1 Year Interning at Puppet
A year of valuable lessons
When I first secured a UX design internship at Puppet, the word pandemic was something rarely used. Now it’s a keyword in our vocabulary. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, my placement experience has certainly differed in comparison to what I originally expected. I worked from home for all of my placement instead of being in the office but this helped me develop new skills such as proactiveness, organization, motivation and balance all from the spare room in my home. My goal for my placement year was to fully immerse myself in this experience. I wanted to deeply understand the needs of Puppets users, develop greater confidence in UX disciplines, and learn as much as possible.
At Puppet, I worked in a UX team with 10 other designers who are mostly based in Belfast and Portland. I was welcomed fully into the team, being treated as a valued member and not an intern. When first joining Puppet I felt like an imposter, I knew nothing whilst everyone around me appeared to know everything. However, by asking questions I overcame gaps in knowledge and familiarised myself with terminology. I learned not to be afraid to ask questions and to keep investigating until I understood the answer which helped me get to where I am now. I’m now a confident UX designer who understands Puppet products and the end goal of our users.
I’ve learnt so many lessons at Puppet that I will carry with me throughout my UX career until the end. Here are a few:
Understand your problem
To provide a solution you’re going to need to break down the problem to understand it. I think this is the most important part of the design process, if you don’t know the problem you won’t know what you’re solving and if you don’t know what problem you’re solving then how do you know you will be making useful design changes and avoiding bad experiences?
Design isn't always about how things look
A lot of people think being a ‘UX Designer’ is just making things pretty. However, making a product pretty isn’t enough to make it successful, it must serve its purpose and provide users with a great experience. You need to always ask yourself, “Is the product doing what it needs to do and meeting the users' end goal?”. If the answer to that is yes then a pretty design is a bonus.
Be confident in your own judgement
If you are thinking it, odds are someone else is too. Something I regret doing during my internship is holding back on saying my thoughts and opinions on something. 99% of the time when I didn’t speak up, someone else did and said exactly what I was thinking but I doubted myself. I‘m slowly learning to become more confident in giving feedback, it’s a learning curve but I know I’m getting there with experience.
Don’t cling to your ideas
Just because you have an idea, doesn’t mean you can’t test assumptions and be open to suggestions.
“Strong opinions loosely held”
This was a phrase that was used frequently by Rick Monro, my mentor throughout my internship. We live in an imperfect world and to try and improve upon concepts and develop them is human, it’s what we should do to provide users with the best possible experience! Don’t stick with your first idea and run with it, instead explore your options, listen to others and improve upon your ideas!
Become a great storyteller
Storytelling in UX is important as it allows for everyone to have a shared understanding of what they are building and the audience that they are creating it for no matter how complex the idea is. Storytelling makes the problem clear, tells us how this problem was investigated, what the user needs and then if solved, what was done to solve the problem. If you don’t use the storytelling technique you could end up making the mistake I did one of the first times I presented, which was jumping into a scenario and no one understanding what I was talking about!
When presenting my work whether this is at a small team meeting or Puppet demos, I’ve learnt to provide context and tell a story about what I’m presenting.
My final goodbye as a Puppet intern
A year at Puppet has provided challenges, opportunities and continuous learning whilst working remote during a global pandemic. I now feel confident in stepping out of my comfort zone and approaching challenges to define problems. This is all thanks to the amazing UX team in Portland and Belfast as well as all the other Puppet employees that I’ve been collaborating with and working alongside who made me feel like a valued team member from day one. They were always there to lend a helping hand whether it be a question or detailed feedback and I feel privileged to have worked with them.
I would like to give a special shoutout to Rick Monro, John Murray and Melissa Casburn. Rick took me under his wing from day one and has left a mark on me as a UX designer due to his infinite design wisdom, it was a privilege to be mentored by him. John Murray was my buddy throughout this experience and every zoom we had left me feeling encouraged to improve upon my skills. He was always there when I needed him for valuable feedback or a good laugh. Melissa was my manager and always made sure that I was getting the most out of my placement year, she encouraged me to be an investigator and be the best I could be, it’s so evident how she cares for everyone she works alongside including myself.
I am looking forward to reuniting with everyone when I return to Puppet next year. However, for now, final year of university here I come!
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Email: hello@emmacorbett.design
