Nerdery UX Apprenticeship
In summer of 2013, I was incredibly excited to be chosen as one of four User Experience Apprentices taken on at The Nerdery. It was their first time running the program, which was started by Fred Beecher.
The apprenticeship was set up so that we could work our way up from observation to oversight in a variety of UX practices. We logged our hours spent working in each area, and gradually became more skilled, and therefore, more hands-on and more billable for the clients. We kept diaries each week, and had workshops run by Fred on many of the topics that we learned about. We even gave a presentation at the end of the program about our experience there that was open to the entire company. Also, we just plain had fun.
Feel free to check out my diary or my skill sheet.
Business Methodologies
The business category encompassed stakeholder interviews, business discovery workshops, feature development/analysis/prioritization, and communicating business discovery findings.
During my time there, I mainly gained experience in communicating business discovery findings, through creating key insights documents based on what we had learned. I also got to sit in on some stakeholder interviews and business discovery workshops. I mostly observed, but I also got to help plan them a bit beforehand, and analyze what we learned when we were done. Finally, I got to help with feature development, analysis, and prioritization on a few projects, after spending some time going through my mentors' research.
User Research
Learning about user research in this program included information on planning and recruiting, remote and in-person user interviews, contextual inquiry, survey design and analysis, research analysis and synthesis, and communicating user research.
I had the opportunity to do a lot of research analysis and synthesis, mostly consisting of watching videos of user testing and taking notes, which were then analyzed. I also got to assist with some remote interviews, and conduct some in-person interviews for an internal project. Within one of our workshops, we practiced contextual inquiry by observing and interviewing some of our coworkers from a different department of the company.
Information Architecture
The overarching theme of information architecture included card sorting and analysis, search log analysis, content strategy, content audits and inventories, and site mapping.
My first week was mostly spent doing content audits, so I feel that I got very familiar with those. Who knew spreadsheets could actually be fun? I also got to observe some site mapping. Unfortunately, I didn't get as much experience with card sorting or search log analysis as I would have liked.
Interaction Design
Interaction design covered the topics of ideation and design workshops, scenarios, storyboarding, and process flows, screen layout and design, interactive prototyping, and prototype testing.
My favorite thing in this category (or maybe even overall) was interactive prototyping. We used Axure to create prototypes with conditional logic and interaction demos, which was really enjoyable. I also really loved process flows, and found that the thought process behind this was a welcome challenge.
Final Thoughts
This apprenticeship really solidified my love of this industry and my resolve to pursue UX as a career. I’ll forever be grateful to Fred, as well as all of the UX employees at The Nerdery for mentoring me!