Student Success Story: Yulee Foster
Looking back before you joined the course at Experience Haus, can you tell us a little bit about what you were up to and what led you to consider a course in Product Design?
I was working in retail at the time and I had always wanted to design but didn’t really know where to start and how to get into it. I was looking for a complete career change really. I then started to look at a number of different courses to do, found the Experience Haus one and signed up!
What made you choose Experience Haus?
I can’t remember exactly how I came across Haus but I think it was just a case of Googling! I also got in touch with someone who did the course and she said she really enjoyed it and told me how to get the most out of it.
Ultimately, what led me to choose it was the fact it was part-time. At that moment I didn’t know for certain that this was what I really wanted to do – I was trying something completely new and didn’t know if it was going to be for me. I wasn’t looking for a full-time course as I was still working and didn’t have the time to dedicate to something like that. The Experience Haus course was a fantastic introduction to everything that I needed to learn to do and gave me the freedom to explore this new thing I wanted to do, without jumping head first into it.
Thinking about your time on the course… What did you want to achieve from your Experience Haus course?
I didn’t know how to go through the different design processes like experience mapping or affinity mapping, or pull projects together so that was something I was looking to get out of the course, and I did! Personally, it would have been hard to learn how to do it all by myself but it was nice to learn whilst working on a real life project at the same time.
What did you enjoy most about the course?
I know everyone probably says it but working on a real life project was definitely one of the most enjoyable things. I also really liked the research side because I had never really done it before. I’d designed my own fun things on the side so I felt confident about that aspect, but I’d never done research before, so going through the whole research project and organising everything into key findings was really fascinating. I learnt the importance research has in forming designs.
What was your one big takeaway from the course?
Following on from the above question, the research side and design processes for sure. I do actually use my PowerPoint presentations that I was given at least once every couple of weeks! Sometimes I think “how do I write a problem statement again,” and I know I could just Google it but there’s something about it being on a presentation and then remembering learning it in class. The presentations were the biggest literal takeaway for me!
