Product Design Internship Story— A trip to the land of OYOpia
💫 Highlights from my product design internship with the OYO design team
I‘ve been with OYO since September of ’21. I had quite an experience working here and I’m going to tell you all about it.
The start of something new ✨
The online state of my college due to the pandemic allowed me to apply for internships, so I prepared a portfolio and started reaching out to companies via LinkedIn. I also cold-emailed some of the employees of the companies that I wanted to work with. Luckily, I got a call from OYO. Then after 3 interview rounds and 10 days of waiting I finally had the offer letter in my mailbox.
The timing couldn’t be any better ✨
The team was upto something big. They had just started building an entire design system and I got to be a part of this! OYO design is currently in a state of a total renewal. And as a designer, there couldn’t be a better learning opportunity.
The Work at OYO ⚔
Every weekday, skipping Monday, the team meets at 12 noon for a quick stand-up. Perfect for normal people who want Mondays to start a little later!
There are 2 major divisions, namely, the Consumer side & the Merchant side. Luckily, I got to work on the projects concerning both the departments. These were the projects that I majorly worked on;
1. Micro-interactions & animations for the consumer mobile app & desktop site
I worked on this task with my manager & the director of product design, Rajat Kashyap. What started for me as a benchmarking & competitive analysis task, took a drastic turn when a unanimous decision was made to trust Rajat & me with the responsibility of creating all the micro-interactions.
Every interaction was built from scratch. We would spend hours learning how to introduce real-world physics into it. The most challenging & interesting part was meeting up with the developers and finding out ways to implement our designs.
Vaibhav Chaudhary, Rohan Deshpande, Eshu Kalra, Rajat & I would sit for hours, go through countless feedback sessions and meetings to make sure absolutely nothing was being overlooked.
Tip : Have a habit of making an exhaustive list of all the use-cases.
2. Conducting usability tests & research for the consumer app in India, US & China
I worked on this task with the director & head of product design for consumer side, Sandeep Parashar. I recommend you to check some of his case studies as I learned a lot on UX research and its importance while working with him.
The best part was that not only did I get to apply & test all my theoretical knowledge of UX research, but also that I got to do it on a global scale. I can’t explain the excitement I felt in talking to the translator for China’s product team and walking her through the test we had designed!
3. Conducting usability tests & research for the Realisation hub on the Merchant platform
I worked on this project under Shekhar Kadam, who’s the Director Of Product Design & User Experience. Conducting user research with the Hotel Managers as our primary target audience was a whole new game! It was extremely challenging to understand and categorise them into different personas. Moreover, it was so important to prevent usability from being compromised while building everything in the new design language.
Luckily, I also had tremendous amount of help from Himanshu Jani and the project was completed successfully.
Designathons 🧩
Each quarter, the design team takes 2–3 days off from the regular work to shake things up a little bit & compete in a hackathon. Groups are formed and each quarter the competition gets more intense. This is the best time to wake up the experimental side of our minds and just brainstorm on problem statements without worrying about your regular work.
We would be asked to turn down any work related call to focus on the hackathon !
Time away from the virtual desk 🎳
On ordinary days the team would meet up on a zoom call occasionally to play Scribble, Geoguesser, etc. But then there were not-so-ordinary days where an offsite meet-up was arranged by our wonderful team.
This was my first time meeting everyone in person. The nicest set of people I must say! We had a lot of fun just hanging out, going out for lunch, competing hard in the bowling alley, Go-Karting, and ending each night with some karaoke and drinks.
My 10 Months long internship 👩🏻💻
’cause it just didn’t feel like looking around for something else. Let me explain why.
You are not just an ‘intern’ here 🙅🏻♀️
You get to work and take a lead on critical, challenging and impactful projects regardless of your designation. Which was huge for me given it was my first internship.
I faced a lot of challenges and made many many mistakes but thanks to my managers I could complete all the projects successfully. This brings me to my next point;
The mischief was always managed 🔮
You are encouraged to learn and make mistakes here. I mean, if we were perfect from the start wouldn’t we all be directors of design instead of interns? Not just the manager but anyone from the team was always there anytime I got stuck and needed help.
No-meeting-Wednesdays 🚫
It was introduced for us so we could have one day in a week to focus solely on our work and not get carried away by endless meetings. Our calendars would be blocked for the whole day and we could turn down meeting requests unless it was necessary for the progress of our work.
One-on-ones 🤜🏻🤛🏻
Each member has monthly one-on-one sessions with their respective managers and the Program Manager. The session was always a safe space to communicate your needs, problems and your ongoing experience in the company.
The acknowledgment ✨
The team never fails to acknowledge & appreciate the efforts you put in. It’d always encourage me to keep working.
They even have their Award Ceremonies!
Key Takeaways 👩🏻🏫
There were quite a few takeaways for me from this internship:
1. Communicate
You have to always remember that your work is never your work alone. In a company of this size, your work has a dependency on other people/projects and vice versa. Hence, it is important to keep everyone on the same page at all times. Which requires clear communication.
2. Understand the time constraints
It is extremely important to keep track of the deadlines and the progress of a certain task. Once you do that, it’ll become fairly easy to develop the art of time management. If you ever get confused or even forget the deadlines just ask your manager, and communicate!
Tip: Take it one week at a time. Listing down your targets for the week makes it easier to track.
3. Understand your limitations
You are invincible! But also a human & humans have certain limitations. Hence, you need to avoid over-commitment to a project. Always take a buffer when asked to provide a timeline. And communicate right away when your estimations go wrong. No one will kill you or worse, take your job away! Trust me. People always understand as long as you are being honest towards your work & give your best.
4. Take breaks
Don’t get too absorbed by your work that you forget to take out time for yourself. If you don’t, you’ll just end up burning yourself out which will do your productivity more harm than good.
5. Have fun
Internships are the best time because you have the flexibility to make mistakes and learn from them. So, don’t get too much into your head. Just try to enjoy yourself and the rest will follow.
I hope this article helped you get an insight into not just how the OYO design team works but also what to expect from a product design internship. If you too want to be a part of the team, we’re hiring!
