Agoda Design: Mentoring the Next Generation of Behavioral Designers in Thailand

From left: Omo (student), Salie (Agoda), Kate (student), Massimo (TDC) and Jeremy (Agoda)

Agoda Design team is committed to bridging the gap between education and real-life experience, as well as contributing to the design community. In the past, we’d provided talks and mentorship at different events. Since early 2020, we have partnered with Thammasat Design Center (TDC) in Bangkok to not only coach and mentor talented aspiring designers, but also to onboard our future colleagues. We have successfully recruited 3 very talented designers from the program since we started this journey.

Program background

One key skill of UX designers is the ability to think about usability and apply insights from behavioral and motivational science to the design process. That’s why our partnership with TDC is focused on the Behavioral Design and Gamification Design programs led by Massimo Ingegno and Samuel Salzer.

In each batch of the program, we provide a 4-week design challenge for students to take up. Every week has a different theme and focus whilst Agoda Designers provides mentorship and support. The mentorship takes form in regular check-ins and group critique sessions.

Design Challenge

We cater different design challenges to each batch of students based on the course they take at TDC. At the beginning of the challenge, our students will have a clear understanding of the expected outcome. From our past experience, students were able to conduct several pieces of research and user profiling with the goal of understanding the problems they are solving.

Through user interviews, creating personas, and conducting usability tests with design prototypes, each week we see our students forming their design hypotheses stronger and articulate better how to make design decisions that not only benefit the users but also achieve business goals.

While coaching, our designers are learning from the program too. The 4-week experience provided our designers with how to mentor and grow their coaching skills. One key factor is to provide guidance rather than giving solutions. Coming from different backgrounds, our designers have learned to inspire by asking questions and giving feedback.

“It is not easy for the mentee that only has 20 minutes to present their weekly assessment but also challenging for the mentors. We need to quickly provide feedback that they can take action on and improve their work for the next session,” said Jeremy Hsu, Senior Product designer at Agoda.

“It is not easy for the mentee that only has 20 minutes to present their weekly assessment but also challenging for the mentors. We need to quickly provide feedback that they can take action on and improve their work for the next session,” said Jeremy Hsu, Senior Product designer at Agoda.

What our students say

“The mentors from Agoda are extremely helpful and provide constant support and detailed feedback. It helped me broaden my knowledge as a UX designer.”

“This challenge gave me an opportunity to conduct research and validate these insights to motivate users.”

“Discussion opportunity is one of the best benefits when working on any challenges.”

Through this program, the students were able to get a taste of what it’s like working in a fast-paced environment like Agoda as well as working with our designers.

After the Design Challenge

“With full scholarships as the prize on the table, we see our students giving their best effort and thriving on each batch of challenges. As mentioned earlier, this is also a great opportunity for us to find aspiring talents to expand our design team. And after a couple of successful hiring, we continue to mentor them from associate designers and see them grow in Agoda.

As a mentor, I learn more from my mentees every day and the sense of accomplishment and joy when they are promoted to product designer is beyond describable. You can listen to the podcast episode where I talked more about my collaboration with Bantita and how we formed a mentorship program within our design team,” said Rachel Hou, Senior Product Designer at Agoda.

If you’re interested in learning more about our design team, visit agoda.design

About Thammasat Design Center
Thammasat Design Center is a Thailand-based design institution that provides various design-related courses to upskill designers and aspiring designers. Visit their website for more information.