What I learned from my UX design internship at Shutterfly
This summer, I worked as a UX Design intern at Shutterfly’s Commerce team. Together with a Product Management intern, we led the redesign of the ‘My Account’ dashboard to help millions of users to better navigate through our platform.
I still remember when I had the very first weekly one-on-one with my manager Bryna, the design director of the Commerce team, she shared a piece of advice with me, which was “to own your project till the end of this internship, so you could end this summer with something you can tell a good story of”. Looking back at the past three months, I fell in love with my project and explored every possibility to learn and grow as a UX designer. It has been an extraordinary journey that I can proudly share as the best summer of my life.
Communication — The Best Design Tool
As a designer, I always enjoy diving into the problem and perfecting the pixels on my own. It took me a while to learn that excellent communication skill was actually as crucial as excellent design skills. During the first week of my internship, I was so devoted to the competitive analysis that I spent hours every day working on my massive spreadsheet.
I did enjoy working in the flow state all day long which allowed me to generate my first round of recommendations rather quickly. However, when I looked back, I realized it’s a bit unrealistic for a full-time designer to spend so much time alone on this one task, especially when everyone has more than one project to work on at the same time. For designers, communication can not only help us express our ideas but also save us huge time to successfully complete a task. Whenever we are feeling stuck, communication is always our best friend.
During the summer, my major project was to redesign the account dashboard, the first page users would see after logging in. This busy page was filled with different modules, such as photos, projects, orders, account etc., by various stakeholders of the company, without a clear information hierarchy. The uniqueness of my project required me to constantly collaborate with different stakeholders throughout my design process.
Before I made any change to the current page, I learnt to proactively schedule meetings with PMs and designers from other teams to:
1. Understand the background of the current design
2. Inquire about the product strategy, metrics and what they want to improve
3. Propose a few new ideas
4. Collect their feedback
5. Follow up!
Do remember to follow up after you iterate or gather new insights from user research. As I interacted with more and more stakeholders, I found myself gradually improving on tailoring my communication to the right audience and asking more questions regarding the product strategy. My understanding of the overall company business was refreshed and deepened every day.
It might sound a little bit intimidating to open up a conversation with a senior manager you’ve never met before from another department. Instead of sending a meeting invitation right away, I often started by sending a short Slack message, explaining who I am, what I’ve been working on, what I want to discuss and politely ask for their availability for 30 minutes in the next few days. Some employees might be too busy to meet or on DTO, but it won’t hurt to ask and send over a small deck via slack or email to show what I want to propose and seek feedback. I was truly surprised by their openness to such “random” meetings at Shutterfly and their dedication to sharing their genuine feedback and experience with me.
A quick tip for scheduling a meeting: Be prepared & avoid lunchtime :).
For the rest of this summer, I learned to fully utilize communication as a powerful tool to deliver solutions efficiently. Here’s a rough “communication timeline” in a typical week of my internship:
- 1:1 with my manager: once
- Project Check-in with my project team: once
- UX Team Meeting: once
- UX Researcher Meeting: once
- Stakeholder Meeting: >twice
- Engineer Meeting: once
Besides those “official” meetings to showcase my design and gather feedback every week, I also spent a huge amount of time every day exchanging design ideas within my project team through Slack, emails and small design sprints. It’s important to get feedback as early and often as possible, no matter how “raw” your design looks like. Since the moment you proposed an idea, you’ve already taken a big step to solve a problem.
Know a Little More About Your Users
If I have to name one favourite part of this internship, I will probably pick those meaningful moments I spent with users. No matter how stunning a design appears, it can hardly be considered “complete” without solid learning from the users. UX design is a dedicated long-term learning process.
During our first card sorting session, we met a user who might be more familiar with our products than anyone in our team, bringing in a photo book she created through our website over 12 years ago. Hearing from her desires, frustrations and concerns in person brought us closer to the problems we had and guided us closer to the solutions. A month later, we invited her back to our research lab, presenting her our latest prototype and asking for her feedback. During the usability testing, she was so surprised to see her suggestion actually incorporated into the design that she kept asking when this new prototype would be live.
People keep complaining they don’t have time to conduct user research or they can’t see the immediate value of it. However, it is user research, if conducted properly, that saves us huge time from iterating based on false assumptions. As UX designers, we are the ones who should always strive to know a little more about our users. For me, it is learning from users that help me reinforce the value of UX design.
After talking to users face to face twice this summer, I was able to hear their voices, watch them interacting with our products and finally prove to them that we indeed input their voices into our design. When I saw the happy faces from users as they saw the new design, I haven’t been so proud of my role as a UX Designer in my life.
Thanks to our UX researchers who guided me through the entire research process, I was encouraged to draft the research plan by myself and invite users to the office to complete the tasks I designed. More importantly, I learned to get the whole team involved in the research process, from reviewing the research guide to taking notes for interviews. Besides designers and researchers, I also shared the research updates with our product managers and engineers to collect their feedback. User research is never conducted in silos. In fact, it is teamwork that facilitates the understanding of users from different perspectives and contributes to the right solution for users.
Explore the World Beyond Design
As a designer from a non-technical background, I found this internship a valuable opportunity to explore the world beyond design as much as possible. By attending some scrum, sprint meetings and brown bag sessions with engineers and PMs, I was introduced to the agile workflow and the end-to-end product development process. Working closely with developers also allowed me to learn different ways to make their job easier.
On the other hand, I was very lucky to receive hands-on training together with my PM partner to use Jira, Adobe Analytics, Optimizely and Fullstory. I learned to analyze the business performance of a product and incorporate data into my design decisions. By keeping myself updated with the cross-functional teams, I found myself more confident to get stakeholders involved in my design process and deliver more valuable solutions.
Special thanks to Sheila, for being my awesome teammate and the best mentor I could ever ask for; to Bryna and Elaine for encouraging us to take risks and supporting our decisions wholeheartedly; and to Tony and Tianmi for guiding me to better connect with users. All the great people I met at Shutterfly have taught me to cherish every important moment in my life and try to make them eternal. The biggest takeaway for me is, of course, to share life’s joy!
Thank you for your time to read my first Medium post! I hope you find these takeaways informative and helpful in starting your UX career. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any question or just want to chat:
