Udemy is a San Francisco-based company in the on-demand online education space. It provides a platform for instructors in all areas of expertise to share their courses and for students to purchase and take courses.

As a product designer at Udemy, I worked on the UX and visual design for instructor and student experiences. During the spring, I identified an opportunity to reimagine and reboot a summer design internship program.

With support from Design leadership and the recruiting team, I hired and mentored the Design team's intern, Sijia Yan, on a project to completely overhaul the Udemy Support Center. Shortly after her internship was over, the updated support center was launched and made available to Udemy’s millions of users.

Expertise:

• Recruiting and hiring

• Project management

• Mentorship

• Responsive web design

Project Details:

• Role: Project lead

• Timeframe: 6 months

Key Collaborators:

• Sijia Yan

Challenge

The Design team had a great opportunity to start building a presence in the design community

As many teams within Udemy were getting ready to welcome interns for the summer, the Design team had no plans to bring on an intern.

Many non-critical but impactful user-facing design projects were being backlogged due to lack of design resources. With a bit of structure, I saw them becoming perfect design intern projects.

I have interned at many companies while getting my career off the ground and I wanted to pay it forward to another aspiring designer. Furthermore, teaching is one of the best ways to learn, and I wanted to grow my design leadership skills.

(Photo: Two of the memorable internships I had while in design school)

Outcome

I wanted the intern to have a meaningful project that they could own and also see the whole design process from brainstorming to launch.

After doing some outreach to various teams, I learned that the Support team has long requested an overhaul of the Support center but had no available design resources. The Support Center was a key experience for frustrated students and instructors seeking help.

Unfortunately, the site was difficult to navigate, full of visual bugs, and a poor representation of Udemy’s design values. Users were giving up and going straight to the Contact Support button, which translated into more work for the support team.

After approval from my manager, I established a group of stakeholders, outlined an internship plan, went through hiring process and selected an intern.

A few things happened before Sijia arrived. First, the director of the Support team, the primary stakeholder, went on paternity leave a few weeks earlier than planned. Second, the project manager for the Support team became unavailable due to escalating problems with a critical part of the Udemy platform.

Unexpectedly, I became the project lead. The summer continued and I mentored our intern through the design process and several iterations of the UX and applying the Udemy style guide to the visual design.

Taking insights from the Support Team, we made major updates to key pages:

The front page was re-designed to present the most popular articles (which addressed the vast majority of questions), clearly separate help for students and instructors, and look more visually similar to the main site

Reflection

Other pages such as the search results were also re-designed to use UI elements and UX patterns from the main site

I also mentored Sijia through the spec creation process and how to design responsively. Until leading another designer through the process, I had forgotten how important it was to point out every detail of a design to an engineer to reduce risk of misinterpretation.

A win-win-win situation for the Support Team, the intern, and me

The whole process was the quite the ride, but in the end I was able to achieve all the goals I set out in the beginning:

• Empower an aspiring designer to own and ship a project from end-to-end

• Learn through teaching

• Help improve Udemy’s user experience by reducing bounce rate and support tickets

This being one of my first design leadership roles, it taught me a deeper understanding of cross-functional collaboration.

I now understand why many intern projects are more centered around theoretical projects rather than actual projects—the mayhem involved in putting a design into production can make it difficult to take time to absorb knowledge.

To crystallize our learnings together, Sijia and I wrote a reflection essay together on Medium.