My UX design internship with Riot Games
Behind the scenes from the perspective of one of Riot’s Player Platform UX interns from the 2023 summer program
Hello! My name is Vicky, and I am entering my last year at the University of Waterloo’s Global Business and Digital Arts program in Fall 2023. This past Summer, I was able to work at Riot as a UX Design intern, and I’m here to share some of my insights with aspiring interns of the future. Prior to completing my internship with Riot, I completed a 8 month UX design internship with a tech startup in Toronto and that was about it in terms of professional qualifications.
I made it into Player Platform’s Commerce “initiative” — which, as turns out, is a lot more than just processing your credit cards — and got to work on a proprietary internal tool as well as a not-so-secret-once-it-releases project.
With this article, I will provide you with a glimpse of my experience as a UX design intern, the interesting lessons and takeaways I had through working here, and some tidbits for future applicants.
The intern recruiting experience
During my recruitment process, I had 4 rounds of interviews. The first round is a phone call with the recruiter (shoutout to David for being the GOAT) to talk about your resume experiences and about your interest in gaming. Contrary to what many believe, you don’t need to be the biggest fan of Riot to work with them, as long as you have an appreciation for games and the gaming industry.
The process to hear back the first time took a month, and scheduling my interviews took another month. This happens because of the large amount of (global) applications the University Program team has to process and evaluate. Use this period to prepare your materials for the upcoming interview rounds should you get to the next stage of the recruitment process.
Preparing your Portfolio Presentation
I spent most of my time building my presentations (I didn’t have one before my recruiter call) and most importantly, practicing my presentations on a live audience! It makes so much of a difference in the energy you can bring when you are confident and familiar with your material. Remember that you will have an hour to present, so prepare 2 projects to talk about! For those building their very first presentation, aim for it to be around 15–20 minutes long and I usually set up my case study presentations in the format illustrated below. However, these are just suggestions if you have no idea where to start. If you have a more engaging idea on how to present your project, don’t feel limited by this approach — there’s no “right” answer, just many paths to a great story.
Behavioral Interviews
Riot’s interview process included 2 sessions of behavioral interviews (typically just asking you about your past experiences) with different designers asking common interview questions that occasionally had a twist. For those interested in preparing for these interviews, I would recommend thinking of 3–4 strong stories that have elements that align with Riot’s values before the interviews. The interviewers put in a lot of effort to make you comfortable and I found them to be very amicable and understanding of the pressure that interviewees are under — if you need time to think about your answers, let them know!
I think what made me successful in my interviews was being down to Earth and having a positive attitude about the obstacles I had to overcome in my stories.
Craft Competency Interview (AKA Portfolio Review)
The craft competency interview happened between the 2 behavioral interviews. It was an hour long interview where I was asked to present case studies and showcase my designs before answering follow up questions about my design decisions. I would recommend preparing two 10–15 minute presentations since it’s very hard to use a whole hour on 1 project. One of the projects I decided to present was a school project (this link also has my script attached in speaker notes). Hopefully my presentation helps future applicants set a bar for what’s expected at the craft competency stage.
And remember, just because a personal project is completed, doesn’t mean you can’t add on to it for a presentation after. Retrospective edits are just as valid.
My onboarding journey at Riot
All interns were remote in 2023 (I envy you, on-site interns from the future) and as a result my orientation happened from the comfort of my couch. However, we were told about an exciting offsite at the LAX campus where interns could experience all the magic Riot Games Los Angeles campus could offer (NOMS!).
Riot provides interns with managers and craft mentors to work with throughout their internship. My manager helped me join the right channels and provided me with a thorough onboarding itinerary full of people I should meet. We also engaged in weekly one-on-ones to talk about my work, transitioning between projects, and overall how I’m feeling. I was lucky and got 2 craft mentors — Senior designers you work with on projects with — who I worked with on a day-to-day basis and would go to with project-specific questions.
Week 1
On day 1–3, we were introduced to the university team, who emphasized that for the duration of onboarding we were expected to do absolutely 0 work and to focus on the orientation goals. Riot really really emphasized employee wellbeing through its orientation topics, with imposter syndrome being the most memorable for me.
We got to learn more about Riot’s beginnings, how it plans to achieve its goals of being the most player-oriented company, meeting Marc and Brandon, and the security protocols we were expected to follow. After orientation it was meeting with our managers and getting synced up to the team rituals (weekly meetings). My manager was absolutely amazing and had set up an onboarding itinerary for us that gave us a list of people to meet, documents to look over, and the general timeline since I would be working on 2 projects across 3 months.
