Event idea: New product and student/entry-level jams

The problem

In the last few years, I’ve met an increasing number of people who are entering the field of UX feeling disheartened and disillusioned with the process of searching for a job.

The market for juniors is overcrowded, and many companies aren’t looking to hire people with no experience.

At a UX meetup recently, the audience was asked by a new founder to pitch in any ideas of what they thought he could do to improve his product. He had 4 minutes at the end of his talk, and there wasn’t much time or response from the audience.

It got me thinking that there must be a fair few businesses starting up that would like some guidance on making their products or services the best they can be but who might not have the connections or budget to hire an agency or a freelancer.

It made me think it could use the strength of the crowd to give businesses useful recommendations and students and new entrants an opportunity to work on a live project – extremely useful for their portfolios.

How?

Like a hackathon, create a 1-day jam where businesses pitch their businesses, and UX designers spend a day working on their problem. The company must agree to implement the winning ideas in exchange for participating.

Having the business stakeholders in the room would allow the designers to hone their skills in working with stakeholders to extract information, understand blockers, and gain insights from past research, restrictions, etc.

They would, of course, be free to solve the problem however they saw fit.

The designers would pitch their concepts back to the business, and the company would choose one or more to develop.

Important: The business would have to be able to implement something. In the world of work, compared to student days (when the world is your oyster and budgets, timescales, and competing priorities don’t restrict you), it’s a lot more challenging to fix all the things you’d want to.

The business would need to be realistic in what it could achieve, and The student/entry-level designer would get experience on a real-world project for their portfolio.

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