“Paper Elements” by Dina Belenko is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Being an intern on the Analytics team means I should have some understanding of analytics. Being a user experience design intern on the Analytics team means, in an ideal world, I should have as much of an understanding of analytics as possible. “That makes sense,” you might be thinking. “A designer can’t possibly create the best experience for a product without having any idea how it works, right?”
[insert nervous laughter here]
Coming into my first day of the internship, I had very, very limited knowledge about analytics—I’ve used Google Analytics on my design portfolio, but only about one feature out of its robust suite of them. I didn’t know who used these products (“analysts, probably”), how they used them (“to… analyze data, probably?”), or really anything else about what these kinds of platforms could do. Compare to my previous design work: I’d always been either a consumer of the type of product I was designing for (a journaling or student club app), or I at least had pretty good assumptions for how a user would interact with it (a clinical voice assistant or game for middle school girls). This time, nada.
I spent a good chunk of my first week just trying to figure out what on earth our Analytics platform did. How do you make visualizations? What do half the words in here even mean? I spent a couple hours just watching tutorial videos, feeling like I was back in school, and experimenting with the product in much confusion. After a whole week of this, I finally had a relatively better idea of what was going on. At my midweek meeting the second week, when I’d presented the audit and competitive analysis I’d been working on, my manager told me I was now one of the resident experts on this topic. Me? The person who literally had 0 idea of any of this 7 days ago, and now probably has a fraction of an idea? I smiled and nodded.
But that’s the thing about user experience design: you never know enough about the people you’re designing for, or how the typical person uses the product. That’s exactly why the first step in a design process is user research, and so is the third, and the fifth, and it could go on and on, depending. We spend hours on the phone with users to figure all of this out, even if we think we know the answer. And when we design our answer, we always go back to the users and ask, “is this what you wanted? Is this what your answer would be to this problem?” We ask until our design becomes their perfect solution.
Knowing next to nothing about what I was working on made me feel so lost. But as we went on more and more user calls and the past few weeks, I’ve realized the problem I’ve had in all my past work: I’ve always known something about what I was working on. I had assumptions about what the users would say and how they would act, and I never stopped to think about the confirmation bias I had whenever I’d conduct user research. But in the work I’m doing now, I can’t ask leading questions because, frankly, I don’t even know what answer I’d lead the users to. I’m always surprised in our research calls, and I’m constantly learning more. To be honest, 5 weeks in, I’d still say my grasp on the topic is as weak as a soggy noodle at best. But in design, knowing next to nothing (and admitting to it) is a blessing in disguise.
Questions? Comments? Have you run into roadblocks that actually worked out well? Let me know down below!
