As I’m doing this internship, The most concern I had was that I’ve never studied UX design before. But working with a founder and other designers helps me understand tasks and how each process gets done to make a website.

I have learned that UX design requires more logical and thoughtful strategies compared to other types of design such as editorial design, logo design and branding. You have to be very mindful of the flow and overall user experience. It also includes business aspects, often required to work with someone who knows what need to catch the attention of the users or how to market things. 

I worked with a group of web developers in Vietnam and I think it was one of the most challenging part of the whole internship. I would instruct them on screen design.

I struggled working with them so much because they knew nothing about design. The things we worked on hard were gone when they worked on it and sent us back the htmls. EX) tracking, leading, spacing between each element, and the charcoal text color which we specifically chose would all be written in pure black. All these may seem very small but as we know as designers, things like that make a huge difference. So I had to instruct them on these things. After checking all pages of the htmls, the developers worked on back-end which is a process of linking each page to make it work as a website. It still took a while to get this stage done, because our website is kind of complicated since there are three types of users; parents, educators, and both parents and educators. So for some screens it can be seen differently depending on the user. This made the developers very confused. We delayed launching the website for 3 months, mainly because of the developers, but I am so glad that it is out in the world now.

I got to work directly with a founder through each design tasks. This was very helpful for me in translating and elevating the brand’s vision and user experience. I always got to know the problems in the website immediately and what she wanted in design to achieve certain goals.
Also, getting to be in a real work environment is a fantastic experience. Unlike school, there are a lot of restrictions to consider, such as; budget and technical availabilities. Learning how to work around these issues and still producing great outcome was an excellent challenge.