Participating as an Industry Partner will bring new perspectives to your current product development process. If you are new to the world of UX design, you will have the opportunity to collaborate and experience what it’s like to have a designer on the team. The discovery artifacts and the MVP prototype you end up with will be a great resource for you and your team to build upon or iterate from as your product evolves over time.

If you already have a design team, this is a great chance to bring in a fresh set of eyes, who is bias free towards your product and eager to make a positive impact. This collaboration may also highlight opportunities to improve your current workflows.

Industry partners should expect students to approach the work first from a research perspective, where students gather information, current workflows, proposed use cases, and friction points from prospective end users of the new software designs. Students will synthesize and translate these data into software design recommendations in the form of wireframes that lay out the information architecture and ideas for interaction design. In the final week, students will prepare and submit high fidelity design work in the form of a prototype that looks and feels like a real application. This prototype will be design-only in order to convey the user experience. No development code will be created and no data will be stored or transferred in the prototype. Product management students will guide the vision, strategy, and business considerations of the projects to ensure the students are bringing value to you and your users.

Students will have scope to create an MVP’s user journey. Industry partners should not expect students to provide a completed design specification for an entire application that can proceed directly to development. Instead, partners should expect that students will think deeply about the problem or opportunity presented and generate creative design solutions that leverage UX and product management best practices.