Becoming a better designer @AppDynamics
Not one month in my entire college has passed without some senior telling me how important internships are. But I always thought that internships are just resume boosters that are supposed to get you a stable job later. Looking back, I can’t help but sigh at how naive I was. And all this changed when I interned at AppDynamics(Cisco) this summer. This is an account of what I learned while working with an amazing set of designers here and my overall journey.
Getting that internship!
Just taking a moment here to share my story of landing an internship at AppDynamics. The company visited my institute, the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Guwahati, in October 2020 for the annual internship drive. Students were shortlisted first based on their portfolios, then a very fun task related to medicine intake monitoring for the elderly was sent to the shortlisted candidates. We were given three days to finish the task. After which, there was another shortlisting for the interviews. After two design interviews and an HR interview, I was selected for this internship. Months of preparation and slogging had finally paid off!
Getting started.
We were greeted by Cisco initially before being handed off to AppDynamics. AppDynamics has a distributed design team, located in San Francisco and Bangalore. I received a very warm welcome from the entire team. I met my mentor, Sidharth Pratheep, who is an IITG alumnus. Coincidentally, we were on the same campus for almost 4 semesters, studying in the same department, on the same floor, and never talked. I honestly have no clue what I would have done here without him. Apart from him, the major guiding figure was Joe Lachoff, Director of Product Design. He meets for 30 minutes one-on-one with each of his direct reports every week. I have always been a little intimidated by the corporate world and its hierarchies, but I was surprised by how approachable and supportive everyone was, especially Joe, even when they have so much on their plate already.
I learned about the different teams I was supposed to work with, mainly the User Research team and later the UI kit team. My mentor made a timeline for my 8 weeks internship so that we don’t lose track of the progress and every week had fixed targets.
The Experience.
Before I get all design-nerdy, allow me to explain what AppDynamics does. Their product is essentially an application performance management tool. From the user end to specific lines of code, AppDynamics makes sure that you always know what is happening within your environment. You can set alerting parameters for your application and AppD will notify you whenever there is anything abnormal. I’ll skip the very technical details here. You can read more about application performance management here. In all, it is a complicated product with hundreds of pages, and in the words of the employees, “it takes around 10 months for people to wrap their head around the product”. And there I was, a confused 21-year-old, 3rd-year design student who spent her college days on… well, things not so technical, for just an 8-weeks-internship. I was very overwhelmed initially, and there was a point where I wasn’t sure if I would be able to deliver what I was supposed to. But everything rounded up very satisfactorily in the end, thanks to all the amazing people who helped me throughout.
And here are my 7 key takeaways from this experience:
1. Talk to people.
I will accept that I’m super talkative as a person, so this comes slightly easy to me. But I’ve seen a growing trend in design students to limit their interactions to just a small group of people, mainly designers. Not only does that narrow your perspective, but it also harms your social skills a lot. I’m going to accept I didn’t quite do my best at making interpersonal relations while working online. I couldn’t be my usual jumpy, hand-gesturey, dramatic, over-excited self, but I tried to do my best. People who have more experience have been at your place, they know exactly how you feel, and maybe they can’t pave the way for you, but they can surely point you in the right direction. And sometimes directions can just be super helpful Confluence pages. I still don’t understand how people keep track of all the useful pages. You tell them an issue, and boom… a helpful link slacked to you. Superhumans! People connect you to other helpful people, and when you are this clueless newbie staring at your laptop and you have to send meaningful slack texts instead of nudging the people around you to find the right person, these connections are a lifesaver.
2. Focus on YOUR problem.
Me being my over-enthusiastic self (who almost signed up for a software engineering degree) tried to read and learn as much as possible about the product and my problem domain. Soon my brain stopped registering or making sense of stuff. I knew some things and I knew that I didn’t know a lot of things. Again after ‘talking to people’ and not just within my organization, I realized it’s impossible, and more importantly, it’s not necessary to know everything. My domain was Kubernetes, and you bet I still don’t understand it completely. But things started making sense when I focused on exactly what the problem statement required me to do. This was necessary because the internship was just 8 weeks and I didn’t have time for reckless information hogging.