Week 2
At the start of the second week I was able to meet my mentor and start my project onboarding. This involved going through the background of where this project came from, its current state, and what needs to be completed. This project was designing an internal tool, so its work process resembled more of the fast-paced iterative workflow you would see in a startup than the traditional UX process.
By the end of week 2 I had a version of my first feature ready to go through several feedback sessions with the users, our engineering team, and upper management stakeholders. This project was interesting because the users were niche specialists that exist only within Riot. It was definitely a very unique project that was heavily defined by the twists and turns of Riot’s existing systems. Wrapping my head around where we exist within this system (and where we stop) was one of the biggest challenges with this project. I was able to overcome this by spending the majority of my second week combing through documents and asking questions rather than hammering out screens.
Week ???
Because I had 2 projects that are to be worked on separately, at some point I had to transition into my new team in early July. We spent the first week planning the timeline of what I would be doing for the 4 weeks and how to get things done. With 4 weeks left in the running and 1 week dedicated to having fun on campus, you would expect the time pressure to be immense. However, I really wasn’t stressed by it because of the incredible support I received from my team and my mentor.
Lessons and Takeaways
Take time to make meaningful connections
We were encouraged during orientation and throughout our internship to make as many connections at Riot as we can. We had several options to meet new people, such as through Riot’s Inclusion Groups (RIGs), our onboarding buddies, and Slack Donuts. Asking for one-on-one meetings is one of the easiest things to do at Riot as an intern. Everyone I talked to actively made time to talk to me and offered me assistance if I needed it during my time here.
One super awesome experience I would recommend all future interns to do is to join a RIG. While the RIG I joined didn’t have any events that happened during my internship, the support I received from my RIG buddy made navigating Riot’s massive networks so much more manageable. This support is also very evident post-internship as I still keep in touch with many of my peers at Riot.
Be passionate about the problem, not the design
The internal tools project I got to work on was a very good lesson on not hyper-focusing on one design. Due to the nature of designing software for an internal role at Riot, we worked closely with our users and primarily aimed to start discussions with our designs. This means whatever I made last week might have reminded them of a certain constraint that we haven’t discussed before and now it’s back to the drawing board. Being passionate about learning about the problem(s) and curious about working around new challenges helps create products that users are excited to use.
While a lot of my work on this project is unlikely going to be the final version, it has left a sizeable impression on future iterations because of the clarity it brought to the problem space. Sometimes your version doesn’t ship, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t impactful.
The importance of low-fi
Something unique at Riot is that they separate UX design, visual design, and UX research, Riot also has an article that explains the different design career tracks available at Riot. As a UX design intern, my primary goals were identifying the problems, designing a low-fi interface, and conducting usability tests. Something that was emphasized to me was to make sure that our work-in-progress files looked like they were work-in-progress when showing them to others. Details can distract users during testing and might not receive the most open-minded feedback from other designers if they feel something is polished.
Alignment at Riot
In a casual intern meeting with the player platform higher ups, it was emphasized that:
Alignment. Is. Key.
And UX designers play a key role in gaining alignment from users, stakeholders, engineers, and even other designers by providing a catalyst for discussions with their designs and artefacts. How do you gain alignment? Documentation and collaboration.
We did a lot of documentation on all the work that we did on all sorts of platforms so that we can better explain our ideas depending on the party we are talking to. For example, we used:
- Miro to collaborate on higher-level ideas with groups that aren’t familiar with Figma
- Google Docs for those that are interested in looking more in depth at the project (e.g. if they are taking over our projects)
- And of course, our Figma designs with annotations to help grant clarity other designers and engineers on our ideas.
Alignment is an ongoing journey of putting effort into engaging everyone involved in the process to make meaningful contributions. When you involve a variety of folks from different disciplines and teams, they can help you identify problems early and make a product that is both exciting to use and make.
Conclusion
I loved my time at Riot, and it’s been one of the most memorable chapters in my life. One of the biggest things that I got from my time with them was the de-abstraction of what it means to have good life balance and raising the bar for what I expect out of the workplace environment. I have previously completed an 8 month internship at a Toronto tech startup, and the experience at Riot was a whole different world. To be a part of Riot and experiencing the way people here collaborated, the company-wide drive towards being player-focused (A UX designer’s dream), and how interns were celebrated was incredible.
I wish all applicants luck in the upcoming and future application cycles — Riot will be one of the best internship experiences you’ll have — and I also wish my fellow interns the best of luck on the return offers.
