What Does It Take to Land as A UI/UX Intern with Psychology Background

This is a story of Pipi, a UI/UX Intern at Moka.

Having a background as a Psychology student making Pipi has zero experience in handling UI/UX things. As Moka is starting to grow many features and products at a time, he thought this is the right place for him to explore one or two new things before getting into the real job.

Jumped Into Real Project

Lucky for him, at Moka, his supervisor let him jumped into one of their projects which will push him to learn many things directly.

“I do research a lot in my first 3 months. That was indeed exhausting, but it is also exciting to know many things directly from merchants. What makes it even cooler is that I had the chance to present my research directly to my VP!”

The research he did covers traditional SME merchants to bigger enterprise merchants. It was hard at first to even find respondents. But as time goes by, as respondents started to bulk up, as he started to meet a lot of merchants with different backgrounds, he realized that that was one of the things that makes everything more humane.

All those long hours researching and peering through Sketch and tabs of spreadsheets paid off, to know that his work is trusted and being used for Moka's future features.

Classes between projects

Parallelly, he also has classes to enter to support his knowledge and skill in facing the projects.

Here are the three most valuable lessons Pipi learned during his first 3-months internship at Moka.

1. Value the process

Since he is coming from a non-designing background, this lesson is one of the things that majorly changes his point of view. He learned the whole design system. How one little changes could affect the overall outcome. Every decision he makes needs to be structured and thought deeply. This was done so that our product can be touched directly to users and every design that made is right on target.

2. Empathy

Doing these whole research-things gain him more empathy towards others. “I keep trying to be on their shoes. Though sometimes, people wear sneakers and the other ones wear loafers.” That’s one of the things that makes him can appreciate people more.

3. Communication.

“Well, this is one thing that affecting my time management.” It was hard to be open at first. He said yes a lot of time. But, it’s actually okay to say no. It’s okay to reject something. It’s okay to raise a concern if the deadlines are too tight. This thing lets him learn that build an open and honest relationship is one value that keeps everything make sense.

Pipi tried to grasp every single thing he came across, reflected, learned and thought with. Moreover, to have a supportive mentor and teammate is an environment that empowered him to keep growing.

If you want to challenge yourself and need an environment to help you to do so, go check career.mokapos.com to empower you to grow!