I did a User Experience Design Internship at Google in Mountain View, California.

In the summer of 2014, I joined Google for a 14-week UX internship in Mountain View, California. Even though I can’t specifically share what I worked on during my internship, it’s an experience worth mentioning, mainly because it had significant impacts on how I see things and how I position myself as a young designer working in tech. 

I was a part of the Shopping UX team and I had two projects to tackle during my internship period. I also worked with a UX Researcher on a couple of usability studies, ran my own study for my main project and presented in front of some of the top executives. Learning how design process works at an organization like Google helped me refine my own design process as well.

Two weeks after I joined, Google announced Material Design (google.com/design) and all the design teams were in the process of adopting the new language and workflow. Lucky timing for me, because witnessing and taking part on this change at a huge scale was an incredible learning experience. Having worked with relatively smaller companies before Google, realization of how things get done at Google impressed and shocked me, even though I knew it would be different from what I knew before.

Shortly after I started working on my projects, I realized there are many things I can improve on, specifically on how I document and communicate the work that I do. From a broader perspective, I learned things that would make me not only a better designer, but a more efficient person in terms of how I work other people.