My role: UX Design Intern
Duration: Jun-Aug 2022 (3 months)
1 UX Designer, 1 UX Design Intern, PM, Engineering team
Figma, Slack, Miro, Asana
Over the summer of 2022, I worked as a UX Design Intern at Verizon. During my 12-week internship, I worked on various projects for Verizon business and Verizon Design System. Since most of these projects are close to public release/shipment, I want to share a high-level overview of my learnings and takeaways. Overall, I dived into four different areas of design during my internship: UX research, visual design, interaction design, and delivery.
I had the chance to work on many different projects. These projects ranged from small components or landing pages to bigger projects that impacted the entire design org or business at Verizon. The following projects were my favorite and I had the most fun with them.
1. Product Detail Page Redesign
I scoped, iterated and redesigned customer-centric experiences for PDP page.
2. Design System
I owned VDS Brand 3.0 from conception, auditing, iteration to delivery.
Background:
Objective:
Current Design
Redesign
Verizon have a design system called VDS-Verizon Design System. Brand 3.0 is a new chapter in Verizon Design system’s visual identity. In Brand 3.0 we have been updated fundamentals and components to reflect new and updated brand design attributes It includes the changes to typography, shape, space, and introduced components such as tiles and carousel. Verizon Brand 3.0 has been released system-wide in Q3 of 2022.
Tiles have been introduced in brand 3.0. Earlier than this tiles were not part of the Verizon design system. The very first thing we did was audit all of the tiles. We went through the Figma files and pulled tiles we were using and put them in one place. The goal was to identify patterns and evaluate tile container width and padding proportions. Based on that we have figure out the problem areas and as a part of our work was to make recommendations for improvement that have already been included in VDS standards.
Goal:
To establish a documentation template structure that highlights usage and responsiveness and generate approachable usage guidelines.
Collaborators:
Tim Hose (Brand Designer), Preeti Ponkiya (Design Intern), Andrew Pendleton (VDS Engineer)
Stakeholders:
VDS Design Leadership, Internal product teams
Contributions:
The typical user interactions for control inputs are its "unselected"/"selected" states. However, one control element can contain a variety of use cases that multiplies to a greater number when applied to other control elements. Design system thinking requires a merge of visual design application and user psychology to think about technical refinement and human behavior interacting with the interface. After getting the context of how these pre-generated control designs and color palettes are used in the system, I was able to experiment and articulate each interaction state with purposeful shifts in color to indicate a particular user behavior, i.e. doted lines for focus state (accessibility), darkening for hover states, fading for disable states, etc.
We finally had the opportunity to clarify the use of "focused" states for users who use keyboard tabbing on their desktops to access information on Verizon’s website, envisioning how that would translate across the system.
Recent 2022 website update with focused states implemented!
Based on the new design guideline VDS 3.0, we have started integrating the design system throughout our platform. It was my responsibility to redesign the User account page by following new design guidelines and components.
Majority of my time was spent collaborating with data engineers, developers, Product Manager, UX Researchers, and UI designers all from different backgrounds. I took action by scheduling my own meetings with stakeholders to get the feedback that I needed as well as conducting research to validate my designs and make sure that they were feasible and accessible. This gave me the opportunity to improve my decision making skills and apply my customer-first thinking to backup my design decisions.
During my internship, I had the opportunity to get involved in elements design for design system. It gives me the chance to learn how to utilize design system and its limitations. Design system can not only speed up designer's work - but it also facilitates developers' work. More importantly, it benefits users too - lower associates' training cost, lower their memory burden and the possibility of making mistakes. But design system also has its limitation, sometimes in order to follow it, we don't choose the best solution. That's why balancing between following patterns and meeting user's needs is crucial and difficult.
I learned to proactively seek for critique, but also make sure to be confident in my own design decisions. After every meeting with stakeholders and my team, I received a lot of valuable feedback from different perspectives which made it challenging to apply all the feedback into my designs. Throughout my internship, I learned to advocate for my final design decisions and make informative decisions based off of research and talking to customers.
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