This summer, I had my first internship as an Experience Designer at a consulting firm in Canada. During my internship, I consulted and designed an intranet tool that better troubleshoots client’s problems. This amazing opportunity helps me distinguish the difference between a design consultant and an in-house designer and work with a collaborative team to understand the value of design thinking and apply it to our clients. The experience broadens my horizons about what I want and need to improve for my future career as a design consultant.

To give a high-level summary, the three most important things I learned include the importance of storytelling in design, the language of business in design and building connections with your colleagues.

Storytelling in design

What you’ve not learned at school

I realized the importance of building storytelling skills during my internship, not during my time studying at school, where students tried to “flex” their terminology without much understand or make their designs sound superior (although it’s not all the time!). We are often taught about the challenging and technical skills of design, only focusing on the aesthetic look or complex design structure, hoping that it will draw people in with awe. This, of course, is not the case. The reason is that if you can’t get people involve in your design vision, they will not care about your ideas at all. In reality, I’ve had my ideas rejected so many times because I failed that task.

Storytelling drives emotional connection

As an intern, it’s important to learn how to provoke emotions from your audience, either your managers or your peer designers. To accomplish this, you need to find an impactful message and create an emotional narrative in your design. However, it’s easy to fall into a best-case scenario when you present your ideas. This is when you convey a perfect persona that validates the vision you had for your ideas. To avoid that, relating your design with facts and findings you found that can prove your hypothesis.

But to be a good storyteller, you need to do your research and make sure you understand comprehensively the problem you are solving. What you are trying to solve is not limited to only design, but it involves the client’s pain points, the business requirements, the project’s timelines, the tech limitation, or the development team’s capability. After you complete your research, storytelling will be a determining factor that will increase your customer or team’s buy-in when you present your ideas.

The language of business in design

Familiar yourself with business terminology, project requirement and timeline.

During my client project, I had an opportunity to work with our product owner, the delivery lead, the sales team, the design lead, and the clients. Within the first few weeks, I was bombarded with business jargon and barely understood anything the team discussed. Later on, I realized that a successful designer can’t only know how to design but also needs to understand business frameworks and apply them to the design requirements. With your knowledge in business, you can bridge the communities of business, design, engineering, and product.

By balancing your business senses and design skills, you will learn to manage clients’ expectations and pick up their organization’s structure as a consultant. Each client has their design tools/systems and methodologies, which will challenge you to pick up things on the spot.

Building Relationships

Helping your teammates

One of the initiatives that we have in my internship company is called “Fresh Eyes” when our team comes together and shares the projects that we were working on. It allows us to receive feedback from our peer designers, even valuable tips from our senior designers. This is especially useful if we have members that used to work with a particular client or industry, they can provide you with much advice.

Therefore, I felt more comfortable asking them for help and advice as I got closer with my colleagues and team members. In return, I tried my best helping out others whenever possible, whether designing their Accessibility slide deck or importing files from Sketch to Photoshop. I felt lucky to start my career in such a supportive environment and experience the joy of helping people around me and being helped when I’m in need.

Stay connected after your internship

After finishing your internship, some of you may want to come back or apply to a different role in a different company, but showing your effort in staying connected with your ex-colleagues will show that you appreciate your time working with them.

But how to stay connected if you don’t work together? LinkedIn is a great tool to stay connected with your team. You can share relevant industry insights or articles or email them when you’re able to make use of something you learned from your internship. You need to build the relationship in proactive ways so that when there is an opportunity, they think to reach out to you.