Why is a UX designer internship unlike any other internship?
In UX business every person can give something valuable to the team.
Interns are typically not a very good thing for a company. In most companies interns are considered to be just a long-term investment with a negative net value for weeks, sometimes months. Most employers believe that interns take away focus from the real work and because of that get a lot of useless tasks they can do so that they do not interrupt the rest of the workers as much. Interns usually end up working on risk-free made-up projects or are given small tasks without impact to a bigger picture.
That is clearly lose-lose situation for the company and the intern:
- The intern gets a signature for the school and accepts the useless experience of making coffee.
- The company accepts the intern because there’s a small chance they might get a future employee out of it if the intern doesn’t hate it there.
However, UX design is difficult to understand, because it involves a number of different disciplines. This is why good UX designers are typically not the type of people that know a lot of things themselves but rather ones open to understanding people outside of their comfort zone. Each new intern is not just a person doing a job the same way but rather a totally new perspective to the UX design process and that can lead to creativity outside of the limitations of the current team.
Who make the best interns?
In Mobi Lab, interns are chosen the same way as employees — one need to understand the basic values of the company culture, the willingness to work, the ability to communicate and we would like the intern to be able to use necessary design tools. We don’t expect the person to be an expert in the field, but we want him or her to be a functional part of the team on day one.
After that it is important that the company is able to learn something from the new person. This usually means passion — If this person is passionate about something. For example, they could be interested in photography, bringing much valued understanding of contrast and composition, or they could be passionate gamer, having an understanding about the world of gamifications that many applications these days have. It can be pretty much anything as any experience from real world helps us create good user experience.
Getting a new intern on board with the rest of the team is also very important. Even though new people fresh out of school typically have loads of ideas about how to do a project differently, they lack the necessary confidence to present these ideas. It isn’t easy to jump into a professional world and start sharing all the ideas they’ve always had but never spoke about.
This is why we want our new intern to come with us to London. We will take them to our London office, travel with them, we will stay at the same hotel and we will go out together for a pint. We will go together to a UX conference. That’s the fast track into our team, into our culture and into the UX world.
Head first, obviously!
Read more: http://london.lab.mobi
Mobi Lab creates exceptional experiences for people on the go. Our passion is to support the design community and it’s been a blast! We host Design Fridays, meet ups, and workshops. If you want to check out what we are up to visit our Facebook page or http://lab.mobi.
