A little bit more than a month ago, I joined the awesome Radish Lab team as a User Experience/Interface Design (UX/UI) intern. Everyday and every project is a new adventure, and I’ve never been happier to go to work. As someone who just stepped into this field — and who is also a self-taught designer — it is a great opportunity for me to experience the “real world” of design and learn how to collaborate with developers, project managers, and anyone else I will be working with in the future.
These are my valuable experiences to share:
1. Prepare
One thing I really like about Radish Lab’s approach to design is the “Discovery Lab.” This is an in-depth brainstorm that makes us and our client think more about themselves and the message they want to share with the world. From there, we know more about what the client is looking for, and we can focus on delivering an experience we know they will be happy with. Sometimes these are quick exercises or workshops, or sometimes the Discovery Lab can last for weeks. It depends on the scope of the project.
2. Phase it out
These are the key steps of our website creation process:
- Discovery: Identify the key issues and opportunities.
- Creative Concepting + Wireframing: UX/UI planning based on the conclusions from the discovery phase.
- Design: Develop wireframes and design our pages and templates.
- Development: The site starts to take shape and begins to have functionality.
- QA: We test our work to ensure there are no issues.
3. Rad Lab
This is a bi-monthly internal workshop, each time a different staff member presents what they’ve seen that has inspired them. The purpose of this is to learn from each other and grow as a team. And most importantly, these meetings are always accompanied by bagels and coffee.
4. Sprint
Sometimes the process has to be sped up. A sprint is an intensive series of meetings and iterations that allow us to collaborate more with our clients and finish our project on time.
5. Respectful communication
Our company culture is very progressive and open. We don’t have middle management and everyone is encouraged to contribute their ideas.
6. Project management
As a digital agency, we are all about efficiency and technology. Here’re a few tools we use:
- Internal communication: Slack
- External communication: Basecamp
- File management: Google drive. Dropbox
- Prototyping tool: Marvelapp.
- Design: Sketch. Adobe Creative Cloud.
7. Designing Change
For the last seven months, we’ve run an event series called Designing Change. It invites industry leaders, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and designers to be our panelist and chat with us about their career, share their experiences based on the topic, and mingle with our audiences. The events are fun and informative. We are taking a break for the summer, but hope to be back in the fall.
