Meet Our Mentor Experience Team

At Designlab, we prioritize an exceptional mentor experience to ensure the highest quality education for our students. At the heart of this commitment is our dedicated Mentor Experience Team.

The high caliber of mentors we employ has always been a big part of what differentiates us from other UI/UX design educators, and we’re really excited to have a dedicated team to support our diverse, experienced roster.

What Does The Mentor Experience Team Do?

With a core focus on advocating for mentor satisfaction and monitoring mentor quality, this team plays a pivotal role in shaping the Designlab mentorship program.

This team advocates for the mentors in our programs, working to ensure that each mentor is happy and fulfilled in their work with students. primarily focuses on some key areas:

• Advocating for the mentor experience, to ensure our mentors are happy and fulfilled in their work. 
• Monitoring mentor quality, to ensure each mentor—and the learning experience that they foster—mentors are adhering to our high standards.
• Facilitating mentor-student pairing (or re-pairing, when necessary), to ensure both students and mentors are paired in a way that supports the learning experience.
• Planning activities and processes—like growth pathways and our mentor chapters—to ensure we have happy mentors.

Meet the Mentor Experience Team

Crystal Campbell

Crystal is our team lead based in Porto, Portugal. An experienced service designer, her specialization is focussed on driving the end to end mentor journey strategy.

Crystal has held leadership roles in Service Design, Innovation, UX, Strategy, Digital Transformation, and User Research across a wider variety of companies and industries including many big banks, Virgin, Skype, Vodafone, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, as well as various U.K. GOV departments and local councils. She is interested in driving planet-centric design practice and understanding how we can be designers with purpose, leaving a positive impact in our pixels.

Melissa McDougall

Melissa is a part of our Customer Experience team based in Medellín, Colombia. With experience in account management and customer support, her specialization is on mentor-student relations. Together with the rest of the mentor team, she focuses on improving our mentor switch process and effectiveness while simultaneously advocating for students and mentors alike.

Emma Shimmens

Based in the United Kingdom, Emma is an experienced people lead who has supported both the Designlab community and internal team with a variety of different aspects historically, including admissions and marketing, as well as capacity and program management. She thrives off helping people reach their potential and progress in their careers, and now works with the Designlab mentor community on engagement, training, and strategic efforts.

 Hillary Thelin

Hillary is a Customer Experience and Mentorship Specialist based in the United States with a background in customer support and relations, data validation, and procedural management. In addition to answering student and mentor inquiries, she facilitates mentor switches for our students and helps moderate our Mentor Discord channel. Using performance data and open communication, she provides mentors with the support they need to maintain the high quality mentorship Designlab is known for.

Insight & Representation from Top Mentors

One of the most challenging—and rigorous—aspects of the Designlab experience is the portfolio review process for UX Academy students. 

The Mentor Experience team partners with top mentors Darold Davis and Nishant A Bali to offer our mentor community additional support in acing portfolio reviews alongside their students. Both mentors have extensive experience with student portfolios and know exactly what’s required. 

Interested in becoming a mentor?

Our unwavering dedication to mentorship sets us apart from other UI/UX design educators.

If you’re an experienced designer and are interested in becoming a UI/UX design mentor, we encourage you to learn more about the process.