My first fortnight at Turian Labs

by Tanishi Gola (A 2022 design graduate and associate researcher at Turian Labs)

Have you ever experienced the excitement and panic you get when you receive an email saying that you have one week to shift to a completely new city, in a completely different state, where you won’t even know the local language? Well, that is exactly what I felt when I finally received my confirmation email for my internship and was asked to move to Pune for six months. My parents and I were on top of the world for that entire week. I had finally made it to Turian Labs. Turian Labs is a design research and innovation strategy consulting firm based in Pune, Maharashtra. The company works in numerous domains like UX and CX research, innovation strategy, trend forecasting, and design and business thinking. This means it is the dream place for me.

For the past two years of my life, all I fancied was making my place in the field of UX research. I entered Turian Labs with the same purpose in mind. I want to learn, grow, and find my passion for UX design and research. I want to be a part of something meaningful. I was very nervous throughout the week after the confirmation. I kept thinking about the day I was flying to Pune. But this nervousness did not end there. Even after I had arrived here, I kept feeling the same until the day of my joining. On my first day with Turian Labs, as I was introduced to the team for the first time over a call in the morning, I found myself fitting right in. It felt right. One of the team members had prepared a presentation for us. This is what happens on a typical Monday morning at Turian.

In my first Monday Morning Meeting, we call it MMM and it is a big deal, we had a small activity on the concept of unpopular opinions. We were presented with a few unpopular opinions, and we voiced our stance on them. Everyone was actively participating; so was I. I slowly opened up, and soon enough, I was enjoying the process. I even spoke up on some very unpopular opinions. At Least I was not the only one agreeing to pineapples on pizza. Phew! The nervousness that I felt earlier was completely gone. The MMM presentations are usually a great way to start our week ahead. I gave a short introduction about myself during the morning meeting. I talked about my college, my hobbies, and what I like to do for fun. All the team members kept posting welcome messages in the chat box. I was looking forward to meeting them the next day. It felt like a warm welcome. 

In the office on Tuesday, I was the first one to arrive. I walked in and took a seat near the door. A while later, I was settled at a desk upstairs. As I waited and watched my onboarding videos, people started pouring in. I finally met everyone face-to-face. The curiosity and the anxiety were back now that I was in the office, offline, with everyone around me. I tend to get nervous when I meet people for the first time. But didn’t I just meet the team the previous day? It was still new to me. So, I introduced myself to everyone around and got to know about them. I sat at the same place all day and people kept waving at me as they passed by. Their acknowledgment and their smiles made me feel so comfortable in the office. Later, as conversations unfolded over lunch, I settled into the Turian family.

In the second half of Tuesday, I had meetings with the people in charge about the ‘hows’ and the ‘whys’ of the office. The HR manager and my mentor walked me through everything I needed to know. The work culture at Turian surprised me. The team members were so open and free in their conversations and yet maintained the formality that is expected in a workplace. It surprised me, and it motivated me. I could approach anyone with my queries. I had previously gotten in touch with my mentor via email before officially starting with Turian. So when she came to the office, I was more than excited to meet her! Once she was settled in, I went up to talk to her. I had absolutely no idea how to address her and I took a chance and addressed her as ‘Ma’am’. People chuckled at that and told me to call her by her name. That is the system at Turian. I believe it is a very healthy atmosphere.

Wanting to know more about the work, I emailed a few teammates for a one-on-one meeting. They replied positively within just a couple of hours. I had meetings with the team members over the week and discussed projects with them. They were very friendly and answered all of my questions. That same week, I went through an onboarding process. I got a set of videos to watch. They went over the common practices and terminologies that we often come across as a UX researcher and how we implement them in the projects. So till the end of the first week, I sat with the videos. I made my notes along with them. With over ten pages worth of notes, I gained much knowledge in those five days. Through this process, I realized that I had a long way to go before I could call myself a confident UX designer. And I also realized that Turian Labs will help me gain that confidence in my skills.

For the next week, I got an opportunity to work on my first assignment. I was excited about it. When I received the project brief, I instantly opened the document and went through it. The assignment was the perfect opportunity for putting my knowledge to practical use. For the next seven days, I worked on the research project. I researched, conducted interviews, and synthesized them. I was expected to find participants for my interviews and then analyze the observations I got from them.  I had initially chosen three participants to interview for my project. However, after receiving a strange request from one of them to only interview him after midnight, I had to drop him out of the list. But the other two participants gave me sufficient information to work with. Coming up with the top insights was a challenging task. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I presented my research report to the team at the end of the week. I got such meaningful feedback from everyone present. I then worked on improving my report based on the same.

My experience with Turian Labs can’t be better. It is going perfectly well! The onboarding process has been quite effective for me. I had to rewire my brain to learn a lot of new things. I was exposed to so much new information. Things I believed I knew and were clear to me were reintroduced to me with a fresh perspective. Who knew there were so many more terms related to UX research that I did not know the meaning of yet? The entire two-week onboarding process was easy to follow, yet, it challenged me to explore, work, and make mistakes on the way. I look forward to the upcoming weeks here. There is so much for me to learn and explore in this field. There are so many research processes that I haven’t even tried yet! I hope I can meet the goals that I have set for myself. I know that the Turian team is there to support me for the same. I am looking forward to what’s next!