Amplitude Internship
Product Design Internship, Summer 2020
Project Type
Internship
Duration
​May 2020 - Aug 2020 (3 months)
Role
Product Design Intern on Collaboration Pillar
Tools
Figma, Dropbox Paper, Jira
About Amplitude
Amplitude is a B2B product analytics platform that helps companies build better products. It powers over 40,000 products from 180+ countries around the world. The product has tracked over 28 trillion user actions to help digital product and growth teams instantly understand user behavior, build engaging experiences, and grow their business.
01 Overview
Work Overview
Over the summer, I worked on:
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deliver two tier-two design projects that made real customer impacts while partnering with PM and eng.
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resolved two customer love tickets.
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established presentation framework for the design team to better share cross-pillar projects' context.
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started a product audit for the current toolbar and proposed next steps.
Unfortunately, due to NDA, I cannot discuss further details of this project. More info will be shared during interview sessions.
02 Main Projects
Tier-two project 1 - Advanced Bulk Filter
Bulk Filter is the first tier-two project I worked on. This feature allows users to make bulk edits to their dashboards and better explore data. Besides redesigning the UI for the bulk filter card, I also worked on introducing five new features (more to discuss during interviews since not all features have been made generally available). These features are the ones that have been requested by a lot of customers. Introducing these features can really solve customer pain points and make product analysis much more efficient.
An email my PM received from our client
Tier-two project 2
Since this is a brand new feature that hasn't been released, I didn't include the name of the feature because it's too self-explanatory. By introducing this feature, we will be able to increase Amplitude adoption in other organizations and help users better compare and explore data.
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Unlike the previous project, which already had a one-pager ready before I joined, I started this project from scratch alongside my amazing PM. In Amplitude, every designer also owns the research for their projects, and so did I. In this project, I directly interacted with clients by leading/participating in eight user research calls with my PM. I drafted out the research guide and synthesized the research findings, which helped my PM later on put together the one-pager. This project not only honed my skills as a designer, but also taught me how to be a better researcher.
03 Takeaways
Feedback is a gift.
At the beginning of my internship, I was scared of receiving feedback, because I thought receiving feedback means I'm a bad designer. What my mentor said to me completely changed the way I perceive feedback. I started asking feedback actively, not because I knew it was required, but because I truly appreciated feedback and knew that they were helping me throw out all the bad solutions and becoming a better designer. I realized that no matter how experienced you are, being able to ask for feedback and learn from it is always going to be an essential skill.
Ask for engineering input, early in the design process.
Before this internship, I had the misunderstanding to only involve engineers after wrapping up the design process. However, after this internship experience, I realized the importance to ask for engineering input throughout the process since there are things we might not be aware of as designers, such as technical constraints and some edge cases. Involving engineers throughout the process can ensure you are moving towards the right direction and what you design is technically feasible. The engineers I worked with even helped brainstorm some great ideas and really helped better scope the projects.
Use your mocks to envision​ ideas, not your words.
I used to be a designer that relies on and trust my own imagination when envisioning ideas, so oftentimes, I would say something like "ok but if we do this/use this color, this might not work because..." However, I didn't realize that a mock worths a thousand words and people cannot get into my head to "see" what I was envisioning. As designers, we make things, so instead of using our words to convince other, using mockups can most efficiently help us see whether an idea could work, and help our audience see what we see.
Dec 2020 Update
Even though I cannot disclose further details here, I can prove (🤪) that those two projects did really well. I followed up with my PM after the internship, and this is what I got from her:
It was truly an amazing and fun adventure despite the pandemic! So proud to be a three-month Data Monster 💙