USAA Design Internship
user research + interaction design
Overview
This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work at USAA’s new Chief Design Office in Austin over the course of 10 weeks as an interaction design and research intern. The internship allowed me to apply skills I had learned at school as well as experience new working environments, frameworks, people, and mindsets. I worked primarily on mapping out early navigation flow explorations, delivering low-fidelity wireframes, assisting with building an Axure prototype for testing, shadowing remote usability tests, and synthesizing findings from testing to present to the enterprise Experience Owners and development teams.
Roles and Responsibilities
Overall, my 10 weeks as an intern at USAA Design were incredibly enriching. Here are some of my key takeaways from this summer.
Working on a project at a large company is so different compared to working on a project in a school environment in terms of time, scale, resources, audience, and barriers.
As a team, understanding that constantly and rapidly reiterating the approaches to your design is absolutely mandatory. In such a big company, there are different teams in different departments all working on similar projects. Everyone must be willing to work with each other to craft the most viable experience, even if that means changing the bulk of what you have designed.
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Documenting and commenting on your progress, no matter how small of a change, is crucial.
This is especially important when you are part of a rapidly moving team with different roles so that anyone can easily reference your work. Explaining your thought process within the document helps both people inside and outside your team understand your intentions and motives.
So many times as designers, we experience tunnel vision and don't realize how we might be accidentally framing an experience in a way we didn't intend.
User testing is important not just from a UI standpoint, but also from the ability to view our designs from a fresh eye to notice small points that may create confusing flows and mental models.
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Agile Training
DISCLAIMER
Due to legal and privacy issues, I am unable to provide details on the exact experience I was working on during my internship. The work examples I provided are limited and have been edited to conceal private information about the project and experience. I will be happy to share more information about the exact interactions and explorations I was working on in an interview.
Takeaways
At the start of my internship, I participated in Agile Training with a group of other interns part of the Chief Technology Design Office. Though there are many different types of Agile Team formats and protocols, understanding the general rapid and reiterative framework greatly helped me adapt to the actual work environment upon starting.
I shadowed the interaction designer on my team for the bulk of my summer to both learn and contribute to the process of creating a prototype for testing and mapping out different early iterations of navigation flows. The prototype was built in Axure with the ability for the tester to input values and information during the test.
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While mapping out different flow iterations of a new part of the experience for both web and mobile, I learned how crucial it is to show and comment every single step of an interaction while wireframing.
I was part of the process of shadowing and analyzing several different remote usability tests with the early Axure prototype; it was fascinating to see how so many people had different mental models of the experience we were designing for. I strongly believe that conducting usability testing is an experience that is difficult to facilitate properly at school due to time and resource limitations. The opportunity to be able to participate in the analysis and synthesis of real-world testing taught me how valuable the trends and insights outside of the design team environment really are.
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Before the tests, I also learned about the process of writing a research plan, outlining the exact breakdowns of overview, tasks, and question framing for conducting usability testing.
Upon finishing the findings documentation, our team was required to create a synthesis deck to present the testing results to enterprise Experience Owners and development teams. The process for synthesis began with general affinity grouping based on similar trends and interaction patterns, and then pulling out key overlapping test insights. From these insights, we went back into the prototype and annotated the corresponding areas in details for the presentation.
One of the most important lessons I learned this summer was to always keep accessibility in mind while designing. In a company whose mission stems from an all-inclusive member-base, understanding that not everyone is as blessed to be as able-bodied as the ordinary person was crucial to crafting experiences for everyone. While designing, I frequently referenced Color Blindness tools such as the high contrast mode in Macs, or the Stark Sketch plugin to test if the designs passed the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 Level AA contrast ratio of 4:5:1. It is also important to consider the various ways of showing hover states, active modes, and interaction points in a manner that can be accessible to all.
Interaction Design
Usability Testing
Synthesis
Accessibility