A Design Reflection — Invaluable lessons from my UX internship at Juniper Networks
As a designer, your first internship is one of the most exciting milestones you will come across. And when this experience is during the times of a global pandemic, the opportunities and challenges are multiplied. Needless to say, my internship at Juniper Networks is the best way I could spend my summer. Not only did the internship allow me to explore the many facets of my creative freedom, but it also helped me develop myself as a responsible and dynamic designer.
While working as a design intern at Juniper Networks, I got to design network solutions using the latest technologies, develop my design strategy through a comprehensive feedback and iteration system. The internship allowed me to gain insightful experience in the design industry and its requirements. Working in a closely-knit team allowed me to enhance my communication skills and team-building skills, while constantly helping me improve my design. Though the learning experiences have been countless, this article is an attempt to document some of the most important skills I had the opportunity to develop during the internship.
Break it down, right from the start
Working at Juniper gave me a closer sense of professional world experience in contrast to working at my graduate school. Sometimes it was required of me to work on fresh ideas from scratch, while at other times, the task at hand needed me to build upon the existing design libraries and guidelines. It can be very easy to get confused and overwhelmed by the jargon of the technical industry and what you are expected to work on. The first and foremost important thing learned was to write down what I understood and what needed more clarification.
Pen and paper first, design later.
While a design concept was initially explained, the initial thought as a fresh designer was to immediately jump into it and start thinking in terms of solving the problem. To complicate matters further, the remoteness of the situation reduced my white-boarding and sketching habits. But, upon much reflection, it was a gradual realization that as important as it is to design something and think in different directions, it becomes essential to really be sure of what you understood and if it was right.
Design Process is not linear. Initial Sketches are meant to be rough and messy.
Writing one’s thoughts down, sketching initial ideas, making task flows on that piece of paper helps one gain better clarity of the product and the direction to head next. You might initially feel that jumping directly to the digital platform is okay, but it is with the experience that one soon realizes that this step might end up delaying your thought process. I believe that you will be able to think better and have a lot more clarity after having a few pages of scribbled and messy sketches.
Know and accept your assumptions.
We often hear from many experienced designers that knowing one’s assumptions helps us in designing a product better. But, it was only during my internship that I realized how important it was to understand and accept our assumptions. While we were designing a topology view for one of the dashboards, we thought that a drill-down approach would help any user identify the problem easily. On the contrary, speaking to the Lab Engineers and Tenants we realized that they follow a more bottom-up approach where they would like to see the exact alarms and notifications and then trace back to its source. A top-down approach might be more helpful if someone is monitoring the data at a higher level.
I was very surprised to hear their feedback and realized that up until this point we were assuming that all users behave in a similar way when it comes to finding the alarm and tracking it down, while there were two approaches involved. We tweaked our design to cater to both these cases.
Iterations are a part of the design cycle, get used to them.
While working on my project, I ended up re-iterating my first hi-fidelity screen four times. Then, I received three rounds of feedback to create a version ready for development handoff. Every iteration improved the detailing of the prototypes making it more clear and easy to navigate from its previous version. You will be surprised by the variety of valuable feedback you will receive from fellow designers, developers, and product managers. Iterative design not only helps in making the product better, but it also allows for rapid resolution of misunderstandings within the team and brings out more clarity across the table.
Seek feedback early and more often.
This ties back to my previous point of an iterative design process which involves feedback from the team and stakeholders. An ample amount of feedback to understand the implications of our design and how it is perceived across everyone in the team is the key to a successful product. This pushes our design towards a more fine-grained and polished product by getting a design critique and improvements.
At Juniper, we used to have weekly design sharing sessions where team members would share what they are working on, answer questions across the team, and get feedback.
Design critique sessions help everyone to be on the same page about what is being designed, while at the same time helping the designer in thinking from different perspectives.
In conclusion, design critique is an essential skill that every designer should learn and practice more often.
Be open to ideas, but learn to question them.
As mentioned in my previous point, it is very important to be open to feedback and new ideas. However, in a fast-paced environment, it becomes important to understand if the feedback is worth working on. One of the important things I learned while working at Juniper was to back my design with its rationale. As much as it is important to know the rationale, it becomes important to explain the rationale and weigh the feedback against it.
If I would receive feedback that says “Maybe you should use a carousel instead of static images”, I would ask “Why do you think that we need a carousel? Do you think it will improve user engagement or will just be a distraction?” One of the excellent questions asked in a team meeting was “If you plan to hide this element as a feature, how do you ensure it is discoverable when needed.” As a designer, we need to be open to ideas but more importantly, we should also be able to question those ideas to derive valuable insights. The goal of critique is for designers to make intentional decisions.
Communication is pivotal in a remote design internship.
Communication is generally considered the key to good design and a better strategy. But when the internship is remote you need to be more proactive in exercising this skill. Although the long meetings and endless discussions seem very daunting at times, lately, it made me realize that having these discussions is what improves our thought process and makes the design space clearer. It helps us understand different perspectives across the team at large and how we can better cater to both user and business needs.
If we fail to communicate our design, it might not be accepted. Design is a way of communication.
Having debates and discussions is a part of the job at every workplace. It is only meant to refine the product and bring out the best from everyone. During my internship, design to development handoffs used to have a lot of questions where both designers and developers had to sit together to resolve the issues. It was only through efficient two-way communication, we were able to move ahead in the product life cycle. That being said, communication becomes an important trait to climb up the ladder of becoming a successful designer.
Showcasing your work is an important part of the process.
Our presentation shows much more than our work. It depicts the way we think and approach a problem. During the initial weeks of my internship, I was very conscious about presenting my work to my team and pushed to get the best design done in the first working session. I remember my manager saying “It’s okay, just show us whatever you have. It does not have to be perfect.” This made me realize that showing some work that is imperfect at an intermediate step is always better than showing no work at all.
You are not expected to deliver the best design in one working session.
It is the feedback that you get and the iterations that you make on your design, that turns into a finished product. While the first version can be messy, the final presentation reflects our thought process and the workflow. It shows our aesthetic sense, the attention to detail, our ability to engage a user, empathy for stakeholders and the design, and our UX skills, and so on, all of which eventually adds or subtracts to the actual work we do. Therefore, presenting your work becomes an important trait to climb up the ladder of becoming a successful designer.
Looking back, the internship experience has helped me learn and grow a lot. It taught me to work under constraints and strike the right balance between business and user needs. I learned that the ultimate value of design is strategic, but the way to get there is tactical, yet empathetic at the same time.
If you want to chat more about my story or anything related to design, drop me a line on LinkedIn.
