💡 In all three of your classes, we have lots of BHCI and MHCI/MSPM students working together. Can you give some advice on how to prepare for a better teamwork with Graduate Students?

👩‍💻 : Graduate students have a different perspective for classes: undergrads are mostly here for college experience, whereas many Grad have been working for a while. They come here to get more focused skills, better degrees. I would say to give rooms for each other.

👩‍💻  : For undergraduates, they have to know how serious the graduates are on their projects. For graduates, understanding that undergraduate students may have other important events aside from academics, such as the Carnival. Normally, people won’t mind sharing more burden as long as the communication is open.

💡 From your perspective, how is MHCI (Master in Human-Computer Interaction) different from MSPM (Master in Product Management)?

👩‍💻  : There are different backgrounds from MHCI and MSPM. For MHCI, they are software engineers, psychologists, designers, etc., with a more multidisciplinary background. They focus on user experience innovation. MSPM are mostly from software engineering background. They come here to take business classes, and get more business oriented version and design experience.

💡 Given such student diversity at CMU HCII, how can we work in a multidisciplinary team?

👩‍💻 : Be clear on what we can do and what we can learn. Be confident about expressing these to the team mates. Teamwork strategies like pre-mortem and conflict skills we’ve discussed in UCRE (05-410) will be helpful.

💡 As many of incoming student often asked, how is your class Service Design different from Digital Service Innovation?

👩‍💻 : Service Design is about working with an existing client and innovate on that, but Digital Service Innovation is like creating your own start-ups. But both of them are in a different side from UCRE (05-410). UCRE is only methods, but other two apply methods to think bigger, really bring innovation of service.

💡 We know that you have a lot of experience in as a UX Designers and UX Educator. Can you give suggestions on How to apply UX Knowledge into Career Practices?

👩‍💻 : Learn to look from past assumptions and ask questions, make significant innovations.

👩‍💻 : Oftentimes companies will not ask you to do user research. UX designers have to do their guerrilla research themselves. It is the case that UX researcher hand their report to them, but you should be part of that as well.