Student Leadership through UVU's Interaction Design Collaborative

Higher Education Leadership | Mentoring | Organizational Development

Project Overview 

The Interaction Design Collaborative (IXD) is a student-led organization supporting students in Utah Valley University's UX/Interaction Design emphasis. Though the group had existed informally for years, I led it for three-plus years through a period of real transition — from an informal club to an official university organization, through the disruption of COVID-19, and into a sustainable, volunteer-run leadership model.

Project Role and Duration

As club lead, I worked with a rotating team of student volunteers over three-plus years to keep the organization running and growing. Responsibilities included:

• Needs Assessment: Meeting regularly with volunteer leadership to identify the club's strengths and weaknesses and determine what UX and web design students actually needed from the organization.

• Team Recruitment & Mentoring: Recruiting student volunteers into leadership roles and mentoring them through planning and running events.

• Governance Redesign: Transitioning the club from a single-officer model to a volunteer board structure, so operations no longer depended on one person.

• Funding & Resource Management: Navigating the club's shift to official organization status, which meant losing standard club funding, and working with the Digital Media department to secure an alternative funding pathway.

• Programming: Running weekly leadership meetings and a recurring calendar of speaker events, workshops, and community-building activities.

The Challenge

I joined IXD (then an informal club) during a period of thin attendance despite strong programming. When outgoing leadership graduated, the organization faced a real leadership vacuum — no successor and no structure in place, and a thinning attendance. I was asked to take it over, and started by recruiting new student volunteers into leadership roles and working closely with them to figure out what was and wasn't working.

Rebuilding In-Person Participation

When students returned to campus, re-engagement was its own challenge — many were still wary of in-person events. I introduced new formats to rebuild participation, including a design-focused book club (reading titles like Steal Like an Artist and Atomic Habits) and movie nights in the UX Lab. We also learned a simple but important lesson: food consistently drove attendance, so semester mixers built around food became a reliable way to re-engage students. 

Signature Programming

Beyond recovery, I helped build initiatives that gave students real career-relevant experience:

• UXplore: A summer program pairing students with local companies for hands-on Design Sprints — the highest-impact activity we ran, giving students a direct feel for industry work.

• Design Power Hour: A recurring drop-in session where students brought portfolios, homework, or side projects to work on alongside peers.

• Connecting students to industry learning: Promoting professional development opportunities like Adobe MAX to the broader student community.

Succession and Legacy

Before my tenure ended, I prioritized a clean handoff — identifying and preparing a motivated underclassman, to take over leadership, and hosting a well-attended event (20+ students) to build momentum for the organization's next chapter.

Key Takeaways

Leading IXD for three-plus years taught me lessons I carried directly into later leadership work, including project-managing UVU's Digital Media 20th Anniversary Conference — where I applied the lesson of keeping meetings short and focused, learned here the hard way. I also learned that an organization without a secure budget is fragile no matter how strong the grassroots energy behind it, and that sustaining volunteer involvement depends on giving people real ownership and holding them accountable to it. Most of all, this experience reinforced that good leadership is rooted in service — recruiting, inspiring, and adapting to different personality types rather than directing from the top.