User experience is vital to the growth of any platform. A poor user experience can limit the potential of a platform. For this reason, companies ensure they hire and train user experience designers. And recently, they’ve started providing internship opportunities for these UX designers.
According to Rocket 55, UX design has become increasingly important in today’s sprouting interfaces industry. The appealing nature of a website counts to individuals as much as its functionality.
So, while we will focus on the internship opportunities available for UX designers in this article, we will also explain the concept of UX, its design process, and much more.
Table of contents
What is UX Design?
Creating an interphase for a webpage or any platform that will enable users or visitors to interact with the platform easily is expedient. This is the core of user experience and interphase user design.
According to User Testing, UX design is designing (digital or physical) products that are useful, easy to use, and delightful to interact with. It’s about enhancing people’s experience while interacting with your product and ensuring they find value in what you’re providing.
A good user experience on your platform can shoot up engagement and draw visitors, while an unpleasant experience can do a lot of harm.
What is the UX Design Process?
In framing the UX design process, you need to put so much in check. According to Rocket 55, the design process follows a pattern that includes:
A. User Profiles and Personas
The first step in the process is getting to know your audience. This allows you to develop experiences that relate to the voice and emotions of your users. To begin this, you will want to create a user persona, a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and data on your existing audience.
When you finish developing your user persona (or personas), you will have the profile of the person(s) your site is talking to. Creating a persona comprises diving into your site’s analytics and other customer data while also conducting internal and external interviews and surveys. You can even talk to “look-alike” audiences that reflect the same traits as your current users.
Some common traits you want to consider as you develop your persona include:
- Demographics (age, location, familial status, career, etc.)
- Personality (introvert, extrovert, creative, etc.)
- Motivations (fear, incentivization, power, etc.)
- And nearly any other piece of information that will help you get to know your users
Personas should (and will) take a lot of time to develop. Many steps must be taken to ensure you have all the data and information needed to develop a useful persona. And keep in mind that they can change over time as your business and customer base strengthen.
B. Interface Testing
When you’re building a user interface, the more data you can collect, the better. Conduct a study to compare the effectiveness and quality of experience between different user interfaces, including your current site. Something as minor as changing a single word could affect the effectiveness of your page.
One powerful tool for interface testing is Google’s Optimize platform. With Optimize, you can split your website impressions into two groups and show each of these groups a different version of pages on your site. Once you have a statistically significant sample size, you can see which version outperforms the other and make adjustments accordingly.
C. User Surveys
Interview existing and potential users of the system to gain insight into what would be the most effective design. Because the user’s experience is subjective, the best way to obtain information directly is by studying and interacting with users. An element on the page that you thought was working might seem completely invisible to the user, so a firsthand view of the way they interact with the website can provide valuable insights.
Analyze the people in your target audience when you’re conducting these surveys, as your peer group may interact with the website differently than the people you want to reach. Ask questions like: How does the website make you feel? Where did you become confused? How would you go about a purchase? Does the language speak to you? It might surprise you with the amount of constructive feedback you receive.
D. User Flow Diagram
Make a flowchart showing how users should move through a system. Start by deciding how you expect them to move through the site, then compare it to how they interact with it. User personas will help you here — when you understand the user profile on your site, you can better plan the optimal experience for them.
Several analytical tools can allow you to see how users are engaging with your website at the proper time. Platforms such as Mouseflow can even track where a visitor’s mouse is on the page. You can also view heat maps of the areas on the page that attract the most attention.
When you have learned how people use your site, be open to changing nearly anything. The most effective sites are ones that make the user experience a top priority.
E. Sitemaps
Once you’ve studied the user flow visitors expect on your site, thorough planning is essential. Start by building a sitemap for the pages you would like to create. A sitemap is an organized hierarchy of your site’s pages and sub-pages.
