What its like to be a design intern at TeleTracking
This summer (Jun-Aug2018) I worked at TeleTracking as User Experience Design Intern. I was one of the 32 other interns (all the departments). In this blog, I would like to reflect on my experiences and the work/design culture at TeleTracking.
Some Background
TeleTracking is more than 25 years old, Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) based company, producing most advanced and innovative technical and logistic solutions in the healthcare industry. Started as a bed turnover problem solver, now TeleTracking is a vast platform which helps patients, doctors, staff, admin, etc. or in other words, the whole healthcare ecosystem and it is still growing.
The Core of TeleTracking
If you are a UX designer, you must have heard of this term, “THE CORE.” We always focus on the core of our problem/solution and make sure that it persists throughout our design. If the core of the design is clear, motivating and have some credibility, it becomes easy to follow it, and then we get great solutions.
For TeleTracking, the following is their CORE:
No patient should ever have to wait for the care they need.
It is simple, unexpected, credible, and inspiring. It binds the whole company and encourages everyone to contribute towards this noble mission. I have witnessed this inspiration, everyone in the company works with full enthusiasm and energy because they know their work is going to help many patients. This core allows TeleTracking not just to make profitable technology, but also to save the lives of the real people.
Work Culture In General
Before I talk about the design team, I would like to talk about the work culture in general, which reflects in the design team as well. If I have to describe it in one word, I would say “Awesome.” But since I am a designer and I can do better than one word, let me describe it in a few points:
Open Door: Everyone in the company welcomes everyone all the time. Everyone’s schedule is available to all; you can schedule a meeting with your team member or directly to the CEO of the company or directly meet them in person (well CEO might not be available all the time, but you got my point).
Volunteer Events: TeleTracking organize many volunteer events because they believe in giving back to the community. During my internship duration, I got the opportunity to be part of two of them. One of them was Mission of Mercy where over 1500 people volunteered, and over 1100 people got the free dental checkup in two days. At that event, for a while, I was at the exit gate, helping people by giving supplies. I can not articulate the feeling of satisfaction and humanism that I felt when people were thanking me with their eyes full of tears.
Positive Vibe: There is a positive vibe you can feel when you are working there. Everyone is full of enthusiasm, fun, and focus, all at the same time. Hackathons, fun events, scavenger hunt, parties, helping your colleagues, promoting others, etc. are some of the things that happen in the company.
Now let me talk specifically about the design team and design culture:
The Design Culture
When I was working as a intern, there were total of 8 member in the design team. Three 5 UX designer, 2 UI designer and 1 design director. All expert in their field, very helping and open to new ideas.
Treat you as a fellow designer: Though I was an temporary intern, I never felt that I am not the part of the team. I was invited in all of the team meetings, critique sessions, and decision making sessions. I had few amazing discussions in the critique sessions, everyone welcomed me to put my thoughts in front of everyone and participate in design thinking.
Opportunity to explore and try things: Although I had one assigned project form my summer intern, to further develop the design system, I got multiple opportunity to pick-up new projects and participate in design process. Apart from my main summer project, I participated in at least three more projects.
One-to-one mentor: Every intern was assigned with one mentor for the whole summer. This is huge deal, because you can learn so much when you have one mentor to shadow and also get great critique on your work. But when you are in design team, you are not bounded to just one mentor. For me the whole team was mentor. They helped me learning their skills and techniques.
Bring new ideas to the table: Team encourage you to bring new ideas and skills and share it with whole team. I conducted one workshop on Sketch and how to take advantages of new plugins to build the design system. Because of the welcoming nature of design team, I proposed and made prototype for one of my mentor’s project, and they liked it a lot and decided to incorporate the idea.
See the bigger picture: Everyone in the team understand the importance of details as well as of the bigger picture. Whenever stuck, they take a step back, ask questions like, what is the purpose, what we want to achieve, is design matches with the core of the company. It was great to see and learn this.
Team critique sessions: Every designer in the team works on a separate project (with some overlap), but they all organise a quick team critique of their design, which I think is a great thing to do. It is very easy to get into the trap of curse of knowledge if you are working on the same thing for a while. Team critique is great way to avoid it and keep yourself in a check.
My Takeaways
For me, it was an excellent opportunity to learn more about the design process in the real world. From the day one I was able to start learning from my mentor, team and other employees at the office. Here are a few key takeaways for me from my internship:
Plan your work: When you are working in a fast pace company, it is essential for a designer to plan your work, interviews, workshop in advance, especially when you want a workshop session with project managers, engineers, marketing team together. Getting a common time, or in general time of other person is very difficult. So the plan.
Be well prepared: Once planed, always be well prepared for whatever you are planning to do. If interview, prepare the questions in advance, do background research on topic and person. If workshop, be prepared with plan B, what if people are working from home, how will you include them in the participatory design? Being prepared will help you move forward in your work fast.
Something that works and good is better than something that is perfect but does not work: I would say this was one of my most significant learnings. In academic settings, we tend to find better and better solution or design, but in industry settings, it is not always possible to do so. We can not just make product stop working to find a perfect solution, we have to find the design that may not be perfect but it should able to apply immediately and then slowly iterate over the design to make it better and better without losing the functionality of the design.
Prioritising work & understanding the constraints: Again, one of the most significant learnings. Understanding the constraints should be the first step for any designers to start the work. Knowing the limitations on resources, time, people, research, etc. help us decide what direction, methods, process to use to tackle the problem. It also helps us prioritize the work. When you have ten different things to work on, constraints help us to decide which task we should finish first and which all can wait.
Overall, it was three months of learning and fun experience for me. I enjoyed my time while working at TeleTracking a lot!
