What I Learned from the Product Design Internship with Minerva Project
What I did
The product design summer internship with Minerva marks my first experience working on a live product with a team of designers. The experience I gained from the internship spans the whole product design process — from user research, defining the problems, to using the design system, to ideating, prototyping, testing, and documenting the solutions. The breadth of the projects satisfied my goal to have hands-on design experience with shipping products from start to finish. It also built up my confidence to pursue product design as my career.
During the three-month internship, I worked on seven projects, the major ones including: redesigning the office hour information display and editing, creating the dimmed classroom self-view mode, updating components in the classroom interface design system. Throughout the internship, I led and executed the projects independently as well as meeting daily with the senior designer and joining weekly team design review session to discuss the design decisions I made so that my design was aligned with the product and implementable for the product team.
Check out the case studies I made for the Office Hour Center project and Dimmed Classroom Self-view project I worked on.
What I Learned
Design thinking is not a one-way path (#designthinking)
One of the biggest takeaways from my internship is that design thinking is not a one-way path where one just needs to go through the double diamond process a couple of times and call it a successful human-centered design. The iterative components of design thinking could, and sometimes should, happen at each stage of the design process. For example, when I was working on the office hour project, I did a divergent ideation session for the office hour information editor after having finished refining the modal version. Even though the ideation led to a page version that eventually did not get adopted because of its complexity and lack of integration from other Forum features, a divergent thinking at a local level towards the end of the design process helps me take a fresh look at the final solution and made final refinement that would have been neglected due to the cognitive fatigue from working on the same project over a long period.
Practical Empathy (#audience)
Product design often concerns projects that facilitate communication, whether it be between users or between the users and the business. For example, the Forum Office Hour information is communication between instructors and students about when/where/how to meet for office hours. To make this communication more seamless, product design requires even more perspective getting and empathy to ensure that the solution is effective. Before this internship, I thought that getting the perspective of users necessitates surveys or interviews as early and often as possible. In the perfect world where there are time and resource constraints, that would be ideal. However, more often than not, projects have deadlines and users would not always want to participate in interviews every three days to go through the iterations. Therefore, I developed a more realistic sense of empathy — while it is important to keep the decisions evidence-based, not every piece of the evidence needs to come directly from users. Secondary research on consumer psychology and well-experimented design principles is useful in guiding my design. Other information such as my own experience with products, feature requests could also serve as supporting evidence to move projects forward and reserve the user testing section to when it is necessary.
Getting creative with constraints in a cross-functional team (#constraints, #utility)
The constraints in the projects I did over the summer taught me more than empathizing with users in a different way. Throughout the project, my manager would remind me to have the boy scout mindset instead of the perfectionist mindset — leave the place better than you found it instead of trying to make sure everything is ready to fly. When working on a huge product such as Forum, there are a host of problems that the team needs to address, which requires prioritization and scoping of each project based on its priority. Most of the projects I worked on are medium-sized, which meant that the engineers would not have a lot of time and resources to implement them. This meant that I needed to cut down some features in my project that I thought were beneficial. Even though they were indeed beneficial to users, the cost of implementation would outweigh the benefit. Moreover, even though a comprehensive solution is optimal from the designer’s perspective, the drastic cognitive change that comes from the comprehensiveness might overload the users, decreasing the user experience consequently. Initially I saw these constraints as barriers to comprehensive solutions. However, as I tried to combine features and generate more ideas based on the resource I was given, I was able to consider the preferences based on different stakeholders’ perspectives and leverage constraints as a drive to creativity–prompting me to come up with solutions that achieve more with less.
User research method is not one-size-fits-all (#induction, #interviewsurvey)
As I worked through different projects — some involving improving existing features on Forum and some involving creating new features never before seen on Forum — I learned that even though I am conducting interviews with the same number of users, the insights that I can draw from the statistics would be very different depending on the types of projects. For usability testing, based on past research and best practices shared in the design community, I could be sure that testing with 5 users would uncover most of the issues that need to be addressed, guaranteeing the inductive power of my research. However, when I wanted to explain that 50% (3 out of 6) of users would want a new feature, I needed to investigate whether the users I chose for interviews are representative of all the Forum users to increase the generalizability of my conclusion. To make sure that I am interpreting the user interview insights feasibly, I need to have a clear research question and consider the type of research I am conducting as well as the type of data the research needs before conducting the interviews.
Nudging behavior with design (#nudge)
A successful product design would motivate certain behaviors without users necessarily being aware of it. In standardizing the editor for the office hour projects, I decided to give walk-in sessions and appointment sessions the same level of importance instead of prioritizing one over the other because both students and instructors told me that appointments are more efficient even though the default option right now seems to be walk-in sessions. By giving the same weight to both types of OH sessions, I was able to change the default option to nudge the users to a direction that makes OH sessions more efficient.
Being professional, confident, and responsible (#professionalism, #confidence, #responsibility)
Every Wednesday during the internship was our design review day, where I would meet with Cody and Matt, the then design director to go through all of our projects. I learned from the sessions what it means to take ownership of my projects and present my work with confidence. In the first design review session, I would use “we”, as in Cody and I, when I was presenting my work to Matt to sound more persuasive. After the meeting, Cody gave me feedback that I should refrain from using “we” and use “I” instead because I was the one making the final design decisions even though I would take in his input as well. I learned that one professional standard in the design world is being clear about the role I take in a project. What I did and what I did not do should be easily distinguishable. I needed to take ownership of my project and base my confidence and credibility on my research and iteration based on the feedback instead of resorting to ambiguous use of language that would wrongly shirk the responsibility. Moreover, from the design review, I learned that a professional designer would humbly seek out feedback and encourage and empower other team members to feel comfortable to participate. While it is important to be confident to present the findings, it is equally as important to acknowledge the room for improvement and proactively engage the teammates to brainstorm better solutions.
Overall, I think that this internship broadened my understanding of the responsibility of a designer. It is not just about creating a solution, but also about engaging stakeholders — whether it be users, engineers, or fellow designers effectively to reach a solution that is conducive to team success and product success.
Special thanks to Cody and Matt for creating an empowering environment for me to learn. :)
