I get a number of inquiries every month from people requesting an internship at iQ Content. With one exception, though, we have never taken on an intern. This bothered me. User Experience can be a hard business to break into, and the sort of real work experience we can provide is invaluable. I had always reasoned that we were too busy to do this well, and if we couldn’t do it well then I’d rather not do it at all.

That was a lame excuse, to be honest, so this summer we hired four interns on the first iQ Content Intern Programme. In this post, I want to tell you how we designed this programme, what it involved and introduce the interns to you. Over the coming weeks, we’ll see further posts telling the story of the programme from the interns’ perspective as well as some analysis from me on how it went and what we are planning for next year.

Our goals for the programme

When we designed the Intern Programme, we set goals for the sort of experience the interns should have and for how the company should benefit. From the intern’s perspective, we decided that the programme should offer:

1. Fair pay — We believe that interns should receive fair pay for a day’s work. The controversy over the government’s JobBridge initiative shows that many of you agree with us.
2. Real project work — Interns want to do a real job and gain valuable career experience. We were determined that they should work on an interesting, challenging software design and development project and not be distracted by odd jobs or menial tasks.
3. Effective support — Interns require support and mentoring, so we knew we had to assign senior staff to support and mentor each of the interns, dedicating some portion of their time to this task.

Our goals for what the company would get from the programme were:

1. Spot new talent — Recruiting is difficult, because it’s hard to know in advance what someone will be like to work with. We want our Intern programme to serve as an extended job interview for prospective hires.
2. Get stuff built — We have a number of interesting projects that we’d like to do, but are often too busy with client work to undertake them. We saw the Intern programme as a way to get one of these projects done.
3. Test new ways of working — We wanted to try out a number of things that we haven’t had the opportunity to do on client projects. In this case, we chose to run the project using Scrum, to learn more about how User Experience Design works in an agile software development process.

The project brief: Qrawler

The project we chose to work on, Qrawler, is a tool that we need for our Content Strategy practice. One of the first steps on a web content project is to create an inventory of a website that captures all of the content and reflects the site structure. This is often done manually, or with a combination of rather clunky web crawler tools, spreadsheet templates, diagramming software and liberal use of the cut and paste. We knew we could design and build a dedicated tool that would do a better job than any set of the ad hoc tools.

This was an interesting project for a number of reasons:

1. It is technically challenging – website crawlers are well understood, but websites can also throw any number of curve balls at a web crawler that could produce poor results for our content strategists.
2. The design was a challenge – spreadsheets or outliners are almost, but not quite, the right tools for viewing and manipulating a model of a website’s content and structure. We knew we could improve on what Excel had to offer. We also knew that we could improve on the options for visualising the data a web site crawl produced.

We set our interns 12 weeks to get their heads around this challenge, conduct user research, and get stuck in to design and coding this application. We didn’t expect to get it all done in this time, but we aimed to make a big dent in the task and get a first version into the hands of our content team.

The Interns

So, we had a concept for the programme and a project that we were excited about, all we needed now were some interns. I’ll introduce the intern team here, but as they’ll be posting about the project themselves over the next few weeks, I’ll be brief.

Shekman – Shek was the user experience intern on the project and is currently finishing off his MSc in Human-centred Design at City University in London. Shek already has a BSc in Computer Science and Software Engineering from Maynooth. We were impressed by his UX research and design skills as well as his knowledge of how software is actually built.

Catherine – Catherine (Cat to her friends) has just finished her BA in Visual Communications at the national College of Art and Design in Dublin and joined the team as the Visual Design Intern. Cat impressed us with her portfolio and the fact that she would give up a holiday of a lifetime to get a place on the programme. We let her take the holiday, of course, so she started a few weeks after the other guys.

Shane – Shane also joined the team as a developer and starts the final year of his BSc in Computing at the Tallaght Institute of technology. Shane impressed us with the energy and effort he put into college and personal programming projects.

Rohan – Rohan joined the team as a developer, and when the programme started he was in the last stages of an MSc in Computer Science at University College Dublin. Rohan already had a lot of real-world development experience through work as a freelance developer and from work at Polaris Software Lab in his home city of Mumbai, India.

What’s next?

So I’ve outlined the plot and cast of characters, I want to cut to the action in the next post by sharing the interns’ own perspectives on how the programme went, what they felt they got from it and what they are doing now. We’ll start with Shek’s post, for a look at how the user research and interaction design parts of the project went, and how Shek got along during his three months in iQ Content.