Industry Experience: Summer summed up!
🚀 Highlights from my first industry experience as a UX design intern
The summer has been wrenching! Can’t be thankful enough to InterMine for seasoning it throughout. Being the first time industry experience as a design intern — defining and blazoning myself to such exposure has been quite a journey. I’d love to share what and how I learned things up there, which will hopefully be of some value to others.
Selection through Outreachy
One of the things I highly appreciate about this program is that — they highly encourage students to write their experience, which not only improves the routine habit of rookies (like me) but also helps people around the globe looking for answers! Here is one of the blogs I wrote, elaborating on everything one needs to know about the Outreachy intern selection process. After getting approved for the contribution period, I started with 3 projects at the start and ended up with InterMine after the 2nd week. Got well in touch with the team by joining them on discord and mailed all the mentors involved with the project I liked, for more information. InterMine wasn’t the one I applied at one go, yet I won’t regret spending my time contributing elsewhere since; now that I know its worth —worth of good work culture, individual behavior, and the extent of approachability the community offers ❤
The project I chose asked for Improving the UI & UX of BlueGenes. Here’s a bunch of contributions I made to the project during the application period
- User-Centered Analysis of the system
- Suggestions for UX improvements
- Responsive mobile design ideation
- Report- page analysis
- Logo design- finding a face for BlueGenes
I also worked on some portion that wasn’t a part of the project—gave me satisfying confidence and maybe gave quite an edge over others.
Getting a hold.
After getting selected as an intern under the InterMine organization, the first few days slipped by whilst interacting with the whole team. I still remember how I got far too involved in presenting new ideas that I almost lost the track of the expected tasks. That’s where my mentors enter the play! if it hadn’t been for them to clarify what they were looking for was small UX improvements for a start, I would be busy redesigning the whole system with a different point of view. Although being a designer one has a different point of view for any problem — explains me being swank!
Being guided under more than one mentor was such bliss! I liked the idea of having a weekly discussion, every Tuesday — after about an hour of detailed discussion on the status and setting up goals for the coming week, feeling motivated I would sketch my schedule and with a mug of coffee, gear up straight away 🚀
After a week or so, I started spending way too many hours sticking on my chair (5–6 hrs straight!) and I realized that this wasn’t going to be as easy as I predicted — but also that I find challenges thrilling & working under pressure counts under one of my talents 😎 So AFA I love my ‘job’ no matter how hard it turns out, satisfaction finally balances the weight!
About project
Finally to the most awaited part! In these 12 weeks of WFH, I worked on redesigning a new interface of InterMine — BlueGenes. My task as an intern was to improve the usability and aesthetics of the BlueGenes system from 0.3 to 0.8 extent.
InterMine integrates biological data sources worldwide, covering a broad range of model organisms and life science research areas, making it easy to query and analyze the data — to explore organisms and other research data provided by many different organizations, moving between databases using criteria such as homology. The new interface BlueGenes — a collection of all the mines maintained under InterMine, aims at providing a platform to access, view, and operate on the data available globally.
I was responsible for ensuring better usability and overall experience of this system by performing heuristic analysis, collecting insights by conducting remote user testing, and defining challenges by simultaneously having feedback from the community members.
My three months intern period can be covered clearly in four parts — researching, redesigning, user-testing, and concluding as a whole. Let’s start with the first one, shall we?
1. Research and Redesign 📝
First things first, I started by persona creation i.e listing the types of user and categorizing according to their profile and behavior, and demographics. Assuming that my user base already has little or firm biological background, I came up with four major persona — the rookie, explorer, techie, and the expert, you can read the detailed description of each persona here.
BlueGenes involves a data mining platform on several mines for scientists, researchers, and users mostly from biological backgrounds. After researching the behavioral pattern of such users, I came up with two major findings — for users spend a long time scrolling data on their screens, improvise on the usage of theme that soothes one's eyes, by using a combination of shades and avoiding sharp colors and second another remarkable thing I learned is, simple is not always better and simplifying tools for complexity experts might give negative results! Users like scientists and data analysts don’t need to be babily spooned for every working feature, for they know how things work.
Now that I was thorough enough with the working and background of the system, I focussed on redesigning the pages as prioritized by my mentors. The first redesign I presented was the home page of BlueGenes — the discussion thread here, which was fortunately approved and implemented before moving onto the first round of usability testing 🎉
2. Usability Testing 👩💻
Now it was time to tests how this site originally was up to the expectations of users. Due to the recent quarantine situation and restrictions, conducting in-person tests was not possible. Hence, we had to either rely on unmoderated or moderated usability testing and since ‘BlueGenes’ is a new interface, conducting remote moderated usability tests was the best alternative — being fast, inexpensive, gives detailed insights in a fixed duration of time, also the facilitator has the advantage of asking follow-up questions and observing user behavior on the go!
Being a facilitator the first time, I was both excited and nervous about testings! I started, by creating the script and scheduling slots on calendly. I conducted user tests on four of the volunteers from the STORM community, and recorded the live sessions (with their consent) to make detailed observations and noted down — expressions, words, remarks, and responses.
3. Feedback & Prototype 🎴
With an ample amount of feedback, it was time to strive on the pain points and get the most optimized and ‘minimal’ solution. Depending on the audience, my challenge was to find the right improvement for issues such that it weighs between — not too simple and not too complicated.
After weekly brainstorming and simultaneously collecting feedback from mentors, I came up with redesigns for several pages — marked up to their expectations (not me, they say 😛). Attached is the Figma link — listing out the detailed proposals, the design process, and redesigned prototypes.
4. Testing again — II iteration👀
After the implementation of the basics and with the redesigned prototypes, it was time again for usability testing for the second time. Turns out, this time I was worried about the feedback, mainly — constructive criticism.
And the feeling when one gets favorable feedback feels most encouraging of all! Had a hard time taking tests on prototypes — working on a non-functional modal is quite frustrating for experts already. Still, with the help of mentor Herald, I learned how to deal with the response and behavior of the test users. Here is collective feedback from our contended users:
Apart from UX Design!
BlueGenes- a new interface is going to be released soon. Why not brand it? Give it a face, an identity — a logo!
After multiple attempts of delivering the true meaning of BlueGenes, finally landed upon finalizing the one below. Discussion thread here — to get the evolution and process behind.
Work culture
Everyone on the team was supportive and had high morals and ethics towards their work, which kept me motivated all along!
So what if you are an introvert? — Yo Yehudi would make you speak anyhow, no escape from those interactive group sessions😍. My mentor Yo helped me through the script creation process of which I was completely unaware of! (being a newbie), guiding through every stage in usability testing. Kevin being always there to guide me through the back-end point of view and never getting frustrated with my questions requires a spirit!
Closing notes
I’ll wrap it up with a vote of thanks to mentors — for a beautiful experience. Wish we could discuss things over coffee yet anyway you made it light and tight 😬😂
Complete Project link: https://www.figma.com/file/bJfKUu307znLmGEpDI4HtL/BlueGenesUX_Presentable?node-id=94%3A0