Creating a sitemap makes it easier to imagine how a user will get from point A to point B on the website and how many clicks it will take to do it. Instead of implementing structural changes once the site is built, a sitemap helps your team eliminate bad ideas early while simultaneously showing you all the pages you will eventually need to design and write content for. It is an effective tool for adding efficiency to the website-building process.
F. Wireframes and Prototypes
The visuals on each page matter just as much as the site structure, so invest time into creating wireframes, which are visual guides that represent the skeletal framework of web pages and provide a preview of your site’s look and feel.
With a visual website framework in place, you can eliminate usability issues before any page hits a computer screen. This can save your company development time for necessary adjustments down the line.
G. Design Patterns
Patterns provide consistency and a way of finding the most effective design for the job. With user interface design patterns, for example, picking the right user interface (UI) elements (e.g. module tabs, breadcrumbs, slideshows) for certain tasks based on their effectiveness leads to better and more familiar experiences.
One tool that helps us maintain UI consistency is style tiles. Style tiles are deliverables that show the design of all modules on a site, down to font sizes and colours. This document includes things like buttons, type layout, and even interactivity. Style tiles ensure a user will have a smooth experience across the entire site so they’ll be able to better recognize how to interact with the site’s elements.
H. Style Guides
Consistency is critical to designing a memorable user experience through a brand. Style guides give writers and designers a framework in which to work when creating content and developing a design, and they also ensure that the brand and design elements align with the owner’s goals.
Make your style guide is easily accessible to anyone working on a new website. One element on a page that doesn’t match up with your brand’s image or voice can stick out like a sore thumb. If you don’t have a style guide, consider building one. You will be surprised how useful it will be beyond designing your site’s UX!
15 Internship Opportunities For UX Designers in 2024
As an intern, finding opportunities in UX design takes a lot of effort. Most of the opportunities you’ll find are unpaid and highly stressful. However, there are still some incredible opportunities you can leverage as an intern UX designer, and they include:
15. Helping Hands Community
Helping Hands is a non-profit organization to reduce the spread of COVID-19 through tech-enabled community volunteerism, by constantly connecting people most at risk with those who can safely deliver critical items and provide various forms of help.
They use many technological products to create this connection as they have an efficient three-step request process. As an intern UX designer, you will learn and create an interphase that will help this organization connect and fulfil its goals.
14. Costco Wholesale
Costco Wholesale is an online environment where you can pick up different goods and appliances of all kinds. To be precise, you can buy vacuum cleaners, digital appliances, and personal protection equipment.
To strengthen buyer decisions, Costco Wholesale uses a unique user experience design that gives every vital information with just a glance. As one of the best places offering internship opportunities for UX designers, you learn and design on the road.
13. Wiland
Wiland is an agency that helps many brands communicate their message to a powerful audience capable of converting from leads to buyers. This specialized platform analyzes these signals to identify the specific audience of people who will buy from you, and they’ll help you find them wherever they are.
As a brand that wants to quickly produce and deliver your brand-unique audience, they make use of certain key strategies as they believe deep user experience is a key to keeping a customer. So, they ensure your user experience design is in check utilizing some of the strongest professionals in the field.
12. Avanade
Avanade is a global professional services company providing IT consulting and services focused on the Microsoft platform with artificial intelligence, business analytics, cloud, application services, and digital transformation.
As a big brand, they work with the best in user experience design. However, to keep the ball rolling, they also offer internship opportunities for UX designers where they can learn and practice an advanced form of UX designing.
11. SalesForce
Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management service and a complementary suite of enterprise applications focused on customer service.
The customer service industry is very delicate as people have strong proclivities towards beautiful designs while also working optimally. For all the beautiful designs on Salesforce, UX designers make them possible, and an internship opportunity there can do wonders for your career.
10. Avalara
Avalara is software that ensures automated tax compliance. Whether the business is online, a new business, or needs help filing internationally, Avalara can help address all tax issues while the business professional focuses on other business areas.
