Design Your Perfect UX Internship
By: Workday Design
Tags: Ux Internship Advice, Design Internship, Ux Intern, Design, Career Advice

How can a junior designer with limited work experience have the UX internship of their dreams? That was the biggest question on my mind before I started as a design intern at Workday. I figured out the answer over the course of the summer: Design your perfect UX internship using as many tools as you can put your hands on.

Approaching the Unknown

When I accepted my internship offer, I knew that I’d be coming in as a designer with very little hands-on experience in the industry.

In fact, I had more background in user research than I did in design. Up until that point, I’d only worked at startups where I was the only designer, cultivating unhealthy work habits in an environment where I had no creative mentor.

Most of all, I realized I had no idea what to expect out of my design internship.

As I sped on the highway from my university to Workday, I had to ask myself, “What did I want out of these next three months?”

Why Design Internships are Important

To start things off, I needed to understand my motivation for pursuing a design internship. To do this, I revisited the insights I had heard months earlier when talking with real designers in the community about building their careers.

Working as an intern is the best way to gain hands-on experience and prepare yourself up for a full time job. UX Internships provide you with the structure and foundation you need for your future career, by giving you opportunities for mentorship, networking, and resume-building.

In fact, companies also use internships as a test drive for future hires in their pipeline. While an interview can add to what an employer knows about a person, an internship will also help that employer evaluate how they would fare in the actual workplace.

Internships are also an opportunity to learn more about yourself. In fact, an internship should be a test run for you, just as much as it is for the company. It’s an opportunity for you, as a junior designer, to decide whether this is what you want to pursue for the rest of your life. It’s the chance to learn about potential strengths and weaknesses in the workplace that can either propel you into rapid growth, or impede it.

There are many different types of internships, but in a product design internship, you are a technologist. A scientist. An artist. A creator.

And only you have the power to make the most out of your experience.

In fact, by harnessing the creative tools and frameworks you might normally use, you can craft your best UX internship and control exactly what you get out of it.

The Double-Diamond Approach

Everyone’s experience as a designer is different. In your design education, are there tools you’ve used that you might see yourself using in your internship?

In my design classes at UC San Diego, I utilized a wide variety of tools in user research, information architecture, and interaction design to complete my assignments. A lot of these same methodologies, specifically interviewing, user testing, and wireframing, were extremely useful in how I tackled my projects during my internship at Workday.

One of the most important concepts I put into use was the Double Diamond Approach, where I used convergent and divergent thinking to tackle design challenges. I was excited to use this as a framework for designing my best UX internship experience, especially after finding out that Workday also uses the double diamond to guide its innovation process.

The Double Diamond is founded on the four phases of discovering, defining, developing, and delivering. This framework, developed by the British Design Council, allows designers to map where insights diverge and converge along the journey of the design process. It’s a flexible way of thinking that can be used in product design, service design, or in this case — to design your own career!

In fact, this is one of several tools that can be used throughout each of the four phases to help you to design your perfect UX internship. In this article, I’ll explore when and why to use some of these:

In the discovery phase, you can use personality tests and rapid ideation to do research on yourself and identify objectives that are important to you before your internship. In the defining phase, you can narrow down on the goals that mean the most to you. In the development phase, you can find opportunities and take action during your internship to make your goals a reality. In the delivery phase, you can reflect back on work done over the past months and understand your next steps after the internship has ended.

Take Time to Get to Know Yourself

“What kind of personality do you have? How do you work with others?” Ask yourself these questions before you enter the workforce and before your start your internship.

In my case, I had no experience working in a big enterprise company; I mostly had a background in design classes where I was working solely with designers. As a result, I was nervous about working at a real company and building real products, where I would need the help of more than just my fellow design students. How was I going to communicate to developers the importance of specific features in my designs? How would I reach out for help from product managers who knew the enterprise domain better than I did? Maybe I needed to know myself better.

After researching different personality tests, exercises, and worksheets I used to hone in on my strengths and weaknesses, I discovered there were many different personality tests out there, such as Myers-Briggs, the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, and the Big Five personality traits test.

One great way to get to know what kind of UX employee you’ll be is by taking the True Colors test (Image content via: Don Lowry, 1978)

Ultimately, I chose to take the True Colors test, an exercise that would help me understand how my strengths, personality, and characteristics build how I react to planned and unexpected situations.

In my case, as a person who was Blue, I realized I had a much more relationship-oriented work style. Described as enthusiastic and idealistic, I have a strong desire to motivate, interact with, and influence others. Though I had experience working with other people in school projects, this test helped me come to the realization that I was an emotionally driven individual who valued collaboration and creativity.

In fact, it’s important for any budding designer embarking on an internship to take one of these personality tests. Collaborating with people is essential for success at any workplace, especially at Workday, where we value close relationships between our product managers, designers, and software engineers.

While we design and advocate for the user experience, the developers build the technical foundation for our creations and the product managers keep us all consistently aligned with our company’s business goals. At the same time, we have diverse backgrounds and working styles. Getting to know ourselves better is the first step in helping us understand how others are different, how we can collaborate together with these differences in mind, and how we can leverage our complementary strengths for seamless teamwork.

Let Your Strengths Define Your Goals

By letting your strengths define your goals, you can use what you already do well to empower yourself, and continue working toward how you see yourself in the future.

Who is it that you want to be in 3 years? In 5 years? And what are some of the qualities you already have now that can push you towards realizing your aspirations?

Setting goals for myself before the internship helped me think strategically about how I wanted to design my perfect experience from the very beginning. That way, I could hit the ground running on my first day at the office, and be on the constant lookout for learning opportunities that would bring me closer to meeting my expectations.

