The Before, During & After in UX design

20 Aug

This summer I joined a startup company’s design team for a summer internship. On my first day I already felt like I’ve been working with the team for a long time. It was a very energetic working space, and everybody was very involved in their respective role. I quickly caught up to their pace and started learning more about the product, which is a tool for educational purpose across both mobile and desktop platforms.

I had two supervisors–Head of Product and Director of Design, both sync with me regularly and assign me tasks to do. I learnt about the structure of the company- product, design, development, operations, market, etc. I dealt with product and design mainly, but everyone sits in the same open space area, so you can stand up and walk to anyone you want to talk to, kinda like in a classroom. Product and design are seated closely, communication is done via both in person and virtually.

On my first day I was given the task to review the current version of mobile product and familiarize myself with the documentations. My first roadblock was vocabulary: I had only been learning UX so far in English, that all my professional vocabulary is in English. Even though I speak Chinese from the second I was born (not really, maybe a year later), I was struggling finding the right word to basically say the same thing. Luckily the company gave me a little notebook, I dedicated one page specifically for note taking of the work vocabulary, it worked.

At the end of the first week I was already enjoying gong to work every day. The freedom given to me was huge: I was assigned to different small task groups simultaneous to work on multiple features, which covered from copywrite to UI to interaction design. I was so happy! My favorite part is working on the interaction design parts.

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