In the summer of 2018, four UX students, Damon Redding, Sarthak Veggalem, Harita Sahedeva, and Joao Araujo were contracted by Hostelworld designers and executives to “analyze and suggest/prototype optimizations for their dynamic property page.”
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Early on my team was plagued with bickering and panic. The obscurity of our project was affecting the team’s morale. In the frustrating moment when we weren't making any progress, I began to facilitate and manage my team. I created plans and suggested processes to ensure that the team's objectives were met. I doubled as a UX Researcher and PM. My team was very diverse, hailing from vastly different countries and relying on vastly different experiences. As the manager, I needed to leverage our backgrounds to generate good ideas. This ultimately meant getting my team to accept their contradictions to design a more inclusive experience.
After the Hostelworld project, I became keenly aware that there were other approaches, thinking styles, and guiding principles out there. I learned to revel in diversity of thought.This project taught me the value of a broad range of perspectives to draw from.
Steve Jobs said it best in a 1996 interview with Gary Wolf:
“A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."