A blog by Yaqi Li
I was honoured to be able to join Lagom for a three-week mentorship this summer. From the first day I started the mentorship, everyone was so welcoming and it really made me feel like I was a part of the Lagom family.
My mentorship included getting involved in different public sector projects at different stages, with a focus on Discovery and Alpha phase projects. In the meantime, I was given some user research related tasks to do for when I didn’t have meetings.
During the first week, I took my time and learnt about GDS standards and how my colleagues put these standards into practice through proposals and project plans.
In week two, I was offered a chance to talk to everyone working in different positions within the company (eg. delivery manager and service designer) and started to build up a deeper understanding about each role and what was involved in their day-to-day job. These meetings helped me become more certain about my career goal of being a user researcher upon graduating from my master’s programme.
I also gained experience building up the user needs backlog, proto-personas and collecting user feedback through interviews.
In week three, I was offered a chance to get involved in multiple “show and tells” and live sprint interviews. It was amazing to see how the team were working together to present the findings and user needs to the client. Everything was carefully considered and discussed in the show and tell preparation stage.
Looking back on my whole mentorship journey, I have learnt so much during these few weeks by observing and carrying out tasks in different live projects that Lagom was working on.
At the end of this, I would like to thank everyone from Lagom for generously sharing your time and experience with me, in particular, Emma and Adam, for checking-in with me everyday and patiently answering all my questions related to the internship and the whole UX research industry.
