A Message to Future Product Design Interns at Bowtie
During these tough times, it’s more important than ever as students to apply and expand our skills by taking on real-world challenges.
I’m Gianna, an aspiring Product Designer and a Computer Science senior studying at the University of the Philippines Diliman. My passion for designing and developing product experiences roots from immersing myself in environments that encourage the creation of solutions that benefit societies. This winter break, I had the great opportunity to join Bowtie as a Product Design Intern.
💰Revolutionising Insurance in Hong Kong
If you know me well enough, you should know that I’m a sucker for startups due to its innovative and agile culture. Joining startups trains you to adopt an “out of the box” mindset which often results in revolutionizing solutions.
When I first came across Bowtie, their ability to revolutionize insurance by removing the middleman and creating a painless virtual experience when buying insurance, which is often a long and tedious process, caught my attention. As a designer with an engineering background, I valued how Bowtie managed to quickly create a product with a clean and user-friendly design, and with credible software — their system is deployed to AWS and audited by PwC.
When I was offered the Product Design intern opportunity, I was excited to take an insider look at what the team has done to become Hong Kong’s first virtual and award-winning insurer.
🏩 My First Week
On my first day at Bowtie, I was welcomed with friendly faces and a bright neon pink sign at the studio (we do not use “office”). Since some colleagues were working from home, I managed to receive warm greetings on Slack! During the onboarding, I was also impressed to learn that weekly Lunch & Learn talks were held at the studio where experts from different startups were invited, be it in the food delivery, wellness and even, the craft beer industry! Safe to say, Bowtie highly values an active learning environment.
💡The Backbone of Bowtie’s Virtual Experience
Even though I joined Bowtie as an intern, I am treated like any other employee at Bowtie. As a Product Design intern, my role is to explore and implement opportunities to ensure our digital products are meeting users’ needs and expectations whilst achieving our long-term business goals. Apart from working with talented designers, growth leaders and product managers from the product team, I also work closely with the Engineering team.
Every week, growth ideation and design critique meetings are held to study our user data and explore ways to improve our products in terms of design and technology. These meetings are often times when we identify the problems, pitch ideas, give feedback and explore solutions. As someone who really values data, I found this to be very exciting as it’s when everyone’s creative juice begins to flow!
👀 A Sneak Peek into the Product Team
The design thinking methodology is fully embraced by our team.
In my first two weeks at Bowtie, I was already given major hands-on projects which highly impact Bowtie’s digital products. One of my projects involves improving the experience first-time buyers go through when purchasing our products. As a Product Designer, I need to carry out a series of customer journey mapping, user interviews, wireframing, prototyping and user testing. I collaborate with our UX Designer on this project.
The customer journey maps are created based on real user data and interviews using the collaborative tool, Miro. Once these are drafted, we dedicate several days to interview various stakeholders within the company to explore their thought process when purchasing on the Bowtie platform. After each interview, we then explore the opportunities that could be done to improve the user journey.
After finalising the maps, it’s time for me to create wireframes and prototypes of the features with the most painful user experience using Sketch and InVision. We then present these designs to the Design team to generate more feedback. Finally, comes user testing, the most important step in my opinion as we gather real user feedback. This is where we have new customers speak aloud what they’re thinking and feeling as they are using our platform.
🔑 My Key Takeaways
I’m currently entering my third month of interning at Bowtie and I’m confident to say that I’m learning so much that I cannot learn in school, or Zoom university rather thanks to COVID-19 .
Prior to joining the team, I wasn’t confident in speaking up about my ideas, especially when it came to design. As someone studying in a very technical field, I felt people preferred to hear the thoughts of a design student. Thankfully, joining Bowtie made me realise this early that it didn’t matter at all. It was self-confidence that mattered because with confidence comes a great learning attitude. I’m so grateful to be part of a team that welcomes new ideas as I learn to differentiate between powerful and low-impactful ones. I feel most interns are hesitant to speak up, afraid they may say the wrong thing. I say forget this and own up to your ideas as they may one day be used by millions of users. What’s the worst that could happen?
Another key takeaway for me is to show up and take the effort to know your colleagues. By getting to know my colleagues or people in general, I learn so much about different fields and how people think. As a Product Designer, it enables me to understand user behaviour and how I can apply it to future projects.
