Retrospective on my 9 week internship at Microsoft, Hyderabad
I worked on Microsoft defender for protecting mobile devices as part of my 8 week internship at India Development centre, Hyderabad. Here are few experiences from the internship:
1. Microsoft research is very good and valuable. They have been researching with several products and their use cases. Their failure and success test data is useful for several other things. Because I’ve seen how valuable research wealth is for design I decided during the internship I’ll try and work on a research project in my P2 and P3.
2. There’s this syndrome of designer supremacy that I carried during my first employment and I had the same moment again at my internship. The PM’s briefed me about the user personas and use cases and asked me to start designing screens for those. I was arguing with them about the user personas and how they have decided without a contextual enquiry but then I sat with the PM’s and saw how the user personas that they found were also sufficient for shipping the first version. These discussions helped me realise that PM’s have been seeing these users and the problem area for an year and how time is important in an agile setup.
3. We had three design reviews with the design studio at the internship. This included sr.Des managers and product designers and the design heads. During my mid review my mentor told me “Anjan, you need to tell a better story”. Post that we had a storytelling workshop by a senior at Microsoft. He told us how the audience lose the interest with data on a screen and find it exciting when you narrate it. After my final review my manager told me my storytelling was better than the previous review. One of the happiest outcomes of the final review was the principal designer of Microsoft Edge asked me If I can present my deck to her team.
4. One of the biggest challenge for me during my internship was writing a UX Research report. I was assigned the task of designing iOS and android screens. But, I wanted to investigate the other areas of vulnerabilities and threats by talking to the users. But my research insights needed to be documented well along with the design suggestions. I approached my design manager and told him that this has been a blocker for long time and he arranged a session with a researcher in the team. She taught me what are the important pointers in writing a research report. The biggest takeaway from that discussion was “Your report should be written in a way that data & cyber security should be understood by a 5 year old kid”. While I haven’t learnt how to write a report better I’m planning to do that this period at IDC.
5. Microsoft as a organisation pushes everyone towards inclusivity and diversity. We had a one week intern learning session where they had a painting session and another session where they taught us the Accessibility sign language. During my internship I had access to Microsoft research and everyone in the organisation reached out to us personally if we have any blockers with subject matter or any knowledge. We had a sessions with the designers where they shared their design journey with us and we got to see how they experienced design as part of their profession. There were engineers and music enthusiasts who turned out as designers. Sessions like these inspired us for dreaming more. During this sessions also I met a lot of IDC alumni and we talked about professors at IDC. I personally felt the importance of IDC during the internship and I would try and utilise my time here at IDC this year to make most of it.
6. After the internship I’m writing more notes in my mobile and I’m planning my work through reminders. This habit was the influence of the unorganised work that I had done during my initial stages of my internship and I intend to plan my work properly from this semester.
7. During my internship I also decided to work more on how to convert research data into design ideas. I was also critically looking at fonts that Microsoft products use(Thanks to Dalvi sir’s course). After my PPO interview at my internship I wanted to think about what my immediate career position should be. Although I didn’t get the offer I started thinking about should I be a UX Designer or a Design researcher.
8. One of the technical skills I picked up from the internship is Swift code development in Xcode. I’ve seen how to transform designs to screens and I developed few of the screens myself. I had UI sanity sessions with the engineering team and I realised how important is Adaptivity and Layout is important in UI Design.
9. One of the important things that helped us with our internship is the connect with the mentors. We had 3 connects with the mentors where we define our core priorities for the internship and at every connect we defined what we could have done better for an better business impact and what my work has helped the team and what I intend to do in future. This helped us realise our goals for every period and helped us develop our performance along each period. Something like this at IDC with the professors would help us know what have we done till now and what we should do moving forward.
Finally my work got deployed and here's a preview from the app store:
