a design workshop, prototyping, and user testing.

Professors shared relevant knowledge to form a compact program. Students completed assignments in Google Docs so that we could review and give feedback online. At the end of this semester, we asked students to give presentations in the Mozilla Taipei office and invited Firefox UX designers to critique.

The simplified UX design process covered during the course

1st lesson: User Research

For the first lesson, I gave an introduction to the Firefox browser and Test Pilot to help students understand who we are and what we do. Next, Ruby Hsu, our Senior User Researcher, gave a User Research 101 lesson and demonstrated interviews, breaking the research method down into step-by-step exercises. After students practiced several rounds of interviews with each other, the assignment was to put what they learned to use and deliver a report which contained user needs and insights for the next lesson: design workshop.

Ruby demonstrating advanced interview skills

2nd lesson: Design Workshop

Juwei Huang, our Senior User Experience Designer, with support from me, UX designers Tina Hsieh and Tori Chen, prepared a series of brainstorming tools to help students diverge from their reports and converge to concrete design proposals. With students’ research reports posted on the wall, the four of us led each team to practice various brainstorming exercises, including affinity diagramming, How Might We, and 3–12–3 brainstorming.