3. Insightful discussions > Hours of thinking in isolation
Sharing my thoughts with other designers and listening to their feedback is what helped me find the correct directions for my project. I was in no place to understand the users or to know what has worked in the past and what has not, I mean I did look at previous designs, but still was too naive to understand why things were done the way they were done. People with more experience know about the approaches that can go wrong or patterns of gaps between the designer’s thinking and the user’s thinking. Keeping the naivete aside, these discussions helped me ask questions that I wasn't asking earlier and look at things in a totally different light at times.
4. Users may NOT be experts.
Another mistake that I made, luckily in the very initial phase of ideation, was to think that users always know what they are doing or what they are looking for. My senior designers pointed that out, and I worked on that, but it made complete sense only when I actually saw users, being a little clueless during user testing sessions. Some users don’t actually know what they are looking for. They rely on the product to tell them what they need to see. Obviously, several users have a very good knowledge of things, and even want to take control of things they see on the screen and customize them. And it is a real challenge to serve both kinds of users.
5. Making mistakes is okay!
I was fearful of the new domain and I didn’t know users that well. I spent too much time trying to get things exactly right, before testing or feedback. But design is an iterative process, do what makes sense, get it checked, get it tested. It is very difficult to get things just right on the first go and IT’S OKAY! Things that made a lot of sense to me initially seemed unnecessary by the end. I did doubt my thinking for a moment but I landed on the current solution because I took that approach and improved on it. It’s difficult to get hold of the right people on time, so you need to make assumptions. It’s definitely important to be aware that the foundation is slightly shaky and will need validation before proceeding. And if everything is done in order, work definitely speeds up.
6. Not all important information is useful.
My project was about data visualization and I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out the right and useful metrics to show. Obviously, things were very technical and I used to get very happy whenever I got a valid metric to display. I was trying to show whatever made sense or seemed important. But not everything is ‘useful’. I realized certain aspects were taken care of by the system itself and even though the related metric might be important, the user doesn’t really have much to do with it. It’s just displayed information, it’s not triggering any action. And hence it doesn’t deserve a place on a higher-level overview that my project required me to make.
7. Real world is messy, and it’s okay!
You can lay out a perfect timeline, make an exhaustive to-do list, get in touch with the right people, and still, things might not go as planned. In my case, I needed the user research team to conduct some sessions at unrealistic deadlines, which obviously wasn’t possible. But I had to start coming up with rough ideas for my project because of the limited time. But how do I think of a solution without user research? And, especially for such a technical product and for users I do not know at all! I honestly was super scared to proceed. I tried my best to make sense of things, went through all the existing research that the super helpful UR team at AppD compiled for me, and came up with a very rough solution. We converted the interview sessions to interview + testing sessions instead. We got some super helpful insights, that probably wouldn’t have been possible if we did only interview sessions. And it sped things up because we had clarity about the solution too. So yes, things did not go according to the plan, but the result was still good.
Things I absolutely loved about AppD.
As I mentioned, I’ve always been a little intimidated by the corporate world, but it’s been an absolute pleasure to work with people, both at the San Francisco office and the Bangalore office. I found everyone to be super supportive and more importantly, humble, much more than I expected. There are visible efforts by people on the team to make everyone feel valued. And the team constantly tries to make a better workplace for everyone; they have introduced concepts like ‘No meeting Wednesdays’ and meeting free hours so that people get enough focussed time to be productive. There is a chance for everyone to present anything they want to show or need help with every week.
I lost my grandfather and had a minor surgery during the course of the internship, and not once did I feel anxious about work piling up. My mentor, Sidharth, made sure I never did.
So over these 8 weeks, I worked on a domain I initially had zero understanding of, learned that the corporate environment isn’t scary, in fact, there are people who motivate you to do more than you thought you could, and definitely became a better designer.
A good virtual summer, I’d say :)
