User Experience Internship Summer 2018
Date: June 2018 - August 2018 (3 months)
Domains/Topics: Web design, digital product design, video-on-demand product, UX culture at the workplace
Tools/Methods Used: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Analytics, Crazy Egg (heat-mapping), competitive analysis, Confluence, Keynote, Wordpress
Overview
My internship as a User Experience Intern at the Motor Trend Group (MTG) was an interesting first dive into user experience work and responsibilities. During my time, MTG was going through a transitional phase with an acquisition by Discovery, Inc. which meant new leadership, new projects, and new challenges. Along with established goals for our subscription video on demand (SVOD) product, Motor Trend OnDemand, this fast-paced and newly developing environment created an exciting atmosphere for freedom and exploration.
I primarily worked on four projects during my internship:
Re-designing the desktop landing page
Competitive analysis
Motor Trend OnDemand tvOS app
UX for the workplace
Excerpt of results from company meeting report in October 2018 through A/B testing, shortly after releasing the updated design. Subscriber rate later increased by 14% along with our promotional landing page design.
Re-Designing the desktop landing page
For our re-design, I decided to first look at where our users were clicking and hovering using Crazy Egg and working with the Business Intelligence team to analyze the metrics from Adobe Analytics. We had some primary goals:
Boost subscription rate
Boost conversion rate from SVOD to AVOD
Decrease bounce rate
After looking at our current rates, I decided to look at some secondary sources online and current practices in web design. From my research and available data, I was able to make some observations about our landing page and present them to our UX team:
Cognitive load was too high — too many elements, walls of text, complicated
Weak call to actions (CTA) — lack of noticeable buttons, unclear value proposition
Most people didn’t even scroll past the first two modules
Our team’s goal during prototyping was to communicate our value proposition and create a new design that would be informed by actual data, research, and better UX practices.
Competitive Analysis on Subscription flows
Working with our Senior User Researcher, I was tasked with outlining the flow of other subscription services within various industries such as other streaming platforms, meal delivery kits, and merchandise/kit subscriptions.
The flow charts and landing page design analysis on each service were later discussed during UX meetings and explained to our Product Managers to provide design rationale for a re-design.
Cultivating a better Workplace UX culture
One of the challenges I faced during my internship was trying to reorient a more UX-focused culture in the workplace. With new leadership and newly-defined goals, it was an important time for change.
A big key component of supporting this kind of culture was making information more accessible. The knowledge, lessons learned, and findings of our User Experience team needed to be shared with our peers and not at just big, once-a-month meetings.
To address this, I created a Wordpress site that combined findings from our Confluence Wiki page and blog posts about latest trends, research, and data in the field of user experience. The idea was to provide resources and updates on findings from our user testing research and make it easier to access all this information. In addition, I would give a brief summary on any updates from the UX team about what we were doing, what we were interested in researching further, and any feedback the team could give us on our designs, process, and overall strategy.
Having to lead the new beginnings of a more UX-focused workplace culture allowed me to understand how to communicate the value of UX in business, engineering, and product teams and paved the way for my ongoing journey of UX advocacy and pedagogy. It is important to inform others to promote livelier and inclusive discussion about our products, goals, and vision.
