Self-Reflection of My Software Engineering Internship and How it Connects with My UX Career Path

For the past summer, I worked as a Software Engineer Intern at Wayfair LLC. I was on the Storefront Lifestyle Team which focuses on providing users with a more customized experience on Wayfair’s Joss&Main, Birchlane, Allmodern and DwellStudio stores.

According to my manager, I shaped my internship experience very un-orthodoxically because as long as working on normal sprint tickets using PHP, I had also touched the base of designs by working with the CSS team and the CX team for the Homebase special project, a brand guidelines which both the designers and the engineers to refer to in order to provide a consistent user experience across our sites to our customers.

As a Software Engineer who is proactively becoming a Dev-Design Hybrid, I am also reading a lot about UX and learning UX techniques. Throughout the process, I came to realize that during my time at Wayfair, a company with millions of users and billions of annual sales, I had worked with designers and PMs that are actually exercising those UX methodologies that I read about. Therefore, I think it will be really rewarding that I, as learning UX techniques and methodologies, also reflect on my internship experience working with CX. I will keep this story updated whenever I learn about new UX knowledge and have new reflections.

1. UX Career Paths Overview

There are many great materials about UX career paths on Lynda.com. And I came to Cory Lebson’s Planning a Career in User Experience course. This course gave a brief introduction about what UX jobs are there in the market and basing on my interests, I had figured out that the UX career paths that best suit my interests, skillsets and experiences are Interaction Design, Visual Design and Information Architecture.

…TO BE CONTINUED…