Solace 2023 Internship
Overview
During winter 2023, I got the opportunity to intern as a User Experience designer at Solace, an event-driven architecture provider.
My experiences revolved around doing research, and creating designs and prototypes to improve the user experience of Event Portal.
My contribution
User research Product design Competitive analysis Achieving stakeholder buy in
The team
Jenna Foreman- manager Kris McKinnon- design mentor
Year
2023 winter
What did I work on?
My efforts were spread along several different areas of the platform. Some of the areas I was involved in include:
- RBAC (role-based access control) implementation
- KPI metrics dashboard
- Exploring improvements to EDA Visualizer
- Error pattern in design system
- Empty states, errors, form UI
- Usability testing setup
Design Process
Tasks typically started off with a meeting with the relevant stakeholders, such as developers or product owners, to understand the requirements and technical limitations that needed to be considered.
At times, I found it challenging to both understand and communicate the topics discussed, due to the highly technical nature of the product. Afterwards, several explorations of the design would be created, and research into common patterns or competitive analysis would be done when appropriate.
Following several rounds of design review with the rest of the UX team, a handoff document with detailed specifications would be created and shared with the original stakeholders to ensure that it met requirements and was feasible to implement.
I found these meetings to be a great learning experience and area for improvement during the term; at times the discussion would shift to less relevant topics, or occasionally there would be so much covered it was difficult to present and record decisions made at the same time. Over time, I improved my presentation skills, along with improving the clarity that I could communicate ideas and concepts, both when presenting and on my design handoff documents.
I have no doubt that developing these skills will be invaluable to my growth as a designer.
Outcome
Overall, this was a fantastic learning experience for me, and I found it especially fascinating to be exposed to the processes and challenges faced when designing an enterprise product (how to maintain consistency, how to keep track of existing designs, and how complicated edge cases can be, etc).
I got the opportunity to work with many welcoming, talented individuals, and value the autonomy I had working on many interesting challenges. I had a great time and hope to bring my learnings and experience to my next placement!