Because of the complication of paying taxes, Avalara uses a unique system to ensure this complete process, and their user experience design is top-notch. You can join in to experience their journey when you take up any of their internship opportunities for UX designers.
9. Chegg
Chegg, Inc., is an American education technology company in Santa Clara, California. It provides digital and physical textbook rentals, online tutoring, and other student services. You can access many flashcards and writing tools to help you do an efficient job.
Creating this interphase required a lot of work from the developers and the user interphase, and experienced designers. Today, they boast of being one platform with the best user experience, and they’re offering internship opportunities for UX designers to experience this.
8. Blink UX
Blink is a UX research and design firm that works with dominant companies to create meaningful digital products, brands, and experiences. With concrete research, they’ll create a flexible structure for that platform that will help you draw and keep visitors.
As a UX design firm, they offer countless opportunities for interns to come to learn and work. So far, they’ve worked with a huge number of clients ensuring these clients get their customers attached to them through a unique design feeling.
7. Deloitte
Deloitte is one of the Big Four accounting organizations and the largest professional services network in the world by revenue and a number of professionals, with headquarters in London, England. Of course, few companies come close to the type of record they’ve created internationally.
Creating professional accounting reports and all types of auditing is technological today. So, Deloitte invests heavily in its user experience design to offer the best accounting systems in the market. And to keep producing at this level, they offer internship opportunities for UX designers who want to blossom in this field.
6. Walmart
Walmart is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas.
As a superstore, they offer delivery services to their select customers at different locations. Because of their massiveness, this platform ensures their websites are easy for customers to navigate. This ease of navigation is courtesy of a great design team made up of highly experienced UX designers.
5. DNC Process Servers
DNC Process Servers is a company fully involved in different legal activities. The experience David has gained through this time has made it possible to put together an excellent team of legal professionals to assist the clients of DNC.
As a client, your first research about this organization will start from their webpage. For this reason, they pay serious attention to how their platform interacts with their leads and customers. Therefore, they work with expert designers and create internship opportunities for UX designers to practice and grow.
4. Lending Tree
LendingTree helps you get the best deal possible on your loans. By giving consumers multiple offers from several lenders, they make shopping easy. This business platform allows potential borrowers to connect with multiple loan operators to find optimal terms for loans, credit cards, deposit accounts, insurance, etc.
To connect their users to these opportunities, they use great software that is easy to use. And creating an easy-to-use software that commands a simple process is the duty of the design team and the user experience designers, respectively. So, they’ve created internship opportunities for UX designers and other design professionals.
3. Mozilla
The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, some of whom are employed by the corporation itself.
This unique browser platform utilizes quality design and an optimal web browsing experience to attract many users. They offer many internship opportunities for UX designers who want to pursue a distinguished career in the field.
2. Amazon
Amazon.com is an American multinational technology company based in Seattle, Washington, focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. This company that started as an e-commerce business has grown to empower other businesses.
Their parent e-commerce platform powers millions of transactions every day and ensuring users and visitors enjoy their Amazon experience is the design team’s responsibility. So, instead of constantly seeking to hire designers, they have created internship opportunities for UX and UI designers to follow their structural design program wherein they can become professionals.
1. Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.
With Microsoft constantly pushing new software into the marketplace, they must ensure users have a beautiful experience when they encounter their product or any product they create for their clients and customers. Therefore, they create internship opportunities for both UX and UI designers who want to explore design at a higher level.
Conclusion
UX designers have always been crucial to the success of any product or service, and the COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened the importance of a good user experience. In light of remote work and social distancing measures, many companies are finding new ways to bring value to their customers.
So, with the incredible opportunities in this industry, you need to take advantage of the internship opportunities for UX designers so you can give yourself a great head start.
References
- Rocket 55 – The Importance of User Experience
- User Testing – What is UX design?
- Adobe XD Ideas – Does UX/UI Design Require Coding?
- Lesley University – 9 Critical UX Skills and How to Develop Them
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