3 ideas to further your UX mentoring

Throughout my career working as a UX/Product Designer and volunteering at design and tech communities, I have been fortunate to come across a subject I came to care about as much as UX Design itself — the responsibility of mentoring others in design.

What I enjoy about mentoring is that it’s a two-way street. Mentees can learn lots of new techniques and ideas from those who have more field experience, but also as mentors you can also get new opportunities for your own growth too such as better communication skills, newfound confidence in yourself, new design trends for your own work, and much more.

After a few years offering mentoring designers in a local UX meetup and online internationally via ADPList, I thought I would share 3 key learnings in my experience that could be helpful for aspiring design mentors out there.

Be patient. Growth takes time

Every mentee you meet learns at a different pace. Sometimes, it takes longer to build someone’s understanding and confidence if it is the first time picking up a new skill and applying it. Particularly for a subject that can be open ended like UX Design.

Keep patient all the way and avoid applying pressure on people to perform fast and perfectly immediately. In the long run, having a good depth and understanding of a technique or case study you’re helping a mentee with will give them better confidence in their abilities to perform and help create an even better open environment between the two of you.

Establishing that safe environment is key so that the mentee you’re working with can be honest and open on where they need help rather than bottling away questions due to fear of judgment on their design abilities.

Ask “Why/What” questions first. Not give solutions

As designers, we’re all wired to come up with solutions. But when you create solutions for a mentee, you’re not teaching them how to become better designers. You’re just making them better followers to other persons ideas than teaching them how to think for themselves.

To help avoid this, I tend to try to ask open-ended discussion questions to mentees to understand their design rationale and context before offering any guidance to their work that may not even need changing.

Examples of how I tend to phrase my questions when mentoring include:

• “What made you decide to use technique <X> for your research?”
• “What was the reasoning behind doing <Y> in this UI component here?”
• “Have you considered trying <Z> when you get to the user testing stage?”

By understanding someone’s rationale first rather than firing off solutions right away, it helps keep discussions focused on the areas that do need changing rather than going off track and suggesting changes to areas that may not need fixing up.

Remember, it’s about helping to improve their work and not turning all their efforts into your own vision.

Provide clear action items for next steps

When having a mentor-to-mentee session, a lot of things are usually discussed and it can be hard to track what the key recommendations or next steps are for everyone.

To help reduce the ambiguity on what next steps are, I like to provide a google doc or notion page where I list out the following:

• What I would recommend from what we discussed
• Relevant images of where the feedback applies
• Resources we referenced like articles, videos, etc that may also help further their learning
• Next meeting dates if applicable

By providing a tangible resource, it helps both mentor and mentee keep track of what was discussed rather than leaving both sides unclear about what to do next and reduce time wasted trying to remember what was last discussed when future conversations happen together.

Conclusion:

Mentoring is a skill that’s taught me a lot both personally and professionally. While I didn’t originally set out to be a mentor in UX, I can definitely say it’s an awesome skill to have that can further your own career growth and help you create an impact on others beyond a 9–5 job.

Thank you for reading and I hope these ideas from my experiences can help upcoming design mentors.