Being the first ever Product Design intern @ Sumo Logic
During the summer of 2017, I worked as a Product Design Intern at Sumo Logic, a late-stage startup that offers a cloud-native machine data analytics service for log management and real-time insights. Over the period of 13 weeks, I worked extensively on context-aware experience around interactive dashboards and complex data visualizations, in a cross-functional team of designers, developers, and product managers. By the end of the summer internship, I had delivered three major end-to-end features in the core product focusing on search, filters, permissions, alerts, and reports for representing petabytes of machine-generated data. In fact, two of them were in the beta version of the product by the time I had to wrap up!
The project was scoped for the summer interns and I was the first ever design intern at the company. I was working with Software Engineering and Product Management interns on one of the core projects that soon became a fully-fledged project by the end of summer. As the sole designer, I was given 3 major epics. After preliminary brainstorming and business strategy sessions, the PM intern and I realized that our project scope was much wider and a lot had to be done over the summer. After a series of meetings with the Product, Design and Engineering teams, we rescoped the project and got started with it all. My takeway was that being the only designer on a project has its own share of excitement and challenges. And that’s what makes it super interesting!
My work involved all of it — brainstorming, competitor analysis, creating user stories and task flows, taking design decisions backed by research and design principles, prototyping and shipping designs. I have to say that it is exciting to be a part of the end-to-end flow in the product development lifecycle, especially as an intern. Throughout my internship, my team was extremely supportive and gave feedback during the design critique sessions. We conducted 6 user testing sessions including both internal and external customers. I used tools like Sketch and Invision for prototyping and for micro-interactions, I used Framer.js.
That is exactly what I have been waiting for!
As a designer, those words are golden. It is gratifying to see users extremely happy. You feel like a superhuman who solves problems.
This is how I summarise my internship experience:
Since the product deals with petabytes of log data, with trillion records and data from a plethora of sources, creating a unified experience becomes a challenge. Some of the questions that I had to address included:
How to represent different types of data? What are users’ expectations for different types of data?
What should be the default behavior across datatypes? How is this change going to affect users’ existing mental models? Are the new features discoverable?
How should a user navigate to the search page? Should we run parallel queries and present a subset of data?
How will a user react when using this product at 4 AM in the morning when their entire system goes down?
Apart from all this, I was involved in the concept design for a product feature. In other words, feel free to work on anything you are passionate about. During my time at Sumo, I have been a part of 2 User Experience Paloozas (design swarms spanning 2 to 5 days where the entire UX team sits down together to solve one specific problem within a larger project, either at the workplace itself or a remote place). The team decides to do these in fancy places — one was in Palo Alto and the other in San Francisco. For these design swarm sessions, the team invites developers and product managers to ensure things move faster.
During the course of 13 weeks, I understood how design works in a fast-paced startup in the enterprise world. I have learned that creating designs that represent petabytes of machine-data for varying user expectations and different types of data needs a whole different thought process. I thank the design, product and engineering teams for their support and making it an extremely fun and productive summer at Sumo Logic!
Watch out for the “fun things” at work in my next article — Interning at a Silicon Valley startup
