Internship Overview 

In the summer of 2019, I worked as a Product Design Intern for Barron’s Group at Dow Jones. I was integrated into weekly design sprints, working closely with other designers, software engineers, UX researchers, and product managers to successfully deliver digital experiences across financial, market, and luxury real estate news platforms. I also participated in the Dow Jones Hackathon, collaborating with three other interns to develop an internal tool using customer data. Due to non-disclosure agreements, I’m unable to provide all the details of my work, but please contact me to chat more about my experience this summer!

Deliverables  

Takeaways

• A beautiful design is not always the most practical. At the beginning of my internship, I was extremely focused on crafting aesthetically pleasing UI. However, after working amongst developers, I quickly realized that there were several technology constraints and factors to consider that I did not face with my own individual projects. When I designed multiple different versions for a feature update or new experience, I consistently conversed with a developer in order to gauge an idea of the general code they would have to expound upon. I also initiated discussions to better understand which solutions would be the most technologically feasible.

• Acknowledge user variability. There are inevitably individuals more likely to engage with a platform based on the specific content a site covers. However, I realized the immense potential these platforms have on reaching various different users with unique backgrounds beyond an intended audience. Thus, in brainstorming sessions, it was important to consider how different components, features, pages, etc. may be adopted and employed by unintended users in unexpected ways, which can actually serve as verification for certain design decision.

• Set specific goals. After conducting UX interviews regarding the homepage functionality of a site and participating in the analysis, which included affinity mapping and persona development, I realized that there was a lack of cohesive insights due to the broad goal set at the beginning of the interviews. Yes, we were able to observe that users successfully completed tasks and generally enjoyed their experience on the site. However, it would have been valuable to have had a more profound conversation with stakeholders to establish certain metrics and detailed behaviors they wanted to analyze through these interviews in order to actually make informed, effective design and business decisions in the future.

• Get feedback early. When assigned a design task, I realized the value in presenting skeleton wireframes to product managers in order to ensure that my work aligned with a vision. Often times, there was not enough information initially presented to fully complete a design task. Yet instead of spending an excess amount of time working on a final version that could have been inadequate, I set up regular check-in meetings to show a rough design early in the process and was able to derive more refined requirements, which led to more efficient work flows.  

• How to balance designing on brand and my own creative freedom. I had to quickly familiarize myself with each brands’ standard patterns, styling, and layouts and incorporate them throughout my work to guarantee that my designs would be cohesive with the rest of the sites.

• The power of prototyping. I worked on a newsletter journey experience that had various stages depending on the type of user engaging with the platform. As it was a bit complicated to digest, I saw an opportunity to prototype each experience on Figma in order to better visualize the paths that the specific users would take. Doing so allowed us to notice gaps and overlaps within certain stages and experiences, which ultimately led to a decrease in the tech load for this specific project.

• Stick to “high level” information when presenting. I experimented with different ways to communicate information after multiple stakeholder presentations. In order to establish my credibility and keep my audience engaged, I learning to focus less on unnecessary details and rather the higher level material that any person without a design background could understand.