GE Internship
Working on the agile product development for an internal training tool.
*During my internship, I worked on the administrator’s version of an internal training system. Here, I will briefly present one of the 3 projects I worked on. I can't show the final design, but I'll explain the project goal, timeline, key challenges, and takeaways here. If you're interested in knowing more about the process or outcome, please feel free to reach out!
Project Goal & My Focus
The overall goal of this project is to help training managers and HRs create online survey more smoothly and quickly. Currently, there is no entrance to access all surveys. My task was to design the main features and the information architecture of the survey center. As a result, training managers can collect feedback more effectively and thus help improve the training.
Step 01: Understand different user groups
After my initial research, I figured out that there’re two types of people who are using the survey function: training managers and HRs. Although they all use the survey function to collect feedback from the employees, they have different goals. For example, training managers focus more on the course quality and HRs focus more on the learning outcome. As a result, I created role-based personas to help me synthesize.
Role-based Persona
I used the persona constantly throughout the project to guide my design decisions, prioritize design tasks, and develop a clear picture of whom the design of the new survey function would target.
Step 02: Host design workshop as the only designer in team
During several meetings after I started the design process, I figured out that the engineers in our team don’t have much experience collaborating with a designer. Thus, I had a hard time seeing they were not developing what I’ve designed.
As a result, I discussed with the manager to host a design workshop with the whole team and explain to them how the design process looks like so that the whole team can be on the same pace before moving further.
Step 03: Co-design and iterate
I worked with one product manager and two engineers to do whiteboard session and design iterations. Each week, we met with the client and hosted co-design sessions.
Step 04: Went above and beyond the requirements
Through my research, I found that beyond requirement, there was a huge need of independent surveys (not affiliated to any training). I made a recommendation to my project leader that we might want our system have the function to create independent surveys so that training managers don’t have to turn to external tools and thus will help company save money.
I got the OK from the PM and we communicated with the customers with our new prototype. The results were that we got very positive feedback from the customers and they said it was really helpful if they can do all surveys within one system.
Reflection
The most important takeaway of this internship is that it helped me learn how to collaborate with different people (PM, engineers, clients, etc) in an agile development team. I learned how to express and explain my ideas to people who may not share the same design language with me.
It’s a really fun experience and I’m glad I received many positive feedback from my colleges saying that I brought many new methods and ideas to the team.
