First web design internship — Week 3 & 4
Note: My internship took place in 2020. Lucidweb shut down in 2021 due to the Covid situation.
Here I am, in the second and third week of my internship. I kept myself busy and I have been working on multiple projects. The longer I am working in Lucidweb, the more responsibilities I get. I also got to meet more people during these weeks. Not in real life of course but still, I got to collaborate more with members of Lucidweb and exchange in meetings. If you have not read the first 2 weeks of my experience as an intern, I invite you to read it here.
Lots of meetings
Eliana invited me to join the daily scrum meeting of the dev team. What is a scrum meeting you would ask? It consists of a gathering that makes the development teams work more productively and efficiently. The team gains an understanding of what work has been done. We ask ourselves 3 questions: what did you do yesterday, what will you do today, and are there any implements in your way? It helps a lot. Especially during this COVID situation. I started to go to these meetings every morning. However, I had a lot of different small tasks and some of them were not consistent for the dev team. I ended up not going every day and in the future, I will join them when it’s relevant. Nevertheless, it was interesting to learn about team development.
I had a similar situation with the marcom team (marketing-communication). Since I had no code-related work at that moment, I assisted their team. Therefore, I was invited to the marcom meeting every day at 4 pm. It was less organized but the intention was there. We would share what we had been working on, and request feedback from others, and ask questions for details.
It was very instructive to attend these meetings, in the sense that I got to learn more about the work we are doing in Lucidweb. I would see the whole picture, clearer, for projects.
Test and report
With Eliana, we established that we would be testing and reporting all the bugs every week for the platform Lucidweb Pro. This platform is in constant evolution. As the dev team is pushing updates every Tuesday, we would help them with feedback by filling out a form in which we detail the bugs we encountered and add screenshots or screen recordings for reference. It’s a small task we established to do every week from now on.
Visuals for the medium post
As I said earlier, I was asked to do some work for the marcom team but still related to design. One of them was to create visuals for the medium article that would be published later that week. As a matter of fact, Eliana assigned me as a leader for this project. It was the first time I was on my own. I would discuss the assignment with the marcom team by myself and decide the design on my own. Obviously, I had to have her approval before rendering anything but it was good to have a bit more responsibilities.
I was asked to create the visuals. The marcom team had the articles but with internet images. Of course, it was not ideal so I had to reproduce them with Lucidweb’s guidelines. I recreated 2 maps and I had to create a banner from scratch. They had a free stock image as a reference so I used that as an example and with Photoshop, it ended up perfectly. After that, I had to transform this banner for an Instagram post. It was nice to get back to Photoshop for one day because as a web designer, I almost never use it anymore.
Content for a virtual booth
The second assignment for the marcom team was resizing images and a video so it would fit on a virtual booth for a client event. I know it’s not much. I was surprised too. But then, during the marcom meeting, I had the chance to explain to them how easy it was. I shared my knowledge with the team. It was a nice way to connect with people I have never met and I thought I would mention it.
Back to the big review
Last week, I did lots of reviews about players. This week, I continued my research but I focused on the 360 image players, still on mobile. Again, I had a list of competitors. I learned from before and this time, I was more organized. I started by doing all the screen recording user journeys. It was easier to analyze after. I also made a list of the players I thought were the most efficient so it would be easier to present it to Eliana.
At first, I thought this task would take me some time like it did last week, but in the end, I was familiar with all the operations, and eventually, everything was done in a day. Maybe the fact that I had a smaller list had an influence but I believe I analyze things better now.
Focus research on platforms
I went on with my work by doing some research about their platform. I used the same list of competitors as the 360 image player review. I had to investigate what kind of solutions they are providing. For each one of them, on a PowerPoint, I would describe step by step the tools they offer to create the players I was reviewing before. I created folders for each file and then for each competitor to be more organized. It was way easier to get the information. I needed a full screenshot of the landing page, a PowerPoint about every detail of their platform and explain it to them, and finally a screen recording of a user journey.
I learned a lot during this process: about efficiency, about the importance of having certain buttons, and about missing steps. All the small details are important. I also learned about UX. Sometimes, I would ask myself why this page is not effective. For example, 3 different links and buttons to navigate to the same page is not good. It’s redundant. As I presented everything to Eliana, we got into interesting discussions about my user journeys and the UX.
The difference with my research on players is that the platforms are all different. They all have interesting ways to execute, that we have to consider. Sometimes, they don’t even provide the same product at the end but it doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. All inspirations are good to take, good and bad.
Redesign the newsletter form
The next task was to re-do the already existing design of the newsletter form on Mailchimp. Because we didn’t have a meeting beforehand, and I had never used Mailchimp, I didn’t understand how it worked. Mailchimp is very restrictive in terms of design, especially for designing newsletter forms. I couldn’t do much at the beginning.
Eliana gave me time to explore it, to test things, and to watch tutorials, but there was not a lot I could do. That was the moment when I felt a bit helpless. In the end, I asked Eliana for help every step of the way. The result is not as we would have wanted it, with a dark composition like Lucidweb’s design, but we dealt with it. It was not really my fault but Mailchimp’s limitations.
Create a newsletter email
On the same line with the newsletter form, I had to create a newsletter email, but this time it was from scratch. I had full autonomy to create whatever I wanted while following Lucidweb’s guidelines. I also had plenty of time to explore Mailchimp. This task was less frustrating. I directly noted that it was way easier than doing a newsletter form because I had more options to design with. There are many more possibilities.
Eliana let me explore the platform first, she let me learn it. Then we reviewed together my experimentation and afterwards, we focused on the task that we had been asked to do. I started by doing 4 templates with the text from the marcom (marketing-communication) team but with random images. It was to experiment with layout without worrying about the visuals. She let me choose the template I liked the most and we would go on with it. I thought it was cool to trust me like that.
When I worked on the images, I tried to modify them so they harmonized together. I made a .gif out of a video to replace one of them. I think they really like it when I create animated gifs. When I was finished, I had to get feedback from Eliana first, then the marcom team, and finally Leen, because it’s content that will be seen by clients.
It was interesting to learn about Mailchimp and to experiment with design. I was free to create what I wanted. Besides, it is not like wireframing but it is close to it and I enjoyed it a lot. This assignment is not finished. We will finish it next week.
Conclusion
To sum up, these two weeks were very constructive. I had a lot of small assignments to do and had the opportunity to experiment with a lot of things. With the meetings, I get to meet more people and I feel more included. That’s a good thing and I hope it continues that way. I also feel like Eliana trusts me more with responsibilities. I get to do work by my own doing. It’s my own creation. I even got my name credited on the Medium article. I thought it was a nice touch.
For the next few weeks, I feel more comfortable about my work but also feel anxious because Eliana is gone in Colombia. She still will be working but with a different timezone. That will be the case for a week and then she will be on holiday. There still will be supervision with the dev team and the marcom team, but I guess I will be the lead designer in Lucidweb, and that’s scary. I guess she trusts me enough to let me work alone and take the lead. I hope I am prepared.
