The mysterious six months of my design career
I guess everyone coming to my Linkedin profile has no clue what I was doing during my six months internship/trial work/just normal design work, as it turned out. You can't even imagine how many exciting things happened there. I wish I could tell you everything and show every tiny detail I created with all my passion and love 🥺💔 I wish. I could. But a non-disclosure agreement still binds my hands. So, unfortunately, my dear 14/15 or so features remained to live only in Figma files I have no more access to. And the one that saw the light came out looking a bit different from my design. I hope I could show you something someday. But for now I even can't show my mom what her little girl had been working on for so long (I'm dramatizing, but you get the point).
But down with sadness! Regardless, it was a fantastic experience. I met beautiful people, spent time doing what I love, gained confidence, and realized if someone threw me out in the middle of the ocean named "here is the work you know nothing about, swim-swim little one," I would swim out.
Although I cannot tell you everything, I can reflect on how it was and how I worked there.
I was working on creating quite a complex platform – Hunome, a new social network where people can try to comprehend the world better together by sharing thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and knowledge. And as I already mentioned, for all this time, I was toiling on many features for one product.
Attention! The text below may contain slightly boring information.
To add some details at least a little (otherwise, you may think that I made up everything), I will tell you about my workflow there. In a few words, it was pretty straightforward. In a few dozen words:
I took a task, studied it up and down, found the problem we were solving, and checked if it was worth our work at the moment or if it could wait (or if I finished all my current tasks, I just did everything else in a row from the list).
I researched, asked questions, benchmarked, and tried to see how other companies solved this problem.
Then I created the first design version, and shared it with others to get feedback, then based on that feedback, I added some changes to the design and improved it.
I always presented it at our weekly meeting with other departments to review the design and receive even more feedback. I loved these meetings. It was a perfect time to define some technical issues that could slow the design implementation and come up with cathing wording for a new feature (our CMO was brilliant, she did magic with words and I learned a lot from her 😍).
After this meeting, everything repeated in a circle: I worked on the design, and others reviewed it until we decided it was ready.
Then I handcuffed it to the dev team, but I stayed in touch with them if they had any questions. Pretty straightforward 😉
My work was more UI than UX, but I still participated in validation and conducted user interviews. Also, I hosted workshops for our team (sort of). That was an exciting and funny experience. I didn't do everything myself, but I had part of the workshop. And I learned from the best.
I wish you all coolness on this hot Finnish day. And if you have good weather there, then you are really lucky.