Jenny@Microsoft

Hello all! My name is Jenny Hu.
I’m currently a rising senior studying Product Design at CMU’s Design School alongside a minor in HCI. I was fortunate to have worked this summer at Microsoft as one of the 21 UX Design Interns pictured above. While our work spanned across many different teams doing a wide variety of work, I was one of the two interns on the Cortana AI&R team. (S.O. to my friend and fellow intern Anna Gusman)
As Juan stated, Microsoft is a *big* company. Working there can easily feel like working in a small city. Unlike companies where you might know or be aware of all the projects, working at Microsoft is more like a constant discovery of new ideas and work. It was, and still is, exciting to think about all the experiences I had this summer. I can’t list them all, but I’ll try to summarize the main areas from my experience below.
Work

Cortana Design
The Cortana Design team is centrally located in Bellevue, WA — less than a 10 minute drive from Microsoft HQ in Redmond, and a 30 minute drive (excluding traffic) from downtown Seattle. The team is a mix of many types of designers, from Voice to Visual Designers, UX/UI, Motion, Prototyping, you name it. Thanks to the unique qualities of Cortana and the Cortana team, I was exposed to a huge variety of Design work going on in this space.
The team isn’t huge, but it isn’t small either. (Perhaps the size of a typical CMU freshman design studio.) The central Bellevue team spanned two large rooms, with a living room in between for daily syncs, meetings, and critiques. Due to the many initiatives and projects, the Living Room was also a space for people to gather, discuss, and hang out. :)
Project Insights
In my time there, I was given one main intern project — I had one manager, and three project mentors. While I can’t share specifics, I found my work heavily focused in research, storytelling, and experience. It indexed heavily on my ability to frame each part of the process as I went through the internship and articulate the reasons and values I derived. It was a project that asked‘how might we humanize technology for the benefit of each user?’
— this was a challenging area to work in for one main reason: it wasn’t starting from a human problem, but rather a technology. By going technology-first, human-second, I struggled first and foremost finding balance between the context of AI-assistant industry work and the context of people’s lives and needs.
I learned a lot this summer, so it’s hard to quickly articulate it all here, but one of the main takeaways in regards to the challenge above is that striking that balance between the needs of people and industry/business is (and will likely always be) a challenge in the field — especially in regards to Emerging Technologies that are making their way into mass manufacturing and adoption. It’s definitely a challenge worth fighting for though, because as these technologies are developed it’s those who bridge the connection of human needs and these technologies that have the power to direct, course-correct, and validate experiences for the future.
Microsoft Design and Internship Culture
While the company is as large as a small city, our Design Intern group was a close-knit group of 21 individuals (comparatively, the whole 2018 intern class at Microsoft was a bit above 2,000 individuals). Alongside that, there were also a handful of unique opportunities to meet designers outside of our team specifically for Design Interns; We had three studio tours for interns to learn more about other studios and their work- as well as two design mingling events to meet designers in other teams. Talking to other designers was encouraged — and Microsoft did well to provide a huge selection of events for interns (design and non-design) to gather, meet, and have fun.
And to CMU Designers: the CMU Design community at Microsoft is larger than you think. It was really exciting to get there and find people who shared the same death-by-lack-of-sleep freshman year. At the very least, I had people I could go to for advice and support when I had questions about other teams, the design community outside of school, the company, and beyond.
Living in Seattle

A small tid-bit on living in Seattle: I thoroughly enjoyed living there. There’s an abundance of pretty much anything — shops, restaurants, coffee spots, hipster book stores- but also mountains, beaches, and most importantly, dogs. It’s a neighborhood centric place — so given the region you live in, your experience could be drastically different.
Thanks for reading to the end, folks! Feel free to reach out if you have questions or curiosities about the internship and the Cortana Design team.
