Internship at
Microsoft R&D India
This summer, amidst the pandemic, I got a chance to intern at Garage
Microsoft India.
The Garage offers a unique opportunity to work
with other interns across the country in teams, hack on contemporary
technology, conduct customer research, design, and develop a product or
build a prototype in 12-16 weeks.
I was offered an internship of
10 weeks, but it was extended by half a week for the Hackathon. Me and
other UX Interns were given the opportunity to select the project of our
choice under Garage.
The team that I chose to work with was Team
for EDU for K-12 Community. The team consisted of four developer interns
and one UX intern and managers and coaches.
Microsoft Teams is a universal communication and collaboration platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. The project that I selected was specifically in the domain of Education for Teams. This version of the Teams that is Teams for EDU allows teachers to distribute, provide feedback, and grade student assignments turned in via Teams using the Assignments tab, available to Office 365 for Education subscribers. Quizzes can also be assigned to students through integration with Office Forms. The brief of the project was to improve the mobile experience for the K-12 community. As the brief was pretty abstract and, this project is my attempt at narrowing down the project brief and coming up with possible solutions for the same.
Process & Timeline
Starting off during weeks 1 and 2, I performed the secondary research where I understood the user groups and their problems, studied the app, and understood online education, in general. Then during the 3rd week, I compiled, bucketed, and validated all the problems that I had figured out during the research phase and after that, I selected one problem statement to define the narrow down brief for the project. After that, I read more related to the defined brief and then moved on to the ideation part where I brainstormed possible solutions for the problems that were present, and I created low-fidelity mockups for some of the solutions. After that, during the 5th and 6th weeks, I created high fidelity mockups for the solutions that I had chosen. After syncing with the developers in the team, and checking the feasibility of the solution during my 7th week, we tried implementing the feasible solution in the form of a POC during the 8th week. In the 9th week, I helped the developers to fit and finish the POC. During the 10th and 11th weeks, our team prepared for an Inter-Garage Demo and for the Hackathon.
High Fidelity mockups for Parent Dashboard
As the work I had done is covered under NDA, I cannot share the details of the process that I had followed, summing things up, there was a lot to learn from the 11-week experience as a UX intern at Microsoft. Building connections, working in a team, developing leadership and skills, and learning from failures were some key takeaways from this experience. Apart from this, thanks to the unique situation of the pandemic, that helped me learn to manage home-work balance, during work-from-home. Some of the reviews and feedbacks that were provided to me were learning to manage time and expectations and having a structured approach towards solving a problem. Overall the experience was highly productive, insightful, and fun. The experience of Garage for me, personally, was a great opportunity to convert one’s wild-creative ideas into full-fledged products and learn this process simultaneously. I highly recommend any student who has a keen interest in such a start-up/incubation/hack-culture environment to apply for the internship at Garage.
