Industry Experience: So far on Intern...

🚀 Progress made so far on the Outreachy intern period

Roshni Prajapati
InterMine

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Photo by Ian Dooley on Unsplash

It’s been halfway through the intern period and I can notice that things don’t always go as planned. Decisions have to be amended according to the circumstances and that’s how it works :)

Generous in getting insights on how the work goes throughout the intern period- this is the page! I will be discussing here- the Intern timeline that I prepared, weekly hours dedicated, accomplished goals and the left-outs, highs and lows in the duration along with expectations and reality of certain ‘things’ and how I dealt with them or not or have I ?! xD

Talking about the original internship timeline, I’m responsible for redesigning a brand new InterMine system i.e BlueGenes for better usability and overall experience. According to which I prepared a timeline that included the following- collecting insights by conducting remote moderated user testing, interpreting the observations, and defining challenges along with experimenting and prototyping iteratively on getting feedback from the community.

Till now under these one and a half months of the intern period I’ve discussed and collected information about the system and made a list of all the things that need to be done under the whole intern period. Asked like a hundred questions to clear concepts regarding several things and thanks to my mentors for being persistent with me. Now that I’m pretty confident with the information architecture of how things work in the system- I started presenting some UX improvements to the mentors, designed the content layout of the homepage including some new features, worked on design iteratively for specific pages, successfully created script (around 15 documents) to carry out remote user testing with help of my mentors and carried out the usability tests for signed-up users 🎉

This was the first time for me-working as a designer at any organization. Underestimated certain parts of the process- One such thing was getting familiar with how the system works and it took time for me to grasp the persona and system base. I kept on redesigning the pages until I realized that mentors didn’t look for the same and I came to know that as for now they were expecting only small improvements for they have to release the new system soon. So getting along with the same task with a different perspective was kind of tiring and that consumed more time than I expected it would 😫

Learning from mistakes takes its own time and I guess that made it longer than I expected to get the task done. So learning and improving I tightened up setting up new design challenges and moving forward.

All set :P

One should never underestimate things and I did so, luckily my mentors are supportive enough- didn’t make me realize that I’m running behind the timeline that I proposed, I knew that I had to recover that anyhow and that shall be done! Another important thing was asking questions before concluding or before kicking into your design work which I didn’t realize earlier.

Ask, ask, just damn! ASK.

Never be ashamed to ask for help! if unaware of something and you have a lot of experienced people around you- then just ask, that is only gonna benefit and that’s what we are here for.. benefits!

Say, if I were provided a time machine! Then there would be certain things I would like to do- skip 2020 😛 . Well jokes apart, if I were to restart my project again I would try not to procrastinate things and to ask as much as I can. Ask for help from seniors, mentors, and fellow interns- in case I get stuck at certain times.

Now as far as the remaining duration of the internship is concerned, there are no amendments to be made. Aimed at asking questions, getting tasks done iteratively, and most importantly- getting them done right in the first place.
At least I’ll try :)

Wrapping it Up!

fruit=🍊=color 😲

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