You’re new to the field so you can’t become a design mentor? There’s no such thing as you can or can’t. Mentoring is duo-way learning for both design mentors and mentees. It helps sharpen our design skills, and develop a relationship with our design colleagues for a long-time growth.
I mentored four designers in the past two years as a junior UX designer. During summer and winter school breaks, we have design interns join the team and help us out on projects. All interns I worked with turn into my friends, and their fresh perspectives on things continuously inspire me to stay curious and maintain an open heart for new ideas.
I didn’t go through any training before I started design mentoring, and I wasn’t conscious of what “design mentorship” means until my interns came to me and asked for LinkedIn recommendation letters.
Am I qualified to be a good design mentor? I asked myself many times. I’m new to the field as well. I don’t have years of experience to share or coach anyone. What if I offer some misleading advice that deviates them from their careers?
A voice appeased my self-doubt: Shan, you love everything about design. You can offer what you have learned from design schools and your work. Your best design practices may or may not be helpful for your mentees but let them decide. Design mentoring is not babysitting. Filtering different voices and growing from the valid inputs is a career-long learning process for every designer.
So I set my self-doubts aside and started helping my design interns onboard and ramp up on their design assignments. Here is a list of things I learned throughout my mentoring:
1. Create an alliance
The top challenge I encountered was to create consensus with my mentees on the design process. Every designer has a different way of solving problems creatively, and that’s what makes each designer unique as an individual contributor. However, when it comes to highly collaborative projects, a shared understanding of what the design process is will make ideas flow better and strengthen cross-functional communications. For example, product managers may ask about the design thinking process behind mockups and expect to see usability testing results that validate the designs to improve business metrics. Engineers may want to know how design deliverables are structured and delivered so they can accurately estimate development time on new product features.
Since most of my mentees don’t have experience delivering designs to engineers in development circles, they came to me and asked: “Shan, how do you deliver this design story to developers?” I offered a detailed walk-through of the structure of design deliverables and explained why the structure is efficient for this project. Setting up an alliance starting from early collaborations made it much easier to scale up our design impact as a whole team, not just as scattered individual contributors.
2. Ask “What do you think?”
Communications are not just top-down from a design mentor to a mentee. If you think you are the boss to give one-way advice and make every design decision, you’ll lose talented designers. Whenever my mentees asked for my input on design explorations, when I gave my opinion, I also asked them: “What do you think?”
Some designers would agree with me by saying something like “I like Design B too.” Then I would ask “Why do you think design B is better than Design A/C or D?”. Sometimes, it’s not Design A/C or D looks better than Design B, but considering other things like design consistency, technical feasibility, or accessibility, Design B could defeat other options. By engaging mentees in these conversations, they could improve design thinking and interpersonal communication skills that will lead them to become more professional product designers. Reversely, as design mentors, we learn what the strengths that our design mentees have so we can configure a personalized growth path for each mentee.
3. Ask “Can you do a round of design QA?”
Most design interns only stay in the team for a couple of months, so they might not follow up with the project from end to end. In this case, their learning process could become incomplete because they may miss out on the product knowledge that comes afterward. Is the implementation correctly matching design specs? How do users use these features? What do they say? A design game is not marked over by submitting final designs. It is extensive by collecting user feedback and analyzing usage metrics after the implementation of new features.
I always ask my design mentees to own the areas they designed, and perform a round of design QA after the feature implementation. They get to know more about the gap between development and design mockups. Also, they will learn what does work and what doesn’t work for the actual users. This retrospective learning method works great for me as I first started designing products and I see it also benefits my design mentees. Plus, when you create something, and it gets implemented, you’re naturally curious about what other people think. All in all, it’s about assigning ownership and let it drive a complete learning process.
Closing thoughts
There are many resources out there helping us to become great design mentors. As far as I understand, a great design mentor is committed to supporting someone’s growth and success unconditionally. It’s less related to your title or your job responsibilities, but more tied up to your motivation to help others learn and grow. When I went to designer mentor nights as a mentee, I always appreciated the words from other designers that inspired me to get better. And I’m hoping to share this vibe with anyone who is passionate about design and wants to develop a career around it. If you have any thoughts to share, please don’t hesitate to put them down here! 😃
