Designing to Accelerate innovation- Product design internship at HackerRank
How it began
Intro timeeee! I studied Biomedical engineering in college. It didn’t take long to realise it just wasn’t for me. Fortunately, I developed an avid interest in design. It felt like a true calling 😜
I was looking for opportunities off-campus one summer. I applied to HackerRank on a whim, unsure as to whether I’d get the internship or not. They were a team of 5 members and didn’t take on design interns very often.
Luckily enough, my profile was referred and chosen to be reviewed by the CTO and Co-Founder of HackerRank, Harishankaran K. The stars aligned so perfectly that it’s almost magical when I look back.
Interview process
Since HackerRank is a fully web-based product, round one of the interviews was with Hari, who put me to test to see if I had sufficient Web design work in my portfolio. After he patiently listened to my projects and processes, I waited to hear back.
This was when Vaasavi Suncol from the People Ops team reached out to me and advanced me to the next round.
Round two was a detailed 1-hour Design interview with Melissae Elhajj, Senior Product Designer on the team. The interview was a fantastic opportunity to explain the design decisions and the reasoning behind them all.
Virtual Onboarding
Granted, this was my first online internship but the fact remains that I anticipated a lot of hiccups along the way. However, the onboarding was super seamless. Every event was planned in a strict timely manner without overwhelming the interns.
Culture and people
Being an intern at HackerRank is all about experiencing the fantastic work culture. From having fun challenges to win against Hari to participating in meetings where your voice is just as important as any, it was an adventure from day one.
HackerRank constantly looks for new perspectives in all matters and that’s exactly how you’ll be seen, the intern who has all fresh ideas. There’s no strict hierarchy here and everyone is very easily approachable, no matter what title they hold.
Meet the Design Fam
It can be a tough burden as an intern to attempt to absorb everything about the organisation. Although, I have these people to thank, for easing me in and making me super welcome in the team: Komal Agarwal, Siddharth Simharaju, Raghavendra, Dmitry Nebeduhin, Melissae Elhajj ❤️
Adding to the culture, let me introduce you to some of my favourite moments during my internship at HackerRank.
1. Celebrating a successful Q3, 2021
Following a very successful Q3 at HackerRank, Hari posted a fantastic celebration video, and we interns celebrated a whole lot better (This was back when Stay- Justin Bieber was new and cool).
2. Interns Website
If working remotely can be made fun, Hari has mastered it. The challenge for all newly hired interns is to come up with a cool website introducing ourselves and Hari bets we won’t be able to finish it on time (Spoiler alert: we totally did :p ).
And as an acknowledgement of our victory, we were given awesome goodies personally signed by Hari with a nice little note.
3. On-sites
These turned out to be super fun and productive trips I highly looked forward to, so much that I’d miss out on sleep the night before (Thanks to Shikhar Jaiswal and Nalini :P). HackerRank being a remote-first company focuses more on virtual collaboration. However, as an intern, our priority was also to connect with the people we were working with. This was difficult in a virtual set-up.
Thankfully, we had product and intern on-sites during which Interns and full-time folks flew into Bangalore. We took part in product planning and other department-specific meetings while forming genuine connections all the while working.
These trips included lots of social events which turned out to be highly delightful experiences we cherished. Here’s a sneak peek:
Now let’s talk Work
Component mapping in HackerRank for Work
During the initial month, I was given a task to map out the complete product flow in HackerRank for Work. This allowed me to understand the full particulars of the product. I also realised that this was part of a bigger project, creating a detailed brand-new design system. I worked with my mentor, Dmitry, on taking this from start to finish and creating one source of truth for all pages in the product.
HackerRank Design is being shaped by the design team. This leaves a lot of room for improvement in order to achieve our shared vision of a perfect design process and system. Hats off to the team for the progress we’ve made thus far.
Secret Project
I got the opportunity to work on an entirely new product being built from the ground up alongside Melissae.
I designed multiple features and UX flows but some of my best work includes user onboarding flows, empty states and micro-interactions.
Here’s a rough snippet of our Onboarding Flow (Top Secret🤫)
The empty state below stemmed from a feedback we received. There was an unexpected halt in our user’s flow which they presumed to be an error in the product. This page relieves the user from a frustrating step in the process by conveying the right information in a comical way.
I enjoyed the fast-paced cross-functional environment as it constantly provided opportunities to learn new things by doing.
I witnessed immense growth while working on this project. I started my internship by spending hours on perfecting icons and their sizes. By the end of my internship, I was asked to fill in for our lead designer. During this ownership period, I focused on our Reports pages. It required me to handle all our designs as it evolved with the product vision and convey the right data in design.
Highlights: During my interview, Melissae mentioned that HackerRank followed a start-up culture despite the fact that it’s not a start-up anymore. I was really curious to see how this was being done and was amazed by how quickly teams work for feature releases every quarter. In my project, I got to wear multiple hats ranging from UX writer, customer delight designer, micro-interaction designer and many more which helped me explore every step of designing a product.
💡Learnings so far
- Designing a new product has taught me to prioritise better. The priority is always launching a functional MVP with a competitive feature set. The second step is where we revisit our previous decisions and redesign some flows to better meet our now more visible user needs.
- There was always the desire, as an intern, to reinvent the wheel. It’s crucial to remember that this doesn’t necessarily solve existing problems and can often complicate things further.
Cue the Curtain
Leading up to the big reveal 🥁, I joined HackerRank as a Product Designer and it has been a great experience so far (will be continued in part 2 :)). Currently, I am leaning towards User Delight opportunities in the product and involved in incorporating the same in our Design System.
In conclusion, It is humbling to work with highly talented down-to-earth folks who make you ask all the big questions. And as we always say, To The Moon 🚀
Special thanks to Vaasavi Suncol, Nalini Sivakkumar, Karthik G, Niteen Mestry and the entire team for orchestrating a fantastic onboarding experience; Dmitry Nebeduhin for an amazing mentorship then, now and always; Harishankaran K for being a great mentor/buddy to us, and the entire design team for their constant support.
