My internship experience at Veritas
When I embarked on my journey as a Human-Computer Interaction grad student coming from an Information Technology and Animation background, I was raring to start my career as a user experience designer. Needless to say, I was excited when I received the offer to work as the UX Design intern at Veritas Technology.
While academic projects let you explore design ideas and push technology to its limit, working on an industry project provides different challenges and lessons than the one learned in the safety of a classroom environment.
My internship experience helped me grow as a designer, challenged my design thinking, and helped me understand how design fits into the bigger picture. I was able to broaden my understanding and prepare myself with the skills required for my UX career ahead.
At Veritas, I worked on designing the experience of managing backup images through their flagship product; NetBackup. This internship experience helped me a lot and today I would like to share my reflections on the past three months.
Context is key!
When it comes to design, you often get caught up in the smaller details and forget about the context. Because of this, you end up designing something tangential to what you set out to make. It’s really important to understand the design problem and user behavior. Furthermore, once you start designing it’s important that you design a solution that fits in the ecosystem rather than design one that stands out egregiously. This might mean that you have to design something new that doesn’t follow the set guidelines when the context demands it.
Although my internship revolved around a topic I am familiar with, the underlying context was something I still had to study to understand. Relying on documentation, user feedback, and domain knowledge experts made me understand the context of what I was going to be designing for. Understand the users, the design system, the business goals, stakeholder’s needs, and engineering constraints. This will ensure that you are mindful of the design context. During my internship, I maintained a log of the terminology used, important concepts applied, and the documentation on the functionality offered by the product; all to make sure I formulate a good understanding of the design space.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions
Learn how to sync up. You only have implicit knowledge, as an intern, you need to rely on the knowledge of others to build something useful. Although you might be supplied with existing documentation, you still need to speak to senior designers, engineers, product managers, and testers to form a complete picture. This will mean you will have to ask a lot of questions. The questions might seem a bit silly at that time but when you are asking the right kind of questions you might be able to reach the root of the problem that you are trying to solve.
Whenever you are presented with a problem to solve, you should always ask ‘Is that really the problem?’
To give you some context, my project revolved around bringing an existing functionality that relied on using a combination of Command Line Interface and a Java GUI version of NetBackup and bringing it to a modern Web UI. While some of the functionality was to be automated in the future, I had to design an interim solution. There were a lot of discussions about providing a workaround solution to the functionality to copy while sharing a hold on backup images because of the limitations of the existing solution. However, by questioning the objective and the sustainability of the interaction pattern that was to be built, we were able to narrow down the scope of the interim solution so that we built only the necessary components.
Design is not your baby
As a new design intern, you often set out to prove yourself. This means challenging the existing design and spending a lot of time getting that perfect first screen. Often in this process, you end up favoriting the first few concepts you developed. As someone who has been in this position a lot in the past, I can say with surety that this is highly unfavorable! We all get attached to our ideas. In this process, we become unable to accept any feedback regarding why it won’t work and what’s currently missing. We fool ourselves into thinking that we might have the perfect answer to the problem space that we were working on only to realize that that’s not the case. This effect is usually amplified when you showcase your designs to the stakeholders too late in the process.
When I understood this, I remembered a professor talking about adopting a beginner’s mindset. When you adopt a beginner’s mindset you become more open to challenging your biases and you learn how to accept feedback. This makes you question things that you might have already assumed to be true and you start to look at things from a different perspective.
Iterate! Iterate! Iterate!
One of my key learnings this summer was generating a lot of concepts through iterations. This was mainly due to having to deal with a complex design space wherein satisfying all possible use cases while being mindful of the engineering constraints could have dampened the user experience. To tackle this problem, I made sure that I advocated for user experience and brought forth a multitude of perspectives through concept generation.
The best way you can polish your design is to get early feedback and validation from stakeholders such as senior designers, product managers, developers, and users. While you might not get something that’s perfect on your first try, constant feedback and iterations will ensure that you get there eventually.
In my project, I iterated on concepts using storyboards. The storyboarding showed a broad range of concepts to the stakeholders while presenting my ideas in a narrative format. These storyboards, which were cheap to develop, acted as a jumping-off point and helped facilitate discussions with stakeholders. Stakeholders were more willing to give me feedback as they felt comfortable doing that when the designs were shown in low-fidelity. By having multiple rounds of iteration, I ended up with a solution that closely matched the workflow of the user.
Building a strong Design Rationale
With every new change that you introduce, you change the experience of the product. Thus, it’s really important to have a strong rationale for the tiniest thing that you are working on including the color of the interface.
Throughout my internship, I had to defend the idea that I built by showcasing a strong design rationale. This rationale was developed through a thorough understanding of the design space and by learning the design language of Veritas. Learning these two things helped me develop the rationale of where I should be using the existing components and where the context demands me to design a new one
For example, some of the questions that I used to question my design were:
Why would you pick a stepper flow which is perceived to have more clicks than a tabbed layout?
What’s the best way to show the user relevant information while also giving him control over his tasks?
Communicate your ideas
During the last week of my internship, I got the opportunity to present my project to the Creative Director at Veritas along with the entire customer experience team.
I got to work on my oratory skill and build a presentation that would help people understand the context of design and explain the work that I did using examples. To be honest, this might have been one of the more challenging parts of my internship experience. Having your design put out there for everyone to critique while anticipating and answering difficult questions about your design is nerve-wracking. However, by building a strong rationale for the design choices and being aware of the limitation of resources, I was able to provide a holistic idea of where the project was and what the next steps should be. I was able to get some good feedback from people who attended.
While the classroom environment gave me the much-needed design vocabulary and methods that I might need for my career, the internship allowed me to try out my skills in a practical space
I feel fortunate to have had this opportunity to work with the Vertias Design Team. I met some wonderful and helpful people along the way. As my first UX internship during my graduate education, I feel I got the learning experience I was looking for. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Thanks for reading! I’m currently back at Indiana University Bloomington to continue with my second year of the M.S. in HCI/d program. Feel free to get in touch with me on Linkedin.
