UI/UX Design Internship
UI/UX Design Internship B3.1
Creativity and Aesthetics, User and Society, Professional skills
Throughout the projects and courses of the department, I always liked working visually and graphically. Within the curriculum however, I have not really had the chance to specifically focus on this digital side of design. Therefore, I chose to do an internship at Less or More; a digital design company that focuses on UI/UX design.
Since the activities and results from my internship are subject to an NDA, I can unfortunately not discuss those here. Therefore, I will go over my main learnings.
First of all, I have significantly grown in the professional skills and design research process departments. Working in a professional context helped me to develop clear communication skills where I learned the value of clear and regular documentation and alignment meetings. By intensively practicing and reflecting on our collaboration, my internship was characterized by a smooth process between the other intern and myself. To guide and structure my design research process, I learned how to work in a sprint-based manner by using short term goals to split up the overarching design challenge. To support me in this way of working, I learned how to use MoSCoW and start-stop-continues to set and adjust goals.
In terms of working and testing with users, I learned that there can be a massive difference between user behavior in a test setting and a real-world deployment. In other words, I learned that there is a difference in how users say they would behave, and how they would actually behave. When observing users in a real-world setting however, I learned that post-test alignment with users is just as important as the observation itself. Since we cannot see the intent behind user actions in observations, follow-up interviews should be used to validate our assumptions. Apart from the underlying strategy, I also learned about some simple and practical methods to test digital designs like heat-mapping and linear prototyping.
Next to using user-centered methods to design the UX for my assignments, I significantly developed my UI and graphic design skills. By learning about theoretical design concepts like information architecture and continuity, I no longer had to solely rely on my intuition for creating graphical interfaces. Throughout my internship, I learned to work with Figma and Sketch which are industry standard UI design software.
