My role: UX Design Intern
Duration: Jun-Aug 2022 (3 months)
VDS - Verizon Design System Team
(Principal UX designer, 2 Lead UX Designer,1 Senior UX Designer,1 Mid Level UX Designer, 1 UX Design Intern, 6 Developers)
Figma, Slack, Miro, Asana
Over the summer of 2022, I worked as a UX Design Intern at Verizon. During my 12-week internship, I worked on various projects for Verizon business and Verizon Design System. Since most of these projects are close to public release/shipment, I want to share a high-level overview of my learnings and takeaways. Overall, I dived into four different areas of design during my internship: prototyping, UX research, visual design, and interaction design.
Due to the confidentiality of this project, I cannot present the visuals or elaborate how does the product work. If you are interested in learning more about this project, feel free to reach out at preetiponkiya14@gmail.com.
I had the chance to work on many different projects. These projects ranged from small components or landing pages to bigger projects that impacted the entire design org or business at Verizon. The following projects were my favorite and I had the most fun with them.
1. Design System
I owned VDS Brand 3.0 from conception, auditing, iteration to delivery.
2. DU Page Design
I scoped, iterated and designed customer-centric experiences for DU page.
Since confidentiality of these projects, I am unable to share any more information about the project publicly. Please reach out to me for the password!
Majority of my time was spent collaborating with data engineers, developers, Product Manager, UX Researchers, and UI designers all from different backgrounds. I took action by scheduling my own meetings with stakeholders to get the feedback that I needed as well as conducting research to validate my designs and make sure that they were feasible and accessible. This gave me the opportunity to improve my decision making skills and apply my customer-first thinking to backup my design decisions.
During my internship, I had the opportunity to get involved in elements design for design system. It gives me the chance to learn how to utilize design system and its limitations. Design system can not only speed up designer's work - but it also facilitates developers' work. More importantly, it benefits users too - lower associates' training cost, lower their memory burden and the possibility of making mistakes. But design system also has its limitation, sometimes in order to follow it, we don't choose the best solution. That's why balancing between following patterns and meeting user's needs is crucial and difficult.
I learned to proactively seek for critique, but also make sure to be confident in my own design decisions. After every meeting with stakeholders and my team, I received a lot of valuable feedback from different perspectives which made it challenging to apply all the feedback into my designs. Throughout my internship, I learned to advocate for my final design decisions and make informative decisions based off of research and talking to customers.
Not only did we work hard, we also played hard. We had a boba making session where we made tapioca pearls from scratch and milk tea. We critiqued art together, played lots of skribbl.io. I formed close bonds with the people and built relationships of full of trust, fun laughter.
Intern Finale Event at Verizon
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