Internship Report
Hongyuan Jiang
ABSTR
This report highlights my 14-week internship as User Experience Designer at
Ziba Design, Portland, OR. During my internship, which ran from May 14–August 10, 2012, I joined four design projects, one research project, as well as one design seminar. Those projects ranged from consumer and trend analysis, web UI design, mobile app design, industrial design sketching, visual design, sound design to information visualization. This report provides details and insights into the projects that I got involved with during the internship.
RACT
CONTE
Abstract......................................................................................................... 1 Table of Contents........................................................................................... 2 Introduction.....................................................................................................3 Ziba Design...................................................................................................3 UX.................................................................................................................3 Working Environment................................................................................... 4 Roles and Responsibilities.............................................................................. 5 Project Overview............................................................................................. 6 Project A...................................................................................................... 7 Project B.......................................................................................................8 Project C.......................................................................................................9 Project D......................................................................................................10 Project E......................................................................................................11 Reflection ..................................................................................................... 12
ENTS
ZIBA
Ziba is a design firm that’s based in Portland, Oregon. The found of Ziba, Sohrab Vossoughi is an industrial designer. He launched the design firm in 1984 and made it a world famous design agency in the passing 28 years. Ziba received the most design awards per employee than any other design agency in the world. The clients of Ziba varies from local start-ups to Fortune 50 companies. Now ziba has discipines of Industrial Design, User Experience Design, Communication Design, as well as Consumer Insights & Trend.
UX
The UX team at Ziba are made of three sub-disciplines: interaction designers, visual designers and kinect designers (motion designers). All three parts work together to create great experiences. Interaction designers focus on the workflow, structure and tasks. Visual designers need to understand interaction design and branding. Kinect Designers usually put static design into vivid visual animation or movies to show the interaction and make the design come to life.
ENVIRO The working environment at ziba is really healthy and collaborative. There is one or two creative directors who are in charge of a project. In the very beginning stage, the creative director will form a team of seven or eight people. Usually there are one or two creative directors, two or three designers, one researcher, one project manager and one client relations person. The creative director, client relations person and a core designer will do a pitch to a certain client. Once the agreement from both sides is made, a new project is launched. The team works together as a whole from start to finish. In Ziba, not only the researcher is responsible for the research, but the whole team. The whole team works together to design the research proposal and decides which method to use for a certain project. Usually there is a “dry-run� test within the company. Designers and researchers will find other staff or people from a different team to participate in the research and to see whether there are some parts that make no sense and change it.
ONMENT Then, there is a local test in Portland. Participants that fall into certain category are recruited and get some incentives by joining the research. Based on this round of research and analysis, more changes will be made. Since most of the clients of Ziba are big corporations, the budget for research is always abundant. Also, in this age of globalization, more and more companies begin to reach out to different countries. Based on the projects that I worked on, the common pattern is that client will choose two cities in Asia, two in Europe and two or three cities within the States and work with local research agencies to recruit participants, then researchers and designers in Ziba would then fly out to those cities to do global research. It takes about one month to go through all the researches stages. This helps designers to get a clear picture about what’s going on in user research, as they are not just reading the research report or analysis from researchers, but instead, they are researchers themselves. In this way, designers get to understand and appreciate of how research enriches the design process.
ROLES
I’m the only UX Design Intern at ziba this year. Most of time, I worked as an interaction designer to develop and create a wide variety of alternative interaction design solutions and UX concepts using both physical and computer software tools. Within the UX team and the whole company, there are lots of brainstorming sessions, I get the chance to work with designers from different disciplines in those sessions and join creative discussions with other creative groups.
As an interaction designer, I needed to create UX frameworks, wireframes and mock-ups for different projects. During my internship, I tried a variety of tools and materials, including Omnigraffle, Keynote and Adobe Illustrator to make wireframes. For the visual design work, I needed to have a strong working knowledge of drawing and prototyping tools software such as Photoshop, Illustrator and some animation programs (Flash and After Effects). At the same time, I needed to have the knowledge about what is possible on different software platforms and devices.
PROJE
Due to the Confidential Agreement within the company, some information, including the client’s name and projects are not allowed to be shared with other organizations and companies, so I will just use “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” and “E” to stand for the five projects that I worked on.
ECTS
This project is the only research project that I worked on this summer. The client is a hard-drive maker that asked Ziba to come up with the consumer trends of hard-drives in the future. We used ethnography as the main research method. Participants were asked to describe their daily interaction activities with digital content. They were given a series of questions to answer and were asked to show a picture of their hard drive usage with researchers. Then they needed to use images and given words to describe their experience with digital content and put them on a given canvas.
