Teaching as a path to become a better designer.

Mentoring UX/UI students at CareerFoundry expanded my understanding of design, and taught me how to present it.

Mentoring as a second education

For four years I mentored UX/UI students at CareerFoundry. A bootcamp is no replacement for a university education, and I never treated it as one. It gives you a starting point, and what students built on top of it depended on the work they put in. Most of them were changing careers, and many had never opened a design tool before. Each one brought a different background and a different way of thinking, and every session made me explain decisions I had been making on instinct for years.

Teaching design is the fastest way to find out what you really know about it.

First, the fundamentals

The first months with every student were about the basics: hierarchy, contrast, spacing, consistency, and the principles of interaction like feedback, affordance and how people move through a flow. Concepts I took for granted had to be explained from zero. "Don't make me think" and "The design of everyday things" were the first reading recommendations.

Watching students work with these ideas showed me things I had stopped seeing. A student would apply a rule perfectly and still end up with a screen that didn’t work, or break a rule and find a better solution. Seeing where they got stuck, and why, made me understand the concepts better myself. I learned the difference between knowing a principle and understanding why it exists.

You only understand a concept when you see someone else use it in a way you didn’t expect.

The deliverables that make a difference

As students moved from exercises to real projects, the questions changed. They wanted to know what to produce, and how much of it. Answering that again and again made me much clearer about which deliverables actually move a project forward: the research that changes a decision, the wireframe that settles an argument, the final UI that proves the idea works.

The rest is documentation. It has its place, but it doesn’t carry a project on its own.

A deliverable is valuable when it changes a decision, not when it checks a to-do list.

Leading through guidance

As a mentor, I never designed the students’ projects. The work was theirs, and my role was to review it, ask the right questions and point them in a direction without taking the pen. When a screen wasn’t working, the useful thing was not to fix it, but to help them see why it wasn’t working.

Managing the work of many students at once prepared me to manage other designers. I learned to give feedback that people can act on, to adapt it to each person, and to keep the quality of the work high without doing it myself. It taught me to guide design through leadership rather than execution.

Leading design means helping others make the right decisions, not making every decision yourself.

The first portfolio

Towards the end of the course, most of my work with students moved to their first portfolios. A portfolio is often the only thing a recruiter sees before deciding whether to talk to you, and most first attempts showed every step of the process with the same weight.

I advised students on what information mattered and what could go, and on how to design a project presentation that is meaningful to show their work and valuable for recruiters. The goal was a page someone could skim in a minute and still understand the problem, the decisions and the outcome.

A portfolio is not a record of everything you did. It is the story of why it mattered.

A system built on the story arc and the 4Ds

To make this repeatable, I developed a system for portfolio presentation based on two structures. The first is the story arc: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. The second is the 4Ds of the design process: discover, design, develop and deploy.

Laid over each other, the two line up. Discovery sets the scene. Wireframes in the design phase are where the tension builds. The final UI is the climax, the moment the project pays off. UI variations in deploy bring the story to its resolution.

With this, students stopped listing steps and started telling a story, giving the most space to the moment their work changed the project.

When the process follows a story, recruiters remember the work.

Once students, now coworkers

During this period I mentored over 30 students, and I’m proud to say that many of them are now coworkers in the same industry. Some still write to me years later.

Teaching made me a better designer

Mentoring gave me a clearer view of my own practice. Having to justify every piece of advice kept my focus on the deliverables that make a difference, and helping students present their work taught me how to present mine.

Every student I helped tell their story made me better at telling my own.