Starting your summer internship
My experience being a User Experience Design Intern at Lucid Software
Orientation, office tour and payroll, the first day’s agenda was set for us. 20 interns in a room, nervous, excited and definitely hungry. I started as a User Experience Intern at Lucid Software two weeks ago and these posts shall act as my reflections/diary entries throughout the internship. So back to the first day, after a few hours of meet and greet, I got together with the whole team. Super fun, super enthusiastic, but the best thing about them is that there is no sense of hierarchy. No one’s an intern or a director, just a bunch of people (some more experienced that others) who enjoy bouncing ideas off of each other. I soon realized that this sentiment is a part of Lucid’s culture. This resonated with something that Lucid’s co-founder Karl Sun said,
‘At Lucid you will not get lost.’
For someone who is just starting off, this was a big confidence booster. It meant that I am valuable to the company. And it just sank in that I’m also responsible to the company.
On day 2 we kicked off my first project. I finally understood what everyone meant when they said ‘real world experience’. Your work costs something to you, to your stakeholders and the company. If I had to explain this briefly, the cost to me is my time, my reputation as a team member and a professional. The first thing I learned is to evaluate how much time to allocate to a project, what it will cost and who will it help? In one week I got to work with my project manager, engineers, quality assurance and other designers. Now I’m trying to understanding what the cost means to the stakeholders and the company. Lucid is a growing company in disguise of a start-up. The people are experienced, the product is established and yet they are always ready to experiment and exchange ideas across departments.
Designing in the real world is harder, with pitfalls, constraints and a lot more hours, but a good team who is ready to take a chance gives you the confidence to fail and iterate. I’ve been here two weeks and my team is rolling out one of my designs for A/B Testing. It may not be successful but like they say you either win or you learn, right?
I can’t wait to see what the next sprint has in store for me and I will keep blogging. In the meantime, here are some more things I learned in my first 2-week sprint:
1. Set personal goals — Before you start learning about a company’s values and team goals you must have your own. What do you really want to achieve in this internship. It’s a two-way street, you have to get as much out of it as they do.
2. Involve your team and project manager — It’s not only important to get feedback early but also as often as you can. It can be very intimidating to present something to your team, especially when you haven’t had a chance to polish it but it’s better to get critique while things are still in pencil rather than when you’re at the printers. Doing so not only saves time, money and effort in the short term but also helps one build better design judgement.
3. Learn to be a great Shadow(er) — You may not get a chance to work on all the projects you want to but it cost nothing to say, ‘hey can I sit in on that session?’ Being a fly on the wall has taught me a lot! Also, it is a pleasant surprise when you get approached by an experience designer, asking you to shadow them. It’s a win-win situation!
4. Take advantage of being a junior — Your project managers and supervisors are a lot more forgiving when you just start so take advantage of it and share all your ideas. As interns we bring a fresh perspective to the team and the sooner you capitalize on it the better.
This has been my experience so far and I’d love to know what you think :)
