I recently had the pleasure of having dinner with a creative who is a UX consultant at TU Graz and also a professor at FH Joanneum. The sit-down wasn’t based particularly on the field of UX but rather a myriad of other disciplines and life endeavors; however, since meeting with a designer will never end without a good discussion about the intricacies and nuances of the design industry.
I was keen to share my master’s thesis subject and perhaps gain some insights and a fresh perspective on what’s about to come, and since this individual is well versed in working with learning management systems and has been working on one for the past 8 years with TU Graz, although their LMS is university based unlike my thesis topic which is organizations based, but they share the same DNA persay.
I gained a new perspective on many areas in terms of working on an LMS, for example, how to manage knowledge and distribute it within a software pipeline, instill a service that will benefit the organization and create the chance to benefit other organizations as well, through a SaaS package, also in terms of doing the proper research on how to find the right literature and reduce fluff as much as possible, also to always leave room for healthy ambiguity and explore the differences in UX between School LMS and Org LMS and how much those differences impact the product experience.
Additionally, talking about my master’s thesis, which happens to be a project related to my actual work, outloud with a UX professional gives more substance and breathes more life into the whole venture and creates more room for sincere feedback and constructive criticism, as well as having someone that I will get back to for advice whenever I need advisory in my thesis’s process.
Furthermore, the discussion carried on to deeper dives into the relationship between programming patterns and UX UI patterns and how crucial it is becoming crucial for designers to be more knowledgeable about programming patterns.
In conclusion, the sitdown was truly refreshing for me as a person, a traveler and as a designer, and surely for my thesis project, it gave me many insights about the UX market in Graz and Austria as a whole and made me realize again how important networking is and how much it could expand your horizon and potentially create more opprtunities that you never thought of.
