My First Google Summer @ Play

At Google Play, I had the amazing opportunity to intern with the MOB UX team. I got to work on a variety of projects with a bunch of amazing people like Engineers, UX Writers, and UX Researchers. It was such a cool experience designing features for products that millions and millions of users use every day.

Hanging out with the other UXD interns : )

Along with meeting so many cool people, I also learned a lot of valuable lessons and skills. Here are 3 of the many things I learned:

1. How to effectively communicate with cross-functional team members

For my projects on the Play team, I had to work with a variety of different people to help create an effective solution that meets all our needs. I learned how to lead meetings with engineers to hear about the backend and their constraints, work with our user researcher to learn more about our users, and collaborate with our UX writers to ensure our user experience is as easy as can be.

2. How to share and defend design decisions

This summer I also learned how to effectively present my designs and ideas to people in a way that was easily digestible while still having good storytelling. I realized this summer that designing the actual screens was only half of the project. The rest was sharing it with others and convincing them of your design decisions.

3. How to be more confident as a designer

Building on to my last point, this summer I feel like I have really become a more confident designer. The encouragement and support from my managers and everyone on my team motivated me to successfully lead my projects until the end. Having so much ownership at first was a learning curve but as I got more practice presenting and answering questions, I slowly became more comfortable and confident.

Overall, summer 2021 was such an amazing experience with so many learnings and memories. Thank you to John and Riva for this opportunity and for being some of the best hosts ever : )