earnest
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Introduction
I had the opportunity to work as a Product Design Intern at Earnest Inc. in San Francisco for the Summer of 2019. I was able to work with & learn from not only the Design team but also others in the company such as Project Managers, Engineers and the Marketing team.
I had one main project & two other projects I worked on during my time as an intern. While I would not be able to show and discuss everything I was involved in, I will showcase some of the work and provide an overview of what I did and what I learned in those three months.
PROJECTS
01
DTI Calculator
02
Design System
03
Research
01
DTI Calculator
Launched in Dec 2019
Calculate your Debt to Income Ratio to better manage your finances and understand your chances of receiving a loan.
My main project was working on the DTI Calculator which calculates your Debt to Income Ratio, helping students manage their finances better with their debts. I was given the task of working on the UI/UX and Motion Design.
A
Higher Level Project Goals
As suggested by the Design Manager I talked with the marketing team to better understand why they were working on this project.
01
Help students manage debt
Assist students in getting a sense of their financial situation
02
Brand & values awareness
Introduce and reinforce the brand values of help & support
B
Design goals & brief
The team wanted to represent the debt income & finances in a visual way.
Things I had to keep in mind while designing
The main necessity for the design was to be as minimal as posible. It was important that as this was dealing with finances debt and numbers that it shouldn’t feel really intimidating.
01
Present finance in a visual way
02
Keep it as minimal & intuitive
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Maintain friendly & helpful tone
04
Make finance less intimidating
C
Process
I won't be able to show the entire process and iterations so this is just a walk through the outline process of working on this project.
Initial template handed
My Manager handed me some designs he had worked on unitil now and wanted me to explore and build off of those iterations.
Reducing text & elements for minimalism
As was required by the design team, I started reducing a lot of text and elements for the designs wherever possible to make the designs as minimal as possible
Exploring different layouts & ideas to visualize debt
With several iterations I explored a lot of ways to visualize the numbers and figures without making it feel too complex.
Visual style and building on the existing color palette
I wanted to use colors to help visualize and separate the different entries. I built off of the existing brand colors and added some light hearted vibrant colors that would be visually pleasing as well as feel consistant with the brand.
Bi Weekly critiques from the design team
I had several critiques from the design team while working on the designs. I iterated on the designs based on the extremely helpful and constructive feedback on my designs during these meetings.
Adding motion design to increase intuitiveness
The team wanted to introduce Motion in their designs and with these minimal designs it was a perfect opportunity to add motion, making the interactions more intuitive.
Making it more interactive with instant feedback
It was decided to split the motion designs in order to provide for instant feedback and make the app much more interactive. This allowed users to play around with different values and see the results on their finances.
Making it responsive
It was important that the users had the same experience and control on both desktop and mobile devices. This project did not start mobile first so the mobile designs had to be created later.
Final Designs
For the final designs, some tweaks and additions were done as required by the marketing team and the calculator was launched in Decemeber 2019. Below are all the final designs launched.
02
Design system
The design system was meant to serve as a single source of truth. It would have curated elements & reusbale components to ensure a smooth workflow.
I worked on setting up a Design System with the Design team in order to optimize the workflow of the Design & Engineering teams. I researched best practises for Design Systems and tried to understand how the designers were using components and other elements.
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Researching other design systems and best practises.
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Talking to designers and trying to understand how they use th design system in their day to day work.
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Building out, naming & organizing styles, elements & components in the design system accordingly.
Our team had a wonderful offsite where we worked on collecting & organizing all design elements & components and coming up with a Design Philosophy for documentation.
Some pictures from the offsite as there is nothing to show here.
03
Research
Towards the end of my internship, the research team allowed me to work on a research study they were about to conduct for some upcoming products.
I organized and coordinated the process of conducting 9 user interviews. Following were some of my tasks.
01
Writing requirements and screener questions to select appropriate candidates.
02
Filter out fake profiles and fradulent participants.
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Recruiting participants that have a diverse set of backgrounds.
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Set up the interview schedules & invite the selected candidates.
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Document and organize information about the participants and their responses.
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Experience and takeaways
This was definitely one of the best summers I have had. I learned a lot and had some great experiences.
As for the internship, this was my first one ever. It gave me great insights on what goes into working on a very real product that was going be shipped and used by real users (as opposed to my personal projects that I had been working on).
I got to work on a variety of aspects of design, right from research upto visual design and handoff. This experience helped me understand what I liked and what I didn't. In some ways I know what I need to do next and in some I still need to figure out.
A 14.5 mile hike in Yosemite
Also my first hiking experience
Thank you