Duration: 4 months, May 2022 - Sept 2022
Role: UI Design Intern, Product Team
Location: Toronto, ON
Tools: Figma, Slack, Miro
OVERVIEW
Squaredance is a platform that creates an easy advertising experience for everyone. I helped create new tools and features to build a one of a kind partner marketing platform users are able to easily use. Through many design thinking sessions and heuristic evaluations, I helped create new overview processes for advertisers and affiliates to use when picking specific channel topics, dashboard layout and components within, while building on to current design system elements for future use.
My role reported directly to the Senior Product Designer, where we worked seamlessly across our Product and Engineering Teams. Partnering closely with my Head of Product and Senior Product Designer, my empathy for users and detailed approach to design assisted my team in building onto the remarkable platform experience Squaredance is known for.
I had the opportunity to design visually appealing and user-friendly interfaces for web and mobile applications for affiliate and advertiser clients. From user research skills and a great eye for visual design helped contirbute to create a strong product team.
Experience Highlights
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📇 Collaborating with PMs and Devs
Engage with daily standups and weekly design reviews assessing solutions and communicating reasoning behind design choices that leverage in-depth understanding of user experience.
🛠️ Building design systems
Iterate on design system, crafting elegant and reusable components that facilitate an efficient design proces. Advocate to maintain our high standards by staying up to date with usability and accessibility best practices.
🎨 Becoming a resourceful designer
Throughout my summer I used my curiosity to become a stronger and confident designer in regards to finding resources on my own to learn new things to communicate my designs confidently with the intention of each step I completed.
💾 Iterations upon iterations
Execution for the complete design lifecycle from project conception within Product, implementation with Developers, experience acceptance and reflection on outcomes post-release.
🎤 User interviews
Conducted and evaluated 5 user research interviews to test feedback and improve existing pages of Squaredance’s platform using Figma.
Deeply understand pain points with continual research and user interviews to develop expert solutions for users
Generate concise and comprehensive artifacts including user personas, conceptual models, site maps, functional flows and annotated wireframes
🚨 New features
Conceptualized UI/UX ideas that brought user friendly design to both advertiser and affiliate websites through the development of new platform components.
Reflect regularly on design processes to encourage my team to be it’s best - pushing myself, and the team, to the next level!
Key Accomplishments & Takeaways
Being a UI Designer at Squaredance was incredibly rewarding and helped me grow both personally and professionally. The company's focus on persistence, curiosity, process drive & humanity made for a dynamic and stimulating work environment, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of the team!
Through multiple presentation meetings, growing at becoming a strong presenter when it comes to design iterations and not being afraid to ask questions and for help, these 4 months have given me the opportunity to learn about myself and to not be afraid when it comes to new ideas.
From creating user processes from start to finish, skills that I continue to work on today is to think outside of the box and limitations and to create interesting user journeys and to not be confined to similar processes that are already current today.
