Learnings from my Google UX internship during COVID-19
During the summer of 2020, amidst a global pandemic, I got the opportunity to intern at Google Design as a User Experience Engineer on the Cloud team.
Even though it wasn’t the ‘Big Tech internship’ you and I would typically expect — fancy offices, free food, sleep pods, massages et cetera, it was still the most productive summer of my life.
If you’ve read my articles before, you know that I wrote about my learnings from my previous design internship at Cleartrip, a travel aggregator company in India. It was an amazing experience where I got to own and ship a feature out to millions of users.
While thinking about what I wanted to achieve from this second UX internship, I had 3 main goals in mind:
- Understand a design-mature company’s approach to scalable solutions
- Empathize with an enterprise user group’s needs
- Network with UXers who are at the top of their game
Looking back at the past twelve weeks, I think I have achieved these goals and much more. So let’s dive into everything I learned this summer:
Embracing ambiguity
One of the most important things I learned this summer was to embrace the ambiguity of a problem space. Most UX problems are ambiguous by design, and for an internship, that is one of the things you’re being tested on.
How do you deal with ambiguity? Can you break a fuzzy problem statement down into actionable research questions?
I’ll be honest, I was a little flustered when I originally came across my problem statement. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize the actual problem behind a vague statement, but that’s what an internship is all about–the learning.
To deal with ambiguity and this enormous problem space, I started by talking to my colleagues and narrowing down the scope of the project. I set up some initial 1:1s with my manager and other leaders across the team to understand what was expected of me by the end of three months.
Setting expectations early on is a great way to be on track for success. Ask questions and identify key elements such as:
- Who are some of the important stakeholders impacted by this work?
- What does success look like for this project?
- How would you approach this problem statement?
- Why is this problem important to solve?
- How does this project tie into the larger goals of the product?
- Can this project potentially unblock other launches, increase revenue, or make our customers happier?
Through a set of initial 1:1s, I developed context around what this enterprise product was all about, what are some of the short & long term goals associated with it, and where my intern project fits in the bigger picture.
Working on a product inside a large organization means having countless stakeholders that are all working on multiple projects. As an intern, you have a limited time to make some sort of impact on the team. This is why it’s important to understand how your intern project fits in the initiatives your team has been working on already. By making them understand the value of your project, they are more likely to give you crucial product insights that you might’ve missed otherwise.
COVID-19 definitely made the initial brainstorming phase of the project harder, as virtual whiteboarding sessions just aren’t as fun as collaborating with your team in person. But I was pleased that it didn’t seem to impact the average Googler’s productivity by a ton. We were still able to come up with lots of ideas together!
Getting out of your comfort zone
I’ve always looked at internships as an opportunity to explore a company’s design culture along with your interests. My manager was great in terms of asking me about my goals and what I expected to learn from my summer at Google.
Even though my role was UX Engineering, I told my manager that I wanted to explore Google’s approach to iterative and scalable design. Having this discussion even before the internship started allowed them to tailor a project timeline for me that included research, design, and prototyping.
I started right from the requirement gathering phase — corralling stakeholders through interviews, conducting a competitor analysis, doing a literature review are all things that traditionally might not be expected from a UX Engineer. However, performing these tasks definitely helped me empathize with our users much better and helped me develop context around a product I hadn’t used before the internship started.
Getting feedback early and often
During my first two weeks, a lot of colleagues advised me to get feedback early and often on my progress.
As an intern, it’s understandable to want to make a strong first impression of your work and abilities. But given the short timeline of most internships, the team knows that it’s hard to get things fully right on the first try.
That’s why I personally made the choice to focus on rapid iterations during my internship. The idea was to start small based on my limited insight into the product, come up with some design ideas, and rely on the knowledge of my teammates to guide further iterations.
Reflecting back, I think it played out really well as I was able to go through five rounds of feedback that refined my design ideas through a combination of low & high fidelity mockups. The best way to satisfy stakeholder requirements is by incorporating the details of their feedback showing them that you’ve done your research properly.
