Mentorship as Design: How Guiding Others Shapes Better UX LeadersBy Lasisi Hassan Ishola, UX Research Lead & Mentor

The most important skill a designer needs is empathy. Design goes beyond technical skills and starts outside the computer screen; it begins with understanding the consumer’s plight and how design meets their need. In an age where AI can accomplish nearly anything a designer can in a fraction of the time, empathetic design is the new superpower.

When I began mentoring aspiring UX designers, I noticed a recurring anxiety: everyone wanted their portfolios to look great, few were asking if their stories felt real. They had grids, colours, and case studies, but no heartbeat. I often tell my mentees that a UX portfolio isn’t a catalogue; it’s a reflection of empathy in action. It’s not about what you designed, but how much of your user’s world you were willing to inhabit. One mentee after implementing my advice to understand customers’ pain points before designing, remarked how his subsequent product designs had 14% more conversion over a 3-month period.

Empathy in UX design isn’t just about mapping pain points; it’s about absorbing context. When working on HouseMoni, a digital platform that helps people access affordable home financing, I spent time understanding not just the direct user — the borrower — but the quiet influence of their environment: their families, their sense of pride, their fear of rejection, and the social weight of financial aspiration in Nigerian society. Designing for inclusion, I realized, isn’t about adding features; it’s about removing fear. It’s about making sure the product doesn’t alienate, intimidate, or exhaust the very people it hopes to empower.

This same empathy shaped my work with Iwello, a telemedicine platform focused on health access for Nigeria’s gig workers and low-income earners. When we discovered that a significant percentage of our potential users owned only basic phones — the kind without internet or apps — the question became: how do we design a healthcare experience for users who have no digital interface at all? The solution was to create a USSD-powered system that worked even on basic 10-character phones. This simple solution resulted in 8000 users. Users could dial a simple code and access health consultations, prescriptions, and wellness advice through a text-based flow. It wasn’t flashy, but it was profoundly human. For many users, this was their first experience of healthcare that truly met them where they were. To me, that’s what inclusive design means: not pulling users up to technology but bringing technology down to them.

At Eweko Concept, a project aimed at improving price transparency in local agribusiness, our research led to the development of an AI-powered price-tracking assistant. But even there, the core question was never about the algorithm; it was about trust. How do you design for small-scale farmers who have been historically excluded from data-driven systems? How do you make sure the interface feels like a helping hand, not a machine watching over them? We focused on language — making it conversational, empathetic, and intuitive. We observed how farmers talked about prices, not in percentages or metrics, but in daily realities: “The price of yam jumped from morning to night.” Translating those patterns into product logic made the tool less like software and more like a familiar friend.

Mentorship, to me, is UX in its purest form. Every time I mentor in smaller design learning circles, I’m reminded that guidance isn’t necessarily providing answers but creating safe spaces for discovery. I encourage mentees to embrace the messy middle: to show empathy maps that changed midway, to share user test results that didn’t confirm their assumptions, to highlight the moments they had to pivot. That’s the kind of storytelling that resonates with employers, recruiters, and design teams.
I’ve reviewed countless portfolios that looked beautiful but said nothing about the person behind them. A great portfolio doesn’t just show success; it reveals the designer’s humanity — their ability to navigate uncertainty, adapt, and grow. When mentees share frustration or self-doubt, I remind them that UX design was never meant to be perfect; it was meant to be human. The honest portfolio isn’t one that hides detours; it’s one that shows how the designer walked beside the user through uncertainty.

One of the most rewarding parts of mentorship is witnessing transformation. I’ve seen young designers go from mimicking UI trends to conducting real user interviews, documenting emotional journeys, and asking bigger questions about ethics and accessibility. In those moments, I see the future of UX — not as a race to master tools, but as a commitment to master empathy.

Empathy cannot be automated because it isn’t just cognitive; it’s connective. It lives in how we listen, how we translate emotion into experience, and how we see users as partners, not personas.
Every project I’ve helped shape, from HouseMoni to Iwello and Eweko, to mention a few, has reaffirmed one truth: you cannot design meaningfully for people you do not understand. And you cannot understand people if you are not humble enough to listen. That’s what I tell every mentee who comes to me overwhelmed by the pressure to “stand out” — don’t build portfolios that impress algorithms, build stories that touch humans.

The future of UX will not belong to those who design faster, but to those who feel deeper. It will belong to the designers who remember that behind every data point is a pulse, behind every wireframe is a voice, and behind every portfolio is a person trying to make sense of the world through design. Any designer who is serious about making impact should take mentorship seriously, the guidance and perspective you gain will shape not just your portfolio but your trajectory as a designer.

Lasisi Hassan Ishola
Writes