What it’s like to be a UX writing and localization intern at Gympass — so far

Hey you all! I was an intern at two companies before and I can tell you: the experience is never the same. Of course Gympass is no exception. I’ll tell you about the whole beginning and what I’ve done so far on a Global team! Shall we? :)

HR process

I’ll pass quickly through this one only to talk about the phases and people involved in it. Since the first contact everyone was receptive and excited to meet me and have me on the team. I have no word better than welcoming to describe this whole experience.

This was my process for UX Writing and Localization Intern:

1. Interview with HR
2. Interview with the UX Writing Lead and UX Director
3. Case study — I received a UX Writing challenge and I had one week to do it and send it to the team to evaluate. Everything was done in English and sent by email.
4. Interview with Product Directors

Onboarding

During the onboarding process all new employees are introduced to the values and focus areas. SPOILER: as new people are from all over the world, the onboarding sessions are presented in English. Yes! We have contact with different cultures since day 1.

There were presentations about each one of them, explaining everything we need to know about the company. It helped me understand each focus area, the business model, and the corporate values.

We also received a getting-started guide to help us get through our first 90 days! Basically for the first 30 you are meeting everyone, getting along with your team, creating accounts (Google, Slack and other tools), reading a lot, and exploring everything possible before you actually start working. I really like this approach because you can do everything at your own pace. Every day my leader was like “Hey, Ane, you don’t need to rush, take your time”, and that’s true! It takes time to understand how everything works, so relax, no one is rushing you to do it.

The next 30 days is about starting to get your hands dirty. It’s so nice to see something you did taking shape, you know? Even with the help of others on the team it is still your experience!

Last but not least, the next 30 days is about continuing to make small deliveries and contributing to bigger, long-term projects.

Some of our values

• Constructive collaboration
• Focus on results
• Live the mission

We have 11 values that I’m so proud of and these 3 are my favorites. Constructive collaboration is about trusting one another and working together. We listen to each other and consider every idea and suggestion. We really take this seriously and I can see it everywhere.

Does focus on results need an explanation? As our culture hub says “We do not sit and wait for things to happen, we make them happen. We believe in setting clear goals, then executing relentlessly to achieve results.” I love that we work to always deliver the best.

Our main goal is making wellbeing universal, so of course we encourage our people to live our mission. We value an active lifestyle because we know that physical activity is transformative. It’s so nice to see how everyone embraces that and shares what they are doing with the whole team to encourage them to do the same.

Team

Our UX Writing team is distributed in squads but also works across other teams. It means that we are able to work on so many different projects and areas, always making the texts consistent with our voice and tone.

3 of us are from Brazil, 1 from Italy, and 1 from the US. How do we communicate with each other? Using English as the main language! That’s why advanced English is so important to join our team, so we can understand each other. At meetings and presentations, we use English to share opinions about our work and to build flows (I’ll talk more about this below).

The experience is really amazing. I never imagined I could work at a company in Brazil that uses English as the main language! I always loved English and I even finished a course when I was younger, but nothing compares to this. As I don’t have the opportunity to do an exchange right now, other countries came to me (it’s a way to think about it hahaha).

We don’t just work together, we talk about everything! Especially at these moments, we can see how other cultures are rich. I learned terms that I never heard before, also terms that we are taught in Brazilian courses that they don’t even use in the US, for example.

Obviously everyone understands that English is not our native language, so it’s a safe space to practice because no one will judge you if don’t understand something or pronounce it in a different way.

The UX team even has “Chapter Day”, it’s a day that happens every two weeks when anyone on the team can make a presentation about anything in life! It can be related to work or not, for example, we already had a presentation about a colleague’s experience at the Google Office in California. Basically, it’s a fun way to practice our English and share a nice thing with everyone.

Did you get excited? So did I! Keep reading because there is more!

Tasks

I’m so excited about what I’m doing, mostly for three reasons:

• I’m learning a lot of new things
• I’m practicing everything I learned from courses and articles
• I’m free to do the tasks by myself (obviously with the team checking what I did later). Because honestly, you don’t learn everything from doing courses, you need to work on something real and learn by practicing, like I’m doing now.

I came to Gympass with only personal projects and what I learned from my previous work. So it’s really important to have that chance to develop myself.

UX Writing

Well, almost everything is new to me here, especially because each company has its own process. At Gympass there’s a lot of steps that help to improve our deliveries and keep consistency.

I work at DOTS, a team focused on developing an internal platform, so I work on copy with the Product Designer responsible. Ok, I can say she is my pair and I love it! We exchange so much information. Here’s how we do it:

1. Meet to understand the purpose of the screens
2. Create a task on my task board (at Gympass, we use Jira)
3. Think about the text and make updates on Figma
4. Discuss my suggestions with the PD. If she agrees, I’ll move to the next step, if she doesn’t, I’ll go back to step 3
5. Ask for opinions from the other UX writers
6. Deliver the task if it’s ok, if it’s not, we discuss new solutions

Localization

Do you know the difference between translation and localization? Translation is taking a word or phrase and putting it into another language. Localization is translating a word or phrase into another cultural context.

For example:

English: Someone tried to sign up using your personal info. But since you already have an account, you can use the app to log in.

Portuguese: Identificamos uma nova tentativa de cadastro com seus dados pessoais.

Mas você já possui uma conta e pode acessá-la agora mesmo, direto no app.

If we just translated literally, the Portuguese message would be understandable but would be not written the way we usually speak, you know?

I’m also responsible for localization tasks, so I’m the one the other writers ask when they need the text they did in other languages. It’s an amazing job to think how we can transform a term in English to Portuguese in a way that’s easy to understand.

Walking through my daily routine

Well, this is how it usually is, of course it can change from project to project.

1. Check my email
2. Check Jira for any new localization tasks, and start the translation process with our vendor
3. Keep working on ongoing projects in Figma
4. When it’s finished, we move on to “Writers critique”, this is the time when the other writers on the team will see and review what I did. If everything is fine, we can say it’s done, but if it’s not, we discuss and talk about how it could be done or why another solution is better

This was a super short version. I always talk with my team to understand the questions, think of suggestions to improve processes, share constructive posts that I saw somewhere, participate in meetings to practice English or just to chat about something one of us did.

In general, what is it like being a Gympasser?

Being a Gympasser is learning a brand new thing every day, it’s always being proactive and willing to help the others. It’s embracing our values and putting them into practice to make the company an excellent place to work. It’s understanding that we are all together working to achieve an incredible purpose: making wellbeing universal.

You can be part of it too, see our available positions!

Did I make you curious about working here? You can reach me on Linkedin! Let’s talk more :)