Finding impact
Impact is one of the most important aspects of any UX project. It’s quantitative and qualitative proof of your work being useful to improve the usability of a product. But it’s important to be realistic about achieving impact from a summer internship.
The best-case scenario could be that your feature gets shipped within the next quarter and you are able to get statistics about its usage and engagement. But more often than not, shipping features takes time and isn’t possible within 12 weeks. There are countless design & dev review cycles that stand in between. This is why it’s crucial to understand the various forms of impact you can make during your limited time at a company. Impact isn’t just “shipping a feature”. It’s so much more. Think about it in these terms:
- Can the work you did inform the future direction of that product?
- Are the assets you created useful to other UX’ers on your team or the organization?
- Were the design concepts you explored well documented with stakeholder feedback?
- Did you improve the workflow of your team by introducing new plugins, adding documentation, building re-usable components et cetera?
Having these things in your mind can make you realize that there are many ways of making an impact on a team. One of the things I did during my internship was giving a live Figma Advanced Prototyping workshop to my UX team and teach them how easy it is to make prototypes that feel real and usable. The potential impact of that workshop was that it can change the way rapid prototyping iterations are done during design sprints, as UXDs would no longer be fully dependent on UXEs to build prototypes.
So, find alternative ways of making a valuable impact outside of the conventional definition, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised about the number of things you can do.
Leverage and expand your network
Every company has amazing designers that you can reach out to and build your professional network. The best trait about the UX community is that it’s a closely-knit mesh that has always believed in giving back. I used Cofolios OOO, LinkedIn, and Twitter to get my portfolio reviewed by countless designers. Some of them worked at Google.
To thank them for their time and catch up with them, I organized coffee chats with them during my internship. Even though their calendars were packed, I was shocked to see that no one ever denied a meeting. Everyone found at least fifteen minutes where we could talk about our experiences and design journeys so far.
Acknowledge the people who helped you get where you are!
I also reached out to some of the designers that I’ve followed for years to thank them for everything they’ve been doing for the design community! Having watched many of Yasmine Evjen’s design case studies, it felt amazing to be able to talk to her about what’s next for Centered.
So don’t be shy, and reach out to UX’ers across the company, even if they’re not from your team or you don’t have a mutual connection with them. Leverage the environment you’re in and make use of the access you have for the summer! Learn from their experiences, get advice about your career, and find out more about what their teams are up to!
Shipping features is an art
No matter how many UX projects you’ve done at university, it isn’t quite the same experience as working at a product company. School projects often don’t have the design constraints associated with shipping products in the real world. Design can’t be thought of as an ‘isolated’ piece in a larger puzzle. Your work needs to align with the business goals of a product and help in achieving quantifiable/qualitative improvements for those metrics.
Every product has a list of thousand feature requests they can build to make it better, but everything is prioritized based on how much value it can add to the user and the product. Intern projects are usually thought of as early explorations into future design directions, but if you find yourself working on a project that can have short term impact as I did, it can teach you a lot about what it takes to ship features quickly.
Here’s what my design process at Google was:
1. Work with cross-functional partners to understand requirements
2. Understanding the technical feasibilities of my designs
3. Knowing the priorities of the product triad, and finding its’ intersection
4. Finally, pitching a concept that can be bought by all of the stakeholders
Some of the things I personally thought helped me pitch and ship faster were:
- Leverage the existing design system patterns and stick to them as much as possible to avoid countless design reviews (unless there’s a clear need for a new pattern)
- UX your project itself and understand the needs & priorities of your stakeholders
- Work backward from the end goal of your project and chart out the path to get there in your timeframe
In conclusion, despite being a remote intern, my summer at Google helped me gain much-needed industry experience on how to navigate corporate culture, work within a large design team, and lastly, design at scale. Big thanks to the Google Intern Programs Team for helping more than 4000+ remote interns have a wonderful experience despite everything that’s going on in the world right now.
Reach out to me if you have any follow-ups, and share this with folks who you think will find this useful before their next internship.
