UX intern at Furlenco
In this summer of 2019, I got this opportunity to work as a User Experience Design Intern at Furlenco for 10 weeks. For the past year, I had been working on UX for some college projects only but I needed to explore something real in my summers. So I compiled all my work into a portfolio and started mailing some companies. My life changed when I got an acceptance mail from Furlenco.
Furlenco is a company brewed in Bangalore founded in 2011 by Ajith Karimpana. It has a simple business model of leasing furniture to people who were interested in premium furniture for their homes. Furlenco has an in-house furniture design team that designs its premium products in a user-centric way that easily blends with the user’s daily life.
During my internship, I worked with the UX team and was mentored by Sanket Kulkarni and Vijay Sawant. I learned a lot from them and they helped me whenever I was stuck in my project.
Starting as an Intern.
On my first day, after my onboarding, I met my mentors and was asked to do a UX Audit for Furlenco’s digital products. This was a small project but allowed me to understand the working of the product, business model of Furlenco and about the overall experience of Furlenco’s digital platforms. So, for the UX audit, I used Garrett’s model, where I first listed down all points on sticky notes and classified the problems on the basis of Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton, and Surface.
The entire UX team compiled their points and we gave a presentation in front of the tech team to create a roadmap for the next quarter.
Creating a habit to read.
Reading is a very important habit for any UX designer, it keeps you updated as well as teaches you better methods to solve design challenges.
So, I used to reach the office every day an hour before to read UX articles, listen to UX podcasts as well as read some case studies. I used to read about the different methods of problem-solving and then tried implementing them in my work. This allowed me to question my ideas and to support my solutions with a concrete reason.
Some places from where I preferred to read:-
- UX planet
- NN group
- Invision group, Muzli
- UI collective….etc
And you should definitely try out the podcasts by AJ&Smart and High resolution.
Getting a hang of the problem.
I was assigned three tasks that I had to complete during my internship. One of them was a primary task to communicate the design story behind Furlenco’s signature products and the other two were secondary tasks; to ideate on tags for product listing page and to build a micro-interaction for the ‘Add to cart’ CTA on website.
Before starting any project I was provided with a design brief from my design manager, briefing about the issues, user’s emotions and current scenarios.
It is very important to understand the design brief well and it’s better to ask more and more questions to gain a better context of the problem. I also discussed with the product managers, dev team and marketing team to understand all aspects of the problem. This allowed me to collaborate with them at the early stages of ideation and think from their perspective.
Being on the move and interacting with people.
As a designer interacting with different people from different teams can be very helpful it can provide you a lot of insights that you can’t even think of. It gives you a completely new perspective for solving a problem. Furlenco has an open culture, you can just walk to anybody and sit with them to get their opinion. I even talked to people during chai and got some valuable feedback.
Sketching out solutions.
The more time you invest in a solution the more you get attached to it. So, as a good designer its better to iterate faster on different solutions to find out a better one, instead of working on your one and only solution and getting attached to it.
Sketching helps you eliminate the non-viable ideas at an early stage.
I used to sketch different solutions and show them to my manager, the dev team and the product managers. It helped me identify the flaws at a very early stage and saved a lot of my time.
Giving daily updates to my mentor.
Designers, in general, are busy 😓. They have a lot on their plate, long hour meetings entire day and working on solutions during the night 🦉.
However, I made sure that I gave regular updates to my mentor at the end of the day. This helped me to work more efficiently. I used to have these 5 minutes sessions & UX stand-up with them to tell them what was I up to and to show them what I have done the whole day. This allowed me to get early feedback and iterate faster.
Learning to ask why & working in a data-driven way.
I loved 😍 questioning my solutions. Each time I was building a prototype, I used to jot down on sticky notes the questions that I needed to validate the solutions. I talked to different people and showed them the prototypes and quickly noted down what they felt. I also used user data to understand how people were interacting with the current product. This helped me to validate my ideas while presenting them to my team in the final presentation. All the previous interactions with the different teams help while presenting the final idea, as they were in loop whole time and saw the idea evolving through all the stages.
Learning more about Furlenco’s products.
My project required me to learn more about the products at Furlenco. Thus whenever any meeting or workshop happened in-house I made sure that I attended it. It allowed me to connect emotionally with the products and know the process behind their designs.
Learning how to present your solutions.
Major learning for me was to understand how to present a final solution to tech team and COO of the company. My mentor helped me a lot in this case. He helped me with documenting and compiling everything and also told me to build a story so that everyone feels connected to the problem and its solution.
I started compiling from ground zero. I listed all the problems with screenshots and defined the goals for the ongoing project, and compiled all the insights from research. Then, I explained how the solution evolved from one ideation to another and presented the final working prototype on Marvel.
Attending Design Meet-ups
Try attending at least 2 design meet-ups whenever you are in a city like Bangalore. Designers learn from each other, so meeting designers and listening to their experiences motivate you even more. You also form good connections within the design industry that help a lot in the future.
I got such an opportunity to attend a design meet-up by TranformDesign.co. The event was organized at 91 Springboard Indiranagar, Bangalore. Speakers like Navneet Nair (Director of product design, PhonePe) & Parameswaran Venkataraman ( Cheif design officer, Fractal Analytics) gave interesting insights about the design industry. The event was a success organized by Shami Raj & Anirudh Shrinivas.
Summing up.
I got to learn a lot during my internship at Furlenco. It helped me evolve as a designer and taught me how the work is done at a professional level. The company has the most collaborative culture, with awesome people who will help and guide you at every stage whenever you are stuck.
Furlenco is one company that I would like to work for in the future 😁.
