What my internship at Freeletics taught me
When I graduated last year from Industrial Design I had a big problem. I had finished my Bachelor, but I had no experience whatsoever outside of university work and no clue in what direction I would want to specialise in for my Masters. The lack of practical experience really bothered me, especially as design is — in my opinion — one of those professions where experience counts more than where your degree is from.
After I found my first internship I moved to Munich for a year to get this important experience. The first internship taught me a lot about the basics of UI/UX design. I noticed that just designing in the digital space wasn’t quite my thing, but the few times I got to do user research were the times I would look forward to the most. After this internship ended I was determined to see if becoming a user researcher would be a profession that would be suitable for me.
Enter Freeletics. During a UI/UX meetup, I pitched myself to some senior looking people, asking if any of their companies would be open for a user research intern. Fast forward a few weeks and I had an interview with the head of design (one of those senior looking people). In the end, the job interview didn’t feel like much of an interview at all, but rather two people talking about design and research and how they might be able to help each other out. Being also given a short tour of the office, Freeletics struck me as a huge opportunity. A place where the passion flows free and my personal interests aligned with the vision of the company.
Fast forward another few weeks and I walked through the doors as a product design intern. The internship would have two phases. The first one would be a research and development project completely owned by myself, and the second I would be part of one of the development crews that Freeletics has to see what working with Scrum is like.
On my very first day, the design team had a nice surprise for me already. They had planned to go surfing in an indoor surf spot and asked if I would like to join. So my first day at Freeletics, in the end, consisted of me quickly setting up my laptop and then going surfing for the rest of the day. Not a bad start, huh?
After the first week of on-boarding, my research project officially started and I could indulge myself into everything related to gamification and designing for motivation. Quite quickly I stumbled on the TED talk by the gamification guru Yu Kai-Chou. He worked on gamification for about 20 years and developed the Octalysis framework as a result. This framework suggests that there are 8 core behavioural drives that gamification can work with. Yu Kai-Chou also gives examples of how these core drives can be triggered, which you can use to broadly map out how well your product “scores” and what core drives need some extra work.
This framework proved to be quite useful to analyse other apps, to see how they try to gamify their products. I wanted to know which apps would be good examples for certain gamification strategies, so I set up multiple user tests with the users of the chosen apps to see how well the strategies actually performed. In turn, the results were cross-checked with the analysis that I already made to see which gamification elements could be used as inspiration.
With all this background information, I started to do some high-level ideation to come up with a system that would coherently incorporate the gamification elements. Doing it this way, and waiting to actually design the interfaces, turned out to be a good move. The very first ideas were incredibly complicated. I put so many ideas into one concept that it became huge and complex. Over time, I was able to simplify it in such a way that all the elements related to each other. This would ensure that the app would be gamified in a way that would be comprehensible and holistic.
Only when I found how to gamify the app, I started to design the interfaces. This was a fairly straightforward process. The stage that was most interesting was the user testing of said interfaces. I was torn in between testing the UI and the idea behind the gamification. It took me several tries before I got it right. I got the advice to just test one part per user test, to make sure that the tests don’t become too long. This turned out to be very good advice. Only testing certain areas of the app would allow me to really dig into the details of the part I was testing.
In conclusion, this project offered me a lot of learnings in an indirect way. On one hand, I learned that working for companies is not so much about proving that your idea would work, but rather about not being able to disprove your idea. Doing user research remotely, through a platform is a great way to gain quick learnings, but as you cannot talk to the people you are “interviewing” you really need to make sure that the questions are easy to understand and the whole flow of the interview makes sense. Last but not least, I found it to be really helpful to map out the way you want to integrate gamification into your app. This allows you to quickly see parts that don’t make as much sense and quickly reiterate on it. The changes you want to make are easier explained to your peers because there is nothing to distract from the idea.
The second part of my internship would be in the Prometheus team under the supervision of Johannes (a senior product designer at Freeletics). If I have to be completely honest, this was the most fun time I have had at Freeletics. It turns out that I am much more of a team player than I thought and the Prometheus team was a blast to work with.
The biggest learning during this period was the whole Scrum workflow. As many of you probably know, you work at certain time intervals (ours were 2 weeks) and for this interval, you set a sprint goal. For the design side, this consisted of working on the discovery phase. Here I did competitor research for trials and some UI/UX explorations for some new designs that Freeletics is working on.
While I was only in the Prometheus crew for 4 sprints, I had the opportunity to become the main designer for the crew for 1 sprint, as the senior designer was on a well deserved holiday during that time. These last 2 weeks were crazy. All of the sudden the entire handover proved to be almost useless as the testing strategy for trials was completely turned on its head. From an AB test, it turned into an ABCD test. On top of that, I volunteered to help with coming up and setting up a booth at a conference that Freeletics was sponsoring. I got a true taste of what it would feel like to have a busy schedule and no time to act on the decisions made during meetings. Time blockers were needed for the first time in my life and were quite valuable. In the end, I think I was able to deliver everything correctly with the help of my team members.
All in all, I am very positive about my internship at Freeletics, having learned more in one month than I did in the 6 months at my previous one. Not only did I learn a lot about the field of UX design, but also politics in companies. I was lucky enough to work in a company that values transparency in management a lot. Through this, I got to see some behind the scenes of decision making. Also, my direct manager proved to be, in my opinion, an example of good leadership. He never lost contact with the people he is leading, even though they are scattered around in Freeletics. Also, proactively wanting to improve himself, his leadership and most of all the team he is leading.
I want to thank everybody from the design team for an amazing and educational internship.