I was given the task of collecting images and coming up with research questions for this project. The difficulty was finding the “best match� through all kinds of images for only a given word. The image needed to be straightforward, have a relationship with digital content, as well as being aesthetic by itself. At the same time, I helped to collect information about the technology trends of digital content storage. After researchers finished 24 global home interviews, the researcher led me to know the process of making design research synthesis, including building consumer profiles, finding opportunity areas and making regional and global level summaries.
This project aims to optimize the experience of front-end employees of certain couriers in delivering packages and finding new opportunities. When I joined this project, the 1st phase of research was already done. My job was to make wireframes for the mobile app based on the research results that people collected from the first phase.
Since this is a mobile app developed for professional users, the first problem that came to me were complicated slang and other terms used in this special industry. In the first several client meetings, it was easy for me to get lost since there were lots of unclear things for me. So I reached out to my mentor, he is also the senior kinect designer for this project and conducted the first phase of research last year. He recommended me to spend two days reading the handbook for front-end employees and to make a Keynote deck to show the current workflow. So I captured the key screens with the help of a special software, and began to get familiar with the features and functions of Keynote, which I hadn’t used before. After those two days’ work, I could understand what clients and designers were talking about, and could even point out their misunderstandings of the current workflow. This made the next step of redesign much easier. In the stage of redesign, I worked closely with a visual designer and came to know more about the structure of visual design deliverables. Usually the visual design language includes font, color palette (primary and secondary), as well as iconography.
All icons and icon styles should be developed based on the client’s visual guidelines. Icons should be generic and easy to understand. Another thing I learned in this project is the role of metaphor in interaction design. Selling ideas and designs to clients is an important part of design process, and thus, using appropriate metaphor provides us the means to understand complex devices.
C
This project was about redesigning the user interface for an online video website. The first time I got involved in this project was to help on its research. I was asked to make comparisons among 14 online video website and service providers. The instructions and features were given to me. This is more similar to a new media product analysis class project that I’ve done in my undergraduate degree, so this part was done quickly and easily.
For this project, I didn’t get the chance to work on UI parts a lot, but I did participate in the video/animation production workshop given by the kinect designer of this project. He showed several short videos that were done before to tell the importance of video prototyping in interaction design. Video is really powerful when it comes to the final stage of prototyping. All those static UI components become vivid on the screen. At the same time, I learned how to use scripting language in Adobe Flash in video production.
Most of my time during the second half of this internship was devoted to this project. In the beginning, I was given the task to design a web app. I worked on this side project by myself and thus needed to be entirely responsible for it. From the stage of research and finding inspiration, to wireframing and refining it with visual language,
I changed my ideas with my the kinect designer everyday and came to realize the importance of verbal and written communication. The kinect designer is responsible for putting my design into a real program, so he needed everything to be checked into detail. This pushed me to get an intuitive sensitivity to form and attention to details. In the next stage of this project, I worked with another two visual designers. I was responsible for developing the wireframes for iOS phones and tablets, Android phones and tablets, websites, as well as HDMI output. Since the basic visual language is already established, I thought that there weren’t many differences among different platforms when I took this task. But I was wrong. For different platforms, all of those wireframes needed to be redone in a totally different way. Especially in a rapidly changing and fluid process, visual designs and interaction wireframes need to keep consistent. So I kept checking in with the other visual designers everyday and made sure the wireframes were in good shape. Through this project, I came to know the role of sketching as a tool in communication in interaction design.
E
This is the only industrial design project that I’ve got involved with. I was invited to join the sketching/brainstorming session for this project. Designers demonstrated strong rapid sketching, conceptualization and visualization skills. The most amazing thing I found in this project was that designers never sketch by themselves, instead, they use others’ sketches and make improvements based on them, which is super efficient.
E
BE HUMBLE, NO EGO Designers at ziba are super smart and talented, but they never show ego. All great designs come from collaboration amongst designers, instead of just one star designer.
USE DESIGN TO IMPACT THE WORLD On the last day of my internship, I got the chance to talk to the founder of Ziba and he told me his vision for the design industry. For the passing years, he made every effort to teach the clients how to carry the design solutions that designers gave them and to apply them into their products. Moreover, he tried to impact clients by letting them know the importance of design.
REFLEC
BE ORGANIZED Since Ziba has a long history and has over 100 clients, it’s very important to be organized for project management. When I was checking archived projects, I could easily find deck or original PSD files that I as looking for. I will definitely carry this pattern into my own project and portfolio management system.
BUILD DIVERSITY People in Ziba come from about 20 different countries. These people make the company which only has 100 people a really diverse community. But another big thing I learned here is to build individual diversity, which means to try many possibilities and to never be confined in a certain comfortable zone. Begin broad and then find the best direction, narrow down and go deep.
CTION
Director: Niklas Gustafsson Eli Blevis
SUMMER 2012