There’s so much to designing!
Introduction
In Summer 2022, I was given the opportunity to intern under the Government Digital Services (GDS) — Digital Design & Development (DCube) team as a User Experience (UX) Intern. Unlike some of the interns who had prior experiences in designing, this internship was my first foray into UX design. Although I was very new to the field, the team believed in me and provided lots of guidance along the way. They created a safe space for me to grow and with that I’ve slowly grew my confidence.
Read on, as I bring you through my experience working with the team over 3 months and share some of my key takeaways from this internship.
Meet My Lovely Team!
When I first joined the team, they were in the midst of launching an online application form for Short-to-Medium Term Assistance (SMTA) on SupportGoWhere. This is a partnership project with the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) to help applicants save travelling time as they no longer had to go to the social service offices to submit their applications.
Due to the nature of the assistance, eligible applicants would have to renew their applications to continue receiving the benefits. To further improve the application process after the launch, I took part in streamlining the renewal process by pushing out the auto-population feature as well as digitalizing the physical letter containing the assistance information. With such features, it helped to reduce the time taken for the renewal process and allow for easier access to the assistance information.
As I have joined the project mid-way, the team was super helpful in helping me get up to speed. They always checked in with me to ensure I was coping well. Their helpfulness and willingness to share design tips has helped me to quickly adapt to the team and pick up assigned tasks easily. I’m thankful for my friendly and supportive team members, whom I could always approach for help, when necessary. For instance, one of the designers in the team sat down with me to explain the past design iterations for a new feature. This helped to narrow the possible ideas, allowing me to focus on building on existing ideas instead of starting from scratch.
Besides that, my reporting officer, Eunice, always made sure to give me constructive feedback so that I can improve and work on my skillsets. She would take time off her busy schedule to share her thought process on why certain design decisions were made, helping me understand the project requirements better.
My Experiences and Takeaways
1. I enjoyed having autonomy over my work
As an intern, I am thankful to be given ownership over my work. This gave me a sense of satisfaction and achievement knowing that my ideas and end-product made an impact on the users.
I was also given the trust and opportunity to present my work to the MSF team and other stakeholders. It was a highlight of my internship! Receiving direct feedback from MSF also brought on new perspectives and considerations that I had not thought of in my designs. Such feedback sessions have helped me identify areas that I can improve on and trained me to be more meticulous to look at problems from multiple perspectives.
2. Multiple-edge cases
In addition, I also learnt that a simple enhancement may turn out to be more complicated than expected. There were many edge cases that we, as designers, had to account for. Edge cases are rare occurrences or scenarios that only affects a small percentage of the people. To account for such cases, some of the questions that were constantly in our minds were:
What screens should be shown during maintenance?
Are there any other user profiles that we need to account for?
For all these scenarios, my team had to design and map out the user journey, making changes on each iteration.
For example, in displaying assistance information, there were many user profiles we had to consider. Although it was not easy trying to cover all the edge cases, our hard work paid off after receiving positive feedback during our user testing sessions. Some positive feedback received from applicants include the ease of navigation of the interface, as well as the usefulness of new features that were added. Hearing these feedbacks gave me a sense of accomplishment and motivates me to create better products for the users.
Conclusion
All in all, my internship experience at GovTech was definitely an enriching one. On top of my supportive team members, I was also able to work with stakeholders and see how my designs come to life. It was truly an eye-opening experience to see how UX designers at GovTech put in so much effort to ensure their users will have a seamless and pleasant experience on their platform. I am super thankful and proud to be part of the team that designs such amazing products for our Smart Nation. Lastly, I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to those that helped me in this journey and making this internship a memorable one. Thanks for having me!
Looking to apply for a GovTech Internship?
Your opportunity is here! The team shared that they are hiring now and interested applicants can learn more about the programme at go.gov.sg/govtechinternship
All the best!
