My internship experience at Kohl’s
Are you here to just see my design-related work and are short on time or on attention span? No worries, here’s a quick link to my Kohl’s portfolio piece that’ll show you my design thinking and process.
If you want to find out more though…
I spent this past summer interning at Kohl’s in Milpitas, California. Now you might be thinking, “Kohl’s? Oh cool! So which store did you work at?”. Actually, I didn’t work at any store. I worked in their technology division called Kohl’s Digital as a UI Engineering Intern on the web team.
As a web dev intern, I worked on a concept project focused on developing new features for the Kohls.com wish list such as reordering items in the list and allowing customers to add comments to items they want. My project resulted in a working prototype, which I built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The app was built with a component-based approach to JavaScript in order to improve modularity and thus, maintainability. I broke down the UI of the app into the following objects: a main list of items, a completed list of items, and item panels. Item panels encompass an item’s information and move between the two lists.
One of the biggest challenges Kohl’s faces from an engineering perspective is becoming smarter in their development practices while at the same time trying not to crumble under the shaky foundation that is their legacy code from over 10 years ago. I think the internet at that time just grew its first chest hair.
But back to the internship in general. It’s important to note that most software engineers sit upstairs on the second floor. I stayed up there only my first week. I’m interested in design, so on my first day I went downstairs to find where the design team sits and see what they do. At Kohl’s, the user experience designers are actually called customer experience (CX) designers. Every day of that first week, I would come downstairs and spend a little more and more time observing how they work and occasionally pick their brains about their process and thinking.
The next week, I moved all my things downstairs to where they sat and even requested a Mac 27" thunderbolt display there! I proceeded to spend all of the next 9 weeks working next to the designers. Spending time with them, getting to know each team member and their stories, and watching how they work made my internship experience. I learned way more from them in a little over two months than if I had read all the design books in the world.
What’s even more exciting was that I got to apply the knowledge and insights I learned from them to an actual project. I worked with a product management intern and an engineering intern on a faster checkout feature in the Kohl’s app. Check it out:
Kohl’s isn’t just all work…
About halfway through the summer internship, Kohl’s was generous enough to take us lowly peons to the headquarters in Milwaukee for a week. There, we got the chance to meet leaders from different parts of the company and learn how they are integrated with one another in order to make Kohl’s function as a whole.
During the trip, we went to the Harley Davidson Museum and also got to see a bunch of music artists at SummerFest, a music festival. I personally went to see Schoolboy Q and Kendrick Lamar with two other interns.
In our last month, we got to see the San Francisco Giants play the Milwaukee Brewers at AT&T Park. Back at the office, we also held a doubles ping pong tournament. Abdul, my teammate for the app checkout project, and I won it all, going undefeated! Ping pong is a pretty big deal at Kohl’s in Milpitas.
Lessons
So what did you learn? Because if you didn’t learn anything, then you just wasted your time. — Jon Russell
Ah, the part you’ve been dying to read and I’ve been dying to write. Just what the hell did I actually learn during my time at Kohl’s? As Jon Russell said above, “If you didn’t learn anything, then you just wasted your time.” Safe to say, I didn’t waste my time.
- I learned how to ask questions. At every touchpoint in the customer’s journey, what is she doing, thinking, and feeling? Asking questions builds empathy and understanding, helping put us in the shoes of the people we’re designing for. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? What is a person’s motivations when they interact with a product and within the larger scenario or context? It goes back to one of my 22 thoughts I had since turning 22 — why we have 2 ears and 1 mouth. As designers, we need to be like dogs and just stfu, listen, and observe. Doing so will lead to asking the right questions, which in turn will help us dive deeper and get to the message of the message, the why behind the why.
- I learned how team dynamics actually work in the real world. Different departments have different agendas and it takes strong communication skills to strike perfect harmony between each team getting what they want without having to sacrifice their values. As a designer, I have to take it upon myself to make the effort to keep every stakeholder on the same page, which means being able to balance and tailor communication between PM, design, and engineering by talking in a way each group understands. For example, translating customer value propositions from a design into what value it brings to the business was a common practice I observed at Kohl’s.
- At the heart of every piece of work is communication. Sometimes communicating with others and getting them on board with your design is harder than actually designing. It’s the art of persuasion, the storytelling that will really sell the design. Behind every product is a story and it needs to be told right. Whenever the CX team needs to present to the business group, they often include actual quotes from customers to help better tell and authenticate the pain points. Who can argue with what the person we’re creating for actually said right? For my own project, we decided to make videos to show the customer experience rather than just tell it. It ended up being more powerful and engaging that way, and it showed on our audience’s faces.
I don’t claim to have mastered any of the above things I’ve listed. I can and will get better at these things, but now knowing what exactly to improve upon is a huge step in the right direction towards becoming a better designer and therefore, better design.
With my internship at an end, I wanna thank all the people that were involved in making this summer such a great and unexpected experience. People don’t normally think of Kohl’s or retail companies for that matter as tech-oriented, or design-centric companies. Kohl’s, though, is purposefully re-inventing itself in that direction and the next few years will definitely be exciting to watch.
From an intern perspective, what made the summer so great was that I got to chase after my own interests. And I succeeded because there were unbelievably amazing people actively supporting me in making that happen.
Big thanks to everyone who made it possible: Jinny Uppal, Mike Gregory, Nitin Mittal, Tarun Agarwal, William Hubbard, the rest of the 2015 interns, and of course, the baller CX design team:
Adam Heller, Andreas Woelk, Andrew Retana, Brett Taylor, Jon Russell, Manny Darden, Rachel Hinman, Tina Quinto, and Zee.