Sticky notes are a tool you’ll use everywhere in design ideation — why not use it to design your internship, too?

I brainstormed possible goals in true designer fashion: with sticky notes.

In my own sticky notes, I put down goals, such as making new friends, honing my visual design chops, and delivering a ready-to-ship feature by the end of my internship.

Even though it can be hard for you to consider your own strong suits, an easy way to get yourself thinking is to lay it all out, rapidly and without pause. Using sticky notes can help you generate potential goals and ambitions without internal judgment, and your result is much more substantial.

As an incoming hire, some of the objectives you might prepare for yourself during the course of your internship can include learning a new tool, refining a skill you already know, or attending a special event or conference.

Stay Focused by Narrowing and Articulating Your Goals

Once you’ve identified all the possible goals you could achieve over your three months as an intern, you need to narrow. What is it that you really want to prioritize? Is there something high on your bucket list that you could probably finish within these three months?

The defining can feel like a bullseye: What is at the center of everything that is important in your UX internship?

Designers have multiple tools to narrow. These might include narrowing your sticky notes with a 2x2 matrix, asking a How Might We question, or defining key business goals or metrics for success.

I chose a bullseye exercise to prioritize, ranking my goals by importance. In fact, the sticky notes I placed in the middle were what I saw as the biggest opportunity for my own growth.

Although I wanted to use this internship to meet new people and improve my skills in visual design, I also knew I had to focus on one goal. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to work toward shipping my designs by the end of the summer, making a lasting impact on the product even after I left the company.

However, it was really important to articulate my goal clearly, in order for me to reach success that would be meaningful and attainable. By digging deeper into my needs as a junior designer, I was able to use a Point of View statement to focus on my motivation for wanting to ship products, and the main challenges in doing so.

Point of View statements are a great way to focus on motivations and what fuels you.

I knew my biggest strength was my enthusiasm for solving problems through design. I valued turning design-thinking into design-doing, and because of my extensive background in human-computer interaction, I’ve always been interested in pushing for experiences that would create value in people’s lives.

As a result, when it came to defining my main goal for the summer, I came up with the following statement:

I need a way to effectively communicate my design decisions to stakeholders, because I want to make sure the designs I ship are impactful and purposeful.

Grab the Chance to Build Up Your Areas of Development

One of the best ways to explore potential learning opportunities during your internship is to revisit what you identified as your problem statement, and rapidly generate ways you could tackle any challenges that might block you from reaching your goal. As an intern, you’ll be able to find learning opportunities everywhere you go, even if they’re outside of work.

Up until my internship, I only had previous experience working with designers. I had grown comfortable with just listening as other people talked around me. I had trouble speaking up and voicing my opinions. I became complacent with letting things happen without fighting for the best user experience.

So, I met with my manager at the beginning of the summer to talk about what I wanted to work on. I treated this weakness as an area for potential improvement, and as a result, my manager mainly put me on projects where I was the only designer — projects where I had to push for the best user experience.

In fact, my biggest weakness became my greatest learning opportunity.

Although my weakness was properly justifying my design decisions to product managers and engineers, I knew that my main strengths were my enthusiasm for solving real-world problems and my willingness to collaborate with others. As a relationship-oriented individual, I knew that building rapport with stakeholders through design-thinking exercises and reviews would be one of the best ways I could get my point across.

To take advantage of spending my summer in a bustling tech hub, I took the effort to make as many connections as I could. In addition to working closely with my team on my intern projects, I bought tickets for events held by Designers + Geeks, attended tech talks given by Salesforce, and even played games with Facebook employees in Dolores Park. Developing a network and talking with other professionals enabled me to feel more confident about expressing myself and putting my ideas out there in my internship.

Reflect Proudly on the Work You Deliver

Revisit your strengths every time you feel far away from your goals, and you will continue to be motivated.

At the end of your internship, look back on the areas for improvement you identified earlier in the summer, and see how far you’ve come in the past three months.

Journey Maps are a great way to reflect on your UX internship to track the progress you’ve accomplished.

In fact, a great way to reflect on your experiences is to chart your own journey map. Doing this will allow you to reflect on your three months from the perspective of things that went well, and things that went not-so-well.

At the end of your internship, it’s important to recognize your achievements.

For me, my weaknesses were being able to defend my own design decisions to stakeholders who were busy looking out for other aspects of the product development process, like technical constraints and a customer’s immediate needs.

At the beginning of my journey as an intern, I could see more pain points centered around establishing myself as a designer on my projects. However, as time went on, these lows became less and less prevalent, and there were more highs when I met with success and overcame obstacles.

At the end of the summer, I had a share-out to the whole UX team with the other interns, and it was an amazing experience. By looking back on a summer’s worth of happy and sad moments, I could not only acknowledge my strengths and accomplishments in the workplace, but also identify opportunities that needed future improvement. The previous three months became an experience that helped me form goals and learning opportunities for my next role as a designer.

But All Good Things Come to an End…Or Do They?

Three months will pass, and hopefully you’ll have fulfilled many, if not all, of the expectations you set for yourself. But what comes after the internship?

A lot of great projects came out of my time as an intern, but my best project was the experience itself — the 3 months I spent learning how design works in the real world.

By tuning into my existing strengths, I used my knack for solving problems through design to understand where my confidence lacked. By tackling my weaknesses head-on, I spent my summer working directly with engineers and product managers, acting as the main advocate for meaningful user experiences in all my projects.

Having made a great impression on my manager with my goals and growth, I was able to come back to Workday the summer after my internship. It’s been over a year since I started working full-time as a member of the Generation Workday program, and I can confidently say that my designs for the perfect internship were a smashing success.