Popin
Designed by and for Designers
ROLE
IMPACT
User Research & Design, UX copy strategist, Hiring Coordinator
1000+
Applications / month
Successful internships
30
Contact Me
How might we?
How might we design an inclusive and interactive design internship program for
budding designers?
A quick 1-min overview
Guiding Design Principles
Understanding the product
scope
Finalizing the solution
So, how does the solution look like?
Designing the solution
We facilitated design workshops to understand the expectations from Mentors and Mentees and made sure those were addressed.
Crafting the perfect internship program
Many aspiring designers began approaching the founder of Lollypop Design Studios, Anil Reddy for internship opportunities. After mentoring a dozen students, he realized the challenge for aspiring designers is that their concept of design thinking in relation to the industry differs considerably and that something must be done to change this.
Our goals were to:
Create a space to learn from the leading talents in the industry.
Create an internship framework that gives them exposure, feedback and the industry culture.
Breakdown the monotonous application form and make it less time consuming.
Be the Pioneer Program
We formed hypotheses after several stakeholder meetings about Popin's business model and requirements, as well as the audience's needs, their knowledge, and their desires in order to design a meaningful and fun experience.
Since time was of the essence, we jotted down initial assumptions to kick start the process and validated them later with usability testing.
This was based on the fact that students with even little design experience reach out to designers on Linkedin for referrals.
Our goal was to reduce the load on the server by not accepting pdf files and, as a result, to encourage people to simply present their work in a more professional manner.
If they are provided with a dedicated mentor, interns are willing to work unpaid.
We came up the framework that helped us to shift the focus on really stressing issues. We started asking questions such as “How might we encourage all the students to prepare themselves for a design internship” rather than “How do we just filter the potential candidates”.
Mentor’s Expectations
Intriguing design brief
Make it easy for them to create briefs that would intrigue their inner child for their interns by providing them with a guide.
Evaluation Criteria
The varying requirements for design briefs made it imperative to balance the criteria for judging applicants fairly.
Progress Tracker
Mentors believe that tracking progress is important so no one takes it lightly and will help interns manage their time more effectively.
Mentee’s Expectations
Exposure to the company’s culture
The company's culture attracted a large number of students to the internship, and the students wanted an experience of it.
Gateway to full-time employment
Interns were also interested in working with company full-time and they hoped this would give them a chance and also a worthy project to their portfolio.
Engagement from start to finish
They didn’t want this to be another monotonous experience. Since this is a 4-week internship, they wanted to their hands-on everything.
After research and analysis, we came up with two directions that we thought our solution could take.
The primary questions that informed my design decisions were:
How to design the program for
designers and non-designers?
2. Is there a way we can excel rather than just simply be an internship program?
Our initial idea was to engage interns in NDA projects with known brands over a longer time period. While we liked the idea, too many complications were associated with the idea, and also it would not have helped the interns to upskill their design thinking.
Opportunity to work with brands
Learn from the experienced mentors
Can’t be used in their
portfolio
Short duration
Less time mentored
A single domain specified project
A chance to network and experience the company’s culture
No real clientele
Pros:
Pros:
Cons:
Cons:
Idea 2
Interactive Mentorship Program.
Idea 1
Involve them in NDA projects.
What did I learn from
this process?
Launching is only the beginning
Market at the right time, to the right people
Understanding the unique value propositions
Get the right Mentorship. Popin is an inclusive and interactive design internship program, provides exposure to the industry’s design practices and the company’s culture. Also, we reinvented the long boring application process.
Introducing Popin
An Inclusive Design
Upfront and Upright
Simplifying, for a better experience
Applicants could be designers or non-designers from different backgrounds and we needed to accommodate their expectations in a certain way so that they don’t give up on their dreams.
Designers who don’t have any prior experience/portfolio, we do send them a design challenge to get them started.
Not all internships match the user’s expectations and might disappoint them. To prevent that, we have outlined what could be expected from both parties to keep the user informed at all times.
We have all been tired and bored of seeing the same old form fields that are just not so interactive. To level things up, we added these toast messages which were well received and also acted as affirmations whenever the user was in doubt.
Lollypop.design/popin
Lollypop.design/popin
Lollypop.design/popin
Lollypop.design/popin
Lollypop.design/popin
Lollypop.design/popin
Lollypop.design/popin
Lollypop.design/popin
Engage and Encourage
Time to put your designer hat
Time to put your designer hat
to validate
The newsletters weren’t just to put across the information that we wanted, each newsletter is carefully curated to indulge the users and reflect the company’s culture and value through it.
To come up with a guideline that would help mentors structurally develop their brief was challenging. Designing the brief
was tricky because we wanted to give as much as we can in a month to the interns and we wanted them to work on projects that would be close to their hearts and as well as ours.
Pan-India
3 participants
Duration
30-45 mins
Usability study
Moderated
Findings
Users wanted to know their mentor
Expected Multiple formats to be supported
Users were completely new to the field
But we didn’t want them to intrude the privacy of the mentors.
They don’t prefer uploading a pdf for their portfolio since it involves a lot of work to convert the portfolios into pdf.
Students even without any design background wanted to apply for the internship and learn.
60%
100%
30%
