Internship On Demand offers Pre-Internship opportunities to college students who are looking to build their professional skills, level up their resume, and expand their knowledge about different types of careers. The program typically runs for 4-6 weeks that reflects on real workplace tasks, allows students to work in a diverse team, and network professionally. It is 100% remote with a mix of live and recorded sessions throughout the week. Pre-Internship is the first step for students to begin their professional journey.

Internship On Demand

Overview:

Internship On Demand is an online platform that ensures students finds the right career, role, and company for them. Through their pre-Internship program, students can develop career readiness skills, gain deeper understanding of a company, and engage with a wide range of opportunities that will prepare them for their first job after college. Pre-Internship students will get the chance to apply what they learn with employers and build a professional profile.

An obstacle that IOD is trying to overcome is the visual layout and organization of their site from the pre-internship student view. It tends to be heavy information loaded throughout the weeks as students complete their tasks in the portal. IOD is looking for ways to make it less clutter for students to easily navigate through their different lessons and assignments.

I took on this project with my design team to identify key areas for improvement for the overall experience for Pre-Internship students. My goal was to focus on moderation features into what already existed to retain a more intuitive and consistent user flow.  

Solution:

To begin, my design team and I implemented a cognitive walkthrough with the IOD website to evaluate the learnability of the system and completed a contextual inquires with two Pre-internship students who have just completed the course to gain a deeper understanding on how they used the IOD website. From there, I then took my key findings after the research and created an interactive prototype with the changes I recommend that will demonstrate improvements to the overall experience as a Pre-Internship student.

My main focus and recommendation:

  • Visual Status Indicators for updates on progress

  • Easier access to courses

  • Including hyperlinks to increase navigation flow

Tools:

  • Zoom

  • Recorder

  • Figma

  • Figjam

  • Google Docs

  • Notebook/Sketches

  • Pen and Pencil

Methods:

  • Cognitive Walkthrough

  • Contextual Inquiry

  • User Stories

  • Information Architecture Diagrams

  • Sketched Wireframes

  • Interactive Prototyping

Role:

UX Design & Researcher

Design Team

  • Shadow Lee

  • Ashley Madich

  • Mike Larson

  • Joel Jackson

What already exist?

A Cognitive Walkthrough was conducted among my design team and I to test common tasks that users will complete step by step. To best understand pain points with what already existed, I drove deeper into how the website functions and how users interacted with it. This allowed me to identify any area where it’s needed for improvement and understand the actions that is needed to be taken for.

Key findings:

  • Unclear connection with the Profile, Active Programs, and My Pre-Internship courses

  • Navigating the purpose of profiles

  • Lack of visual identification

  • Too many steps to complete user’s flow

Cognitive Walkthrough results

Purpose

I wanted to understand in-depth of the thought process of users who has experience with the IOD website; therefore, through contextual inquiries, my design team and I conducted interviews with two recent pre-internship students who just completed the winter course of 2023. Through this, I was able to gain insight into their environment and observe how they interacted with the website. These interviews were tested via zoom where we asked the users to screenshare how they normally would use the website along with some tasks we had also prepared. Prior to the testing, my design team and I put together a Primary User Research Protocol to ensure we had a clear goal that will lead us to create an interactive prototype that will improve IOD’s functionality.

Research

Goals

• To better understand how prospective pre-interns ultimately chose Internship On Demand instead of competitors.

• To learn more about how students use the website to prepare themselves for an internship.

• To better understand how well the app performs for pre-interns.

• To gain insights around any pain points the user experiences while using the app.

• To uncover the degree to which the app meets design principles (mental models, consistency, visibility, mapping, feedback) to gain insight around potential areas of improvement in usability and efficiency.

Users Tasks

• Watching video lessons

• Downloading assignments or additional resources

• Submitting an assignment

• Accessing external links such as google meetings

• Posting their profile on IOD platform

Opportunities for Improvements

• Fewer steps to take to get to the course menu/pre-internship main page

• Visual identification when assignments are completed that are automatic

• Drop bar menu to minimize the noise with too much information

• Hyperlinks that are connected to google meets and any other external links

 
Primary User Research – Protocol
 
Observation Notes
 
Information Architecture Diagram

Planning

Users Stories were then developed to influence my prototype design to where I focused on the user’s goals and what they would like to achieve differently on the IOD website. These user stories helped me articulate what users valued and gain a deeper understanding of why they want a certain functionality. I then took these user stories and created low-fidelity sketched wireframes into interactive prototypes.

User Stories

1. As a Pre-Intern Student, I want to be able to get into my pre-intern portal  without going to my account profile so that I can access relevant information quicker with fewer steps to get there.

3. As a Pre-Intern Student, I would like to be able to access google meets or zoom meetings without having to copy and paste so that I can navigate any meetings from the portal.

2. As a Pre-Intern Student, I want to be able to upload my assignment and get a visual indicator that it has been completed so that I can keep track of all my activities.

  • After Signing In

    Users will find “My Pre-Internship” to access into their courses that they are currently in.

  • My Pre-Internship

    Users may be in multiple courses, they will then select the course they would like to continue to work in.

  • Main Paige of Career Accelerator

    The secondary navigation is where users will find lessons, activities, and other important informations.

  • Assignment

    Users will find detail information on assignment here, be able to download and upload their file in this portal.

  • Submitting Assignments

    Visual indicator will allows users to see their progress as it will help them to quickly locate their status.

  • External Links

    Users are able to find external links that will direct them to where they need to be with one click.

  • Hyperlinks

    Users will be in a waiting room after clicking the google links to meet with admin or any of their team.

Proposed Changes

Easy access into the student course portal after logging in

Visual indicators showing progress updates with lessons and assignments

Hyperlinks connected with any external links such as google meets

Challenges

I had some difficulties with the resolutions of the images, especially in the second navigation bar. Low resolution images became pixelated and difficult to read. This was my mistake, as moving forward, I want to ensure I keep resolution in mind to measure the visual quality of my designs.

Visuals can influence a user’s experience that can be positive or negative. This helps connect main points and strengthen their memory with informations. To have a stronger impact on users, it is important to keep in mind what is going to drive them toward their desired action.

Key Takeaway

This project was influenced by user’s stories and their experience with IOD’s website to enhance what already exist and how to improve user’s flow. IOD has a well-established process that is easy to understand; however, it can take too many steps to complete and/or easily forgotten. Through the contextual inquires, I developed a deeper understanding on how to improve a user’s experience with IOD as a Pre-Internship student. The major finding during this research was the lack of visibility and inconsistency with information overflow.

Going forward, I’d recommend for Internship On Demand to perform an A and B testing to measure if the changes impacted user’s experience and ensure those changes were an optimal solution. I would also propose to have a more customization control for users to have the opportunity to schedule meetings with their team, customize their profile, and receive feedbacks from any of their assignment in the portal verses receiving them through email as all relevant information should be found in one platform.

Next Steps: