Following my introduction to the iQ Content Intern programme 2011 I’m pleased to publish a blog post by Shek, who was the UX designer on our Qrawler project. Shek conducted user research, defined requirements, and did the interaction design and prototyping on the project. I really enjoyed working with Shek, he was an enthusiastic and energetic member of the intern team and produced some really great pieces of interaction design. Here are his thoughts on the challenges, Wins and lessons for him from his participation in the Intern programme.

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About me

Hello, I am Shek, a student on the MSc Human-Centred Systems at City University, London. I applied for the intern position at iQ Content in January, looking for opportunities for personal development and as part of my masters degree. After interviewing with John, I was offered a place on the intern programme as the UX designer on a team with 3 other interns. As UX Designer, I was responsible for conducting user research, concept development, interaction design, and for documenting and communicating design to the rest of the team and project stakeholders.

Challenges on the project

The biggest challenge on this project was to create a design that matched the users’ goals while working under a lot of technical constraints. Qrawler uses software to analyse websites and the relationships between pages, and the capabilities or limitations of the software have a direct impact on the quality of the user experience. To deal with these constraints, we had to make a decision to either try to overcome the technical constraints at the cost of more development effort, or adjust the design to stay within the limitations of the software, which made for a less than ideal user experience.

Another major challenge was to adapt to the agile development process. This process was completely new to me – I’ll share more thoughts about agile and UX later on – but I was able to adapt to it quickly thanks to guidance from my mentors.

What went well

Unlike many similar tools we looked at, Qrawler looks beyond just producing a content inventory spreadsheet. We investigated the whole work process of the content team here in iQ Content and designed features to solve the major problems that they are experiencing throughout their workflow.

Of all the design ideas we explored, I am most proud of the idea of superimposing the inventory and note-taking tools on the web page, which makes the content inspection workflow easier. This idea was inspired by Firebug and means the user does not have to constantly switch between the web browser and the inventory to take notes, tag content and so on. I put together a HTML prototype of this feature for a round of user testing which showed that the experience was way better than the current method of writing notes, out-of-context, in a tiny cell in an excel spreadsheet.

What I learned

I’ve learned that iteration is the key to better design. There were a lot of detailed design issues that I would not have spotted If I had not frequently prototyped and tested my designs. For this reason, I think the agile methodology makes sense from a UX design perspective mainly because it allows more design iterations. The major drawback of this agile development process is that it constantly adds or changes requirements for the developers and the team found it harder to keep track of progress as a result.

I also learned that working in a small team that incorporates different disciplines, such as designer and developer, is not as easy as it sounds. As a UX designer, I sat between the world of the developers and the visual designer, and need to be able to speak to both in their own terms about the design decisions I had made. I am lucky that I have a computer science background, which helped with communicating with the developers and in understanding the technical constraints.

This collaborative environment is different from the university projects I had experience of, which usually involved working in a team of UX Designers – such teams tend to underestimate the impact of technical constraints. I think this is one of the major gaps between academia and industry. Universities should consider teaming up students from different specialties to deliver projects.

Finally, I learned that interaction design is more than just delivering user interface wireframes. There are a lot of tiny little details and edge cases that need to be carefully designed for.

What it was like to work at iQ Content

My first impression of iQ Content was of a place where quality stuff gets done. People here are very smart and friendly, they were willing to spend the time and effort to support the interns in this project. Outside of the project, I had opportunities to observe their client project work, including usability testing sessions and design workshops.

I found that iQ Content provided a really good working environment, and I had the opportunity to do more than sit in front of the computer all day doing design work. I got to use their well-equipped usability lab for user research and testing and got a lot of use out of the whiteboards, post-its, and sharpies where we did a lot of collaborative, creative work. I really enjoyed my time here and I’ve gained a lot of valuable experience out of this internship.