Nearly two and a half months ago, I wished my coworkers goodbye and concluded the second of my two UX internships at Amazon. Today, I’d like to share a bit about my experience interning there and why I won’t soon forget it.

When I remember my experience, I immediately think of the novelty of it all — the work, the city, the people. The next thing that comes to mind is Amazon’s design culture. This was my first professional experience working at a company with an established design culture. It was so much different than any personal or school project that I had been involved in.

Designing in a team is miles different than designing alone

I distinctly remember the onboarding experience during my first Amazon go-around. After rushing over from New Hire Orientation, I found myself sitting at lunch with my manager for the first time. Over Korean bowls and local food trucks, I remember telling her of how I was known as the human garbage can back home.

Back in the office, I met my mentor, who I’d eventually share heavy metal conversations with, and the coworkers who still continue to guide me to this day. During both my internships, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with not only some of the best designers, but also some of the most enjoyable people out there.

New to my knowledge, was the design that’s possible from a collaboration of designers,rather than a team of one. In many past projects I’ve worked on as a student designer, the teams were often built with only a singular designer, maybe two developers, and usually a single project manager.

While this format works for the agile development process, I learned that it shortchanges the UX process immensely. By only having one designer on the team, iteration is a foreign concept, because there isn’t anyone else on the team to critique your work from a design perspective.

This stage of critiquing and then iterating the design with my team was perhaps the stage that I spent a majority of my time on during both of my internships. During these weeks iteration, the team and I continuously cycled through designs and slowly crept towards an improved solution to the problem. This was the stage when I finally got to apply that buzzword, product thinking, that got skipped over so many times when I was designing on my own.

In essence, I believe that this is where the barometer of a strong UX designer lies — can they incrementally move a product’s design towards its ultimate goals for its users? Can they effectively start with a user-based hypothesis, transform that into design, and continuously edit that design until they have 1500 artboards and a complete story of how they arrived there? Finally, can they effectively reason why one design direction better achieves their user’s goals rather than another? For aspiring designers, if this work sounds enjoyable to you, I’d encourage you to look at a career in UX design.

#amazon #user-experience #internships