My experience being a UX Research intern during Summer & Fall 2022

Experience

During the past Summer 2022 and this current Fall 2022, I had the opportunity to intern at McAfee as a UX Researcher. I worked with a team of 6 other UX researchers within the Customer Experience Design Team. I had a great time and learned so much from this internship. I wanted to share my experience and key takeaways from this experience as a result.

*Due to NDA and confidentiality reasons, I am unable to share specific project details.

 

Info

Role

UX Research Intern

Timeline

May-December 2022

Projects I Worked on

I had the opportunity to work on 9 projects that fell under three domains:

  1. Visual Design - How does visual design influence brand identity and trust?

  2. Content Design - Is the wording intuitive to users and represents the brand?

  3. Accessibility - What accessibility issues are currently obstructing users who are blind from doing key tasks with our website, desktop, and mobile applications? How are these fixed issues working for users?

Check out some sample research projects I have done to your right.

Sample Research Projects

How My Skills Have Improved

This internship, the most beneficial thing that has helped improved my skills was receiving mentorship. From day one, I was paired with a Senior UX Researcher. Having a mentor has allowed me to get valuable feedback on my work and thinking as well as understand what the best practices with having a role model.

Fun

Although my internship was remote, I had so much fun still and got to know my co-workers at a deeper level, building trust, fun, and laughter. We met up for dinner and played virtual escape rooms and Gartic phone online and consistently set aside time weekly to have coffee chats to get to know each other further beyond just focusing on work.

Reflections on my internship

💡 1. Learning to over-communicate

With the company being primarily remote still and global with co-workers all around the world, I learned to over-communicate everything to ensure that we were on the same page, aligned, and knew what the next steps were. This not only helped to mitigate potential conflict but set expectations clear right from the start.

💡 2. People will resonate with different findings

When presenting research share-outs, one thing I noticed during our discussion afterwards is everyone took a different piece of the results away and formed their own opinions. I learned to present results as unbiased and neutral to prevent injecting any of my own unconscious opinions into the presentation.

💡 3. Uncertainty is positive

I learned early in this internship that there will be projects that are ambiguous and I will have to make a lot of decisions as to what I think is the best method or best path forwards. While uncertainty can be scary I learned that it is also a good thing and is okay. t’s okay to not know everything because this means you’re in an environment where you’re growing and learning

Thanks for reading! :)