What to look for in a design internship
When looking for an internship you want to come out of it with more experience and as a better designer than when you started it.
There are a couple of things you should look for in an internship, and there are some important things you should have at the end of your internship. All of this can be measured, so set some goals for your internship, and try to evaluate if the internship you are planning to do aligns with your goals.
Don’t work for free
Let us get this out of the way first. There is no reason you should work for free.
The best companies have a plan for how they want you to contribute, and how they can contribute to your career. They recognize that the internship is a valuable experience for both you and them, and they pay accordingly. Free labor is for the most part illegal and also unethical. It excludes designers who cannot reasonably work for free, and it diminishes the value of the work you do. They’re not doing you a favor, both you and the organization benefit from a good internship experience. Being paid for your time and services should not be up for discussion.
Portfolio
You should have a great project in your portfolio at the end of your internship. Your portfolio is perhaps the most important asset when you’re looking for a job as a designer. If you have a real project that you worked on for a real company, that is incredibly valuable.
It is much more valuable to show that you were able to contribute meaningfully within the constraints of a real business or organization than it is to show that you can redesign a random homepage for a company you have very little insight into. Real experience is much better than projects you started and worked on yourself. So look for an internship that will give you something specific to work on that you know you can tell a story about in your portfolio.
Work on a real product
You should have worked on a real product and be able to point to your contributions.
Make sure that the work you do during your internship is on a real product, and is a meaningful contribution to that project, appropriately scoped for your level of experience and skill. Be wary if you’re being put to work on a “toy project” that has little or no value to the organization.
Work on a specific project, not random stuff all over the place
Ideally, you will get a project that has a specific deliverable, is contained enough so that you to a certain degree can work independently on it, and that fits into the overall product and product strategy of the company. If there is no overall plan, and you find yourself one day working on the visual design of a button, and the next day doing PowerPoint templates and marketing collateral, and then you’re being asked to do a usability analysis of a major feature, that is not the sign of a good internship. It is a sign that they don’t really have a plan for how to best utilize your skills and talents and nurture your growth as a designer.
When you work on a specific feature, with a specific deliverable, your internship will look so much better in your portfolio. You have a story to tell, you can show your process and progress from start to finish, what you worked on, how you started, how you progressed, the many decisions you had to make, how you collaborated with the rest of the company, and what the ultimate delivery and final feature looked like.
Create value
It is great if you can point to a feature that you delivered, even better if you can measure that the feature increased value for the organization through a measurable metric. Let us say you work on the sign-up process for a product. If you can point to increases in sign-ups, less drop-off, more engagement, more people completing the process because of work you did, that is pure gold. 50% less drop-off in signups after I did this. Situation before, what you did, and the result. Pure gold.
Make sure they have time for you
The company and your manager should have time for you to help you improve as a designer through guided work, clear expectations, and mentorship. If there is a design or product organization you should work closely with them, in the same group, every day. There should be regular check-ins, for instance through stand-ups every morning, but also regular 1–1 with your manager, a design lead, or a product manager, to help you advance the feature and product you’re working on.
You should be respected and treated as an equal
Even though you may have less experience, and you’re only there for 3 months or less, you should be treated as an equal to the rest of the team in every respect. That means participating in meetings, having your voice and opinion asked for and heard. It should be an environment that doesn’t just invite you to speak your mind and to contribute, but that actively creates that kind of atmosphere where everybody feels encouraged to freely contribute.
You are just as much a part of the team as a senior designer with 10 years of experience. That means you will also have responsibilities and demands put on you, appropriate for your level of experience. Essentially you are a new employee, and the fact that you will only be there for maybe 12 weeks is irrelevant.
Educate them
Ideally, there should be an opportunity for you to educate them. You see things with fresh eyes. You bring with you your experience from your studies, and perhaps experience from other jobs and other internships, and your life and background in general. You can educate them on design methodologies, tools, and approaches to design and products that they haven’t thought about or are for some reason not considering.
It should take you through a proper design process
This is your opportunity to practice what you’ve learned in design school, while at the same time having to adapt that process to the organization you’re working for. The process you’re taught in school will meet the reality of day-to-day product design work, and you should push for a proper process so that you get to practice what you learn in your classes. A proper process is also crucial when you tell the story of your project in your portfolio and will make your project and story much stronger.
Many companies will push you to just design something without anything else to guide you other than your own experience and insights. While this can work for some projects it is not the best way to go about one of your first real projects. Let’s say you’re being tasked to design a feature that gives a nurse or doctor a summary of a patient’s recent procedures, current conditions, and current medications. For this to be successful you cannot simply rely on your own intuition on what is the right information to show without the proper context of the end-user. You need to do research to better understand what kind of patients, what kind of nurses and doctors, where are they using this, what are they using it for? What is important information and what can be ignored? In fact, a feature like this would be too big of a project to handle on your own. Entire companies have been built around features like this. Even if you were given a small part of this to work on, you would still need to do research into the users and the context where this will be used.
The research you do is also for your own benefit, as it gives you insight into a domain that probably was previously unknown to you. A great strength to have as a designer is the ability to quickly understand new domains and industries so that you can design for healthcare, hospitality, finance, government agencies, and other domains that you will have limited knowledge about until you start working there.
Resume
Just as the feature you’re working on should look good in your portfolio, your experience should be a stand-out point on your resume. If you can distill your internship experience into a few bullet points describing what you did, and what the impact was, your resume will be so much stronger.
Ship something
Try to ship something. Maybe even something small that is unrelated to your main project. Having something you worked on shipped into real working software is a great first milestone for a new designer. Ideally, the large feature you’re working on throughout your internship will also ship, but it could be that you get to deliver it to development and it is put in the backlog until later. That’s ok, we’re not always in control of what gets shipped when. But if you can see if you can get that thing shipped, it will dramatically increase your experience and your exposure to the rest of the organization when you have to not only design it but make sure that everybody is on the same page, the designers, the developers, the PM, the stakeholders, about the importance of the feature and having it prioritized so that it gets shipped.
Shipping something will help you collaborate with every part of the organization. The developers need to understand how to build the thing you designed, the PM and other stakeholders need to understand the significance of what you are proposing and how it will impact the product, and how it should be prioritized. You will get experience in documenting your design for hand-off to development and iterate on it together with the developers. You get experience in defending your design, why your solution is the one we should build now, and how it should be prioritized. And you will see your carefully designed feature shipped into the hands of actual users. This will be some of the most humbling and valuable feedback you will ever receive as a designer, the feedback (or lack thereof) from actual users.
Present to them
Ask for the opportunity to present your contributions at the end of the internship. This will achieve a couple of things: You get experience presenting design to outsiders. You get to present your impact on the product to people who do not know who you are. You’ll get a chance to network with other people in the organization, and as a bonus, It can also make your manager and team look good.
Network and build connections
Finally, make sure to network and build connections while you are there. Many companies use internships as a recruitment tool, so if you’re doing a good job they might be interested in offering you a job after you’ve earned your degree. Stay in touch with your team after the internship. If you worked on something that didn’t ship yet ask for updates, see if you can get screenshots for your portfolio of the shipped product.
Examples of good internship projects
Here are some examples of categories of features that could be great projects for a 12-week internship.
Adapting a current feature to mobile
Adapt a current feature to mobile. What does that mean for the user stories? What does it mean for the users? Does this enable something that was previously impossible to do on a laptop or desktop workstation? How does the limited screen real-estate affect the feature, how do you prioritize information?
A benefit of this approach is that a lot of the groundwork for this feature has been done since it is already a part of a desktop or web version of the product. That means you can draw on the existing knowledge in the organization, and then question some of the assumptions as you rework this feature for mobile. Perhaps it doesn’t even make sense on mobile, perhaps it should be a different feature altogether? This will also allow you to do user research specifically towards the platform you’re targeting, for instance the iPhone.
Improve a current feature or user flow based on something you can measure
Let’s say that users have a hard time signing up for the product. Use your design skills to figure out why that is the case, use both quantitative and qualitative methods, and try to improve measurable outcomes through design. A problem could be that a lot of users start the sign-up process, but then for some reason drop off, they do not complete. Is that because it is too complicated? Does the product ask for too much information? Is the process confusing?
If you can do a before and after case study here, and show how your design improved this, that would make a wonderful portfolio piece.
Design something new that is important to the product
At any given time the organization probably has a backlog of features that they know they want to develop at some point. Take a look at the backlog of feature requests and pick one. Make sure together with your design lead or product manager that the feature is appropriate for your level with the proper guidance, and get to work.
An example could be search or filtering of data. If you work in an organization that deals with a lot of data, where the users work on large amounts of data, it is probably at some point necessary to have a way to search or filter for something specific (for instance all patients with a certain kind of health insurance who has not had a doctor’s appointment in the last 12 months). Search and filtering is hard to do right and could be an excellent portfolio piece for a 12-week design internship.
Create a better onboarding experience
It is hard to onboard new users, especially for complex B2B software. Go through signup and onboarding as a new user, notice any problems you see, and as always do the appropriate research to have your assumptions validated and to learn what users need when being onboarded. If the product is meant for data scientists, talk to data scientists, if it is meant for care managers and nurses you have to talk to them.
Create a design system to help the organization design and ship software
If you have 12 weeks, you should be able to gain significant ground on this project and have a small design system in place that helps designers and developers build consistent experiences while reducing friction between them when it comes to handoff and where the source of truth is for the latest design.
In a small startup, this could be a great task that the rest of the design team never gets around to because they are too busy designing, it will also make a very good and visually interesting portfolio piece. In a large organization, this would probably be well beyond the scope of your internship, but you could initiate the project and get it off the ground. This will also give you experience in handing off a design project to an organization.
Conclusion
You should look for an internship that will make you a better designer, and you should finish your internship as a better designer than when you started it. This is up to you, and to the company you work with. If you get the opportunity, make the most out of your internship experience. Having a great internship experience in your portfolio can be extremely important when you later start looking for a full-time job, and will really set you apart from other candidates.
I hope you found this helpful. Please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn if you have questions, comments, or just want to chat about design.
