Exalt Interactive

Girls' Day at Exalt

“It is good to know that there is an industry out there where I can use both humanities and STEM, really.” — E., 15 years old.

This year we’ve joined the annual Girls' Day programme, where we had the opportunity to host a meet-and-greet for 14 enthusiastic young girls. Our company hosted 2 three-hour-long workshops, where the girls could participate in a round table discussion and a fun ideation process on one of our live projects.

We care about the current state and the future prospects of design in our home country. This is the reason why we have launched an incubator mentorship programme (The Exalt Excellence Programme) specifically for young designer talents. We started sourcing for this mentorship programme last year. During our six-month-long intensive incubator, we introduce selected talent to the rigours of product design internships, where they can learn the craft and the soft skills necessary for a UX designer. Our programme aims to respond to a recent designer shortage in the market.

We also wanted to contribute to the dissemination of the UX design profession in Hungary, as UX design is a very recent profession with very high market relevance. Still, it is not well known even among highly educated youth. Therefore, our mentors decided to create an opportunity for young people in secondary schools where they can get introduced to this rapidly growing industry.
We contacted the wonderful organisers of Girls' Day early last year, and our team was very enthusiastic about joining this event.

During our open office hours, we addressed a lot of key questions that even helped us broaden our own perspectives. The girls were curious about a great number of things: the effectiveness of an agile way of work setting, the dilemma on the ratio of designers to programmers, the relevance of user-centred-design and how important it actually is to have a positive dynamic between the staff to execute design sprints on time.

Probably our favourite part of the three-hour workshop was demoing one of our ideation methods. To really showcase a UX design ideation process, we worked with a live project of ours. The ideas that came in were surprisingly creative, so much so that we often saw our designers enthusiastically typing up all that had come up during the workshop.

We're delighted that so many people came to our company's open day and that we were able to showcase a new sort of industry that mends the bridge between IT and humanities to those who were interested. We do hope that the girls went home with as many good and fruitful memories as we did and that we will have the opportunity to hold workshops just like this one in the future as well.

To learn more about the program, please visit https://lanyoknapja.hu/

(The image was taken with the permission of the girls' guardians, and is shared with the organiser.